This open access book offers a new approach to understandings of welfare in modern Britain. Foregrounding the agency individuals and groups claimed through experiential expertise, it traces deep connections between personal experience, welfare, and activism across diverse settings in modern Britain. The experiential experts studied in this collection include women, students, children, women who have sex with women, bereaved families, community groups, individuals living in poverty, adults whose status sits outside professional categories, health service users, and people of faith. Chapters trace how these groups have used their experiences to assert an expert witness status and have sought out new spaces to expand the scope, inclusivity, and applicability of welfare services.

As the Blair government launches a new campaign against poverty, the notion of “the deserving and undeserving poor” raises it head again in the media. The Poor Law, particularly the Old/New Poor Law at the junction of the 18th and 19th centuries in England is again the focus of attention. This book provides the first accessible and comprehensive overview of the literature on poverty and of the welfare policies of the state, as well as the alternative welfare strategies of the poor for the period 1700-1850.

Rigorously researched, Hunger: A Modern History draws together social, cultural, and political history, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions committed to the conquest of world hunger.

Examines present welfare arrangements in England and Wales in light of the past, for undergraduate students in social policy, politics, and contemporary British history. Reviews welfare policy since the introduction of the welfare state in the mid-1940s, discusses contemporary issues such as costs, restructuring, and the move beyond state agencies into the private sector, and offers alternative scenarios for the future of welfare. Distributed in the US by Taylor and Francis. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century: the first century of welfare. The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity. The First Century of Welfare, which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented by paupers themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world of England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a vivid and sobering picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor. We can see how their family life, their relations with their kin and their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender norms conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness and physical and mental disability; and the ways in which real people's lives could be devastated by dearth, trade depression, and the destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of poor folk tossed by the tidesof fortune. It is also one of agency: about the strategies of economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the context of a developing industrial economy, of the support they gained from their relatives and neighbours, andof their willingness to engage with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted. JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social History and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

This textbook is aimed at undergraduate and diploma students across a wide range of the social sciences, with particular reference to those preparing for or involved in careers in social and public administration. It provides, in compact form, the story of social provision from medieval times to the present day, systematically examining major themes of: the relief of poverty and social care; healthcare and housing; crime and policing; and education. With the rise of the Welfare State, and its current questioning as the chief focus, the book sets out to analyze how the state has responded to the social problems that have beset it. Consideration is given to comparative elements in Europe, North America and elsewhere, together with specific reference to issues of race, ethnicity and gender. A specially prepared glossary completes what is a review and description of the growth and present disposition of the full range of social and public services in Britain.