This 1986 book examines why old-age saving became rooted in the employment contract.

Drawing on the authors’ extensive experience as actuaries, this work, originally published in 1987, provides a thorough examination of the problems which had arisen, and those that seemed likely to arise, with regard to both public and private pension funds at the time. It ranges in scope from the realities of individual plans and schemes devised by employers and employees to the management of pension funds and investment portfolios. The concept of socially responsible investment is discussed. Reliable statistical information on the health, age and occupation of the population is an important tool in planning pension schemes for both the public and private sectors, and this book includes a careful analysis of the available data, leading to many useful projections for the thirty to forty years which followed. Although the statistical information is derived from UK sources, the problems it relates to, and its analysis was applicable to pension planning in all developed countries The breadth of the authors’ approach, fully embracing the apprehension at the time about the demands of an increasingly ageing population and a partially unemployed workforce, would give this book added interest to a wide range of academics and professionals in financial institutions, government and the social services. Today it can be read in its historical context.

In the early 1980s, the welfare state, for too long regarded as a notable contribution to the establishment of a humane social order, had over the previous decade come under increasing attack. Some of its critics, especially in the UK and the USA, maintained that it had failed to deal satisfactorily with the problem of poverty. Others held that it was over-elaborate, created a psychology of dependence and imposed costs that needed to be reduced as part of a policy of general economic recovery. In a number of countries, cuts had already been imposed or were now contemplated. In this situation it was crucially important to direct attention once more to the basic objectives of the various welfare services from a systematic and comparative standpoint. Originally published in 1982, the authors of this book, one an economist and the other a specialist in social administration, subjected these aims to rigorous analysis and discuss the underlying issues of social philosophy. They then attempt to assess the various methods adopted for their attainment in Britain and comment on those adopted in the USA and in some continental European countries. Although the authors reject the more extreme assertion that the welfare state has been a failure, they point to the need to relate some of the policies followed more clearly to the basic objectives. A number of proposals for reform are put forward which would imply some change of emphasis and should permit a simplification of existing over-complex arrangements.

The book identifies occupational welfare as a major component of personnel management. It identifies the long, still proceeding, evolutionary process of change which is leading to the harmonization of terms, benefits and employment conditions in British industry. It considers the traditional manual/non-manual workplace divide and the gradual change to a new core/peripheral workplace division in the modern industrial world. It is within core employment that harmonized conditions are becoming prevalent. British practice has evolved in response to prevailing economic, technological and labour market pressures rather than in emulation of American and Japanese companies in Britain.

This book examines the Thatcher government’s attempt to revolutionise Britain’s pensions system in the 1980s and create a nation of risk-taking savers with an individual stake in capitalism. Drawing upon recently-released archival records, it shows how the ideas motivating these reforms journeyed from the writings of neoliberal intellectuals into government and became the centrepiece of a plan to abolish significant parts of the UK’s welfare state and replace these with privatised personal pensions. Revealing a government that veered between political caution and radicalism, the book explains why this revolution failed and charts the malign legacy left by the evolutionary changes that ministers salvaged from the wreckage of their reforms. The book contributes to understanding of policy change, Thatcherism, and international neoliberalism by showing how major reforms to social security could reflect neoliberal thought and yet profoundly disappoint their architects.