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Peter Taylor-Gooby, University of Kent
Peter Taylor-Gooby is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Kent and Director of the ESRC Social Contexts and Responses to Risk Programme. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a participant in the Prime Minister’s No 10 ‘progressive consensus’ Round Table and, since 2009, Advisor to Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. He was President of the Sociology and Social Policy section of the BAAS, from 2005-6, a Founding Academician at ALSiSS, a Fellow of the RSA, co-director of the Risk Research Centre at Beijing Normal University, from 2008, State-appointed Visiting Foreign Expert to China (2008-110, Distinguished Visitor, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Central Policy Unit Special Advisor (2008-9) and Chair of the Social Policy and Social Work Research Assessment Exercise Panel and member of the Research Excellence Framework Expert Advisory Group (2004-9).
Speech
Peter Townsend was the external examiner for my PhD quite a long time ago. I cannot remember very much about the PhD but I do remember the viva. I spent three hours in a room with someone who asked me very incisive questions – I mumbled whatever I could in relation to answers but, over time, I became aware that these questions were moving away from the topic which I thought I had prepared and embracing pretty well every aspect of contemporary social policy. Fortunately, Peter also grew rather impatient with my mumbling and supplied the answers himself so, for me, it was very much a learning experience doing that PhD.
We have been asked to talk about Peter and social policy, to be future-oriented, and to say something that is perhaps positive and practical. I would like to pick out two from the many themes in Peter’s wide ranging work. It had an impressive and powerful sociological imagination and he understood that the social issues and social problems which policy addresses are embedded within social structures, that they reflect aspects of society which policy is often rather reluctant to tackle. One area of that is, of course, his understanding of poverty. He understood that poverty was not simply to do with access to resources or level of resources – it also included people’s capacity to enjoy the common life of the community, their capacity to engage in a lifestyle which was generally understood to command the respect of others. He demonstrated that the complicated issues of social exclusion and inclusion are central to poverty.
Of course, we live in a time when the profile of poverty and inequality in the UK has moved essentially from a European pattern to a US pattern. We face immediate austerity from possible cuts in welfare provision after the next election. In addition, we face, following on from that, the real impact of population ageing in the UK which will not really hit us for another 10 years or so. This is, of course, in the context of all the changes in the way people behave, in a huge range of areas of their lives that will be required if we are to stand any chance at all of tackling issues of climate change.
Let me point out one aspect of contemporary policy making – the emphasis on opportunity. When governments are talking about poverty, they do not talk so much about redistributing goods or material resources, they talk much more about redistributing opportunities and access to opportunities and that is a striking feature of current policy making. There is a great deal to be said about opportunity and many of the policies that are pursued are entirely positive. There is a complex political philosophy associated with Sen, Nussbaum and others, that reinforces shifts towards opportunity capability and capacity and the shift away from the Rawlsian notions of maximin, primary goods and so on.
One area of opportunity that I suspect we do not pay sufficient attention to (and I think it does betray a lack of the kind of sociological imagination that Peter had) is the area of the opportunities of the most privileged and advantaged groups and the capacity of those groups to grab opportunities and prevent others gaining access to opportunities. An enormous amount could be said about that. Chile spends the greatest proportion (32%) of what it spends on primary and secondary schooling privately. The UK is the second country spending 27% of primary and secondary education resources privately in the private sector. I find that statistic absolutely shocking. That sector caters for about 7% of kids but we direct something more than a quarter of what we spend on education at the most vital stages to round about a 14th of the kids in education. How on earth can one talk about advancing equality of opportunity unless you do something about the opportunities available to privileged groups? We do need the sociological imagination in policy making to tackle that. One fashionable idea in education policy is the idea of vouchers. Vouchers are interesting ideas, often associated with right wing, market-orientated, individualist thought. However, if you had a system which allocated education funding through vouchers and ensured that you were not permitted to add anything privately to the vouchers, that would actually be quite an interesting approach to education. I think it is one that might fit with the kind of individualist ideology and opportunity-centred ideologies of the present (and possibly, future) Governments.
Peter understood that social policy, apart from being an academic discipline, was also about policy, and he was one of the most enthusiastic energetic and successful and effective campaigners in promoting research findings and policy ideas and getting policy makers to take those ideas seriously. That is something that at long last the Treasury has caught up with although they call it impact. Applied policy work is the most important and successful area producing impacts on what happens in the real world and what happens in government in our society. I hope that social policy will actually seize this opportunity to be recognised seriously. I think there are already indications that there is a slightly re-alignment going on in the academic world. At last, social policy which, as we know, is more a field of study than a discipline, (and not really something that any serious social scientist would spend very much time or like to see their daughter or son working in) is beginning to crawl up the academic status order. Peter very powerfully made the point that social research and the work that he was able to do in a range of areas can have an impact on policy and it can have an impact on what happens so there is real value to the impact of what social policy does. OECD Education at a Glance statistics, 2009.
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