Making welfare work: reconstructing welfare for the millennium

The welfare system in the United Kingdom is broken.

The number of claims has escalated and so, in consequence, have welfare expenditures.

The social system does not encourage welfare recipients to become independent.

Half the population of the United Kingdom lives in households drawing one of the major means-tested benefits.

Research documents that means-test paralyze self-help, discourage self-improvement and tax honesty while at the same time rewarding claimants for being either inactive or deceitful.

In ""Making Welfare Work"", Frank Field challenges the current political orthodoxy, particularly its emphasis on the role of legislation alone in bringing about social improvement in a welfare state.

Field argues that the impact legislation has on personal character is pivotal to human advance in a welfare state.

Welfare reconstruction needs to address and channel the differing roles of self-interest, self-improvement and altruism, which are among the great driving forces in human character.

A successful welfare state must reinforce these important forces which influence our nature because to create an imbalance between these three motive forces will always undermine welfare's objectives.

Field discusses in detail aspects of modern British society in dire need of change.

These include the drug trade, benefit traps, permanent adolescence, the rise of part-time work, inequality in incomes, excluding the disabled, single parents and the very elderly, for example.

This text should be of interest to politicians and policymakers in all industrialized nations.