Discovering Child Poverty: The Creation of a Policy Agenda from 1800 to the Present (review)

In his 1999 lecture at Oxford University, "Beveridge Revisited: A Welfare State for the 21st Century," Tony Blair announced his government's intention to eradicate child poverty by 2020. According to Lucinda Platt, this agenda crowned a development at least 200 years in the making. Her goal in this book is to trace that process from one particular perspective, the relationship between social research and policy. As she ably argues, that connection defies easy categorization. Research informs policy, but it does so only when it can "find its place within prevailing (although obviously not static) ideas and beliefs." (p. 121) At the same time, policy shapes the parameters of social research, not only raising issues of concern, but also delineating the very subject of inquiry. In this instance, laws restricting child labor and instituting compulsory education helped to define the child while offering new venues for their study, the school. In the end, then, "one message that comes over from this survey of poverty studies and policy change is that there exists an oblique relationship between the two." (p. 118) Beyond that, Platt is hesitant to venture. There is no attempt here to follow a traditional sociological path at model-building. Nor, despite occasional use of the term "discourse", does Platt delve into the murky waters of theory. This book offers an analysis of the process by which child poverty rose to the fore of British welfare policy, as well as the myriad factors that shaped that progression. Wider implications are left for the reader to determine.

The book's initial chapters examine the conditions for the discovery of child poverty. These fall into roughly two categories: growing concern with understanding the extent and nature of poverty, and reforms that marked children off from the rest of the population. This explains Platt's decision to start with 1800, when growing numbers of the impoverished attracted increased attention in Britain's new industrial cities, while the bourgeoisie began to leave its own domestic stamp on British culture. In addition, a new approach to numbers and "facts" slowly gave those interested in poverty new tools for its analysis, which culminated at the close of the 19th century in the social survey. By the early 20th century, most of the key ingredients were in place: children were recognized as important investments in Britain's future and separated out for special concern in schools; statistics amply demonstrated that despite impressive prosperity over the last century significant poverty remained—a point driven home by the dismal results of conscription for the Boer War; and B. Seebohm Rowntree's 1899-1900 survey of York laid important groundwork for the concept of a poverty line by demonstrating that even those with jobs among York's working poor earned too little to afford "strictly defined minimum needs... regardless of how they actually spent their income" (p. 21)—severing the traditional link between poverty and "moral failings".

At the same time, however, campaigners for child welfare found it difficult to breach the walls of liberal individualism, particularly the fear of "perverse incentives" that might offer levels of assistance higher than even the lowest wages, or reward the poor for having more children. Those who linked child poverty to maternal welfare and feminist concerns like mother's pensions and equal wages tilted at even greater windmills. Meaningful change had to await the creation of Britain's welfare state after 1945, after wartime evacuations underscored child impoverishment to a larger audience and state economic controls became more palatable. Even then, however, the successful passage of a new system of family allowances in 1948 relied principally on William Beveridge's skillful public relations efforts, the fact that he tied it to an overhaul of systems of relief that everyone acknowledged as necessary, and persistent resistance from trade unions to increased wages, which they feared would make British goods uncompetitive.

Despite early...