Examination of witness (Questions 86 -
106)
TUESDAY 16 JUNE 1998
PROFESSOR D MARSLAND
Mr Wicks
86. May we welcome Professor David Marsland
from Brunel University? I mentioned the 1970s earlier. We actually
first met at Brunel University in the 1970s, but we must not turn
this into a 1970s morning. May we very much welcome you and thank
you for taking the trouble to give us some written evidence? To
start the ball rolling you raise some sceptical questions about
issues of success measures. Could you briefly in a few minutes
summarise your position in terms of success measures and their
likely success?
(Professor Marsland) Yes. I am very pleased to
see that the Green Paper is leading us in this direction and that
the Committee is doing this technical work on it. I have been
involved in advancing this sort of general approach to things
for some decades. It is treacherous terrain. All I have done in
the note is first of all to draw attention to some matters of
principle which are obvious and common sensical in a way, but
about which mistakes can easily be made, even by intelligent people
gathered together in their anxiety to get the job done quickly.
Then in the time available I have commented briefly on your principles
and on the measures. I do not have any overall scepticism but
you need to look carefully as you go along at the logic of what
you are at in this part of your work and then look really critically
at the principles and construe them as merely very first drafts,
even more especially at the indicators. There is technical expertise.
You are wheeling them in. Here was Alan Marsh. If you get your
questions right we could really do this very well. I have got
started—but it is perhaps not a very helpful answer.
87. You are very much encouraging of the
approach, but you are urging caution.
(Professor Marsland) Yes; absolutely.
Mr Pond
88. Since Mr Wicks was being nostalgic may
I say that since I first came across you at the West London Institute
for Higher Education we have enjoyed many interesting debates?
May I ask some questions about a section of your evidence on the
principles? You have welcomed the approach but you are rather
critical about some of the principles established in the success
measures. In your first paragraph on principles you say, in terms
of the measures, "... they are mostly vague and in some cases
vacuous. There are also some key omissions" and the omissions
you include are, for instance, "to maximise self-reliance,
to strengthen real families, to ensure reducing expenditure on
welfare", which I am sure is one of the basic principles
anyway, "to avoid helping those whose behaviour is unacceptable
by comparison with the deserving, and to encourage people to think
more in terms of duties than rights". I have to say the term
vacuous did rather come to mind when I was reading some of those.
Why are those more precise than some of those set out in the Green
Paper?
(Professor Marsland) They are not recommended
as any more precise at this stage. Those are first drafts from
a slightly different ideological perspective, which the Committee
in its complete membership will want to consider. People need
to realise what principles are. They are not things which drop
down even from a modified leftist position as self-evident. They
need to be argued. You cannot argue something unless you have
some alternatives. These are a few alternatives—and they
are not altogether merely alternatives.
There are some contradictions in some of the Green
Paper principles. Some of them seem to have had a first half draft
and then a second half tacked on. In oversimplified technical
terms, sometimes the first half is of the left and you have a
right wing (not very right wing like me, of course! I mean New
Labour) bit tacked on at the end, and sometimes it is the other
way round. The Principles need thoroughly justifying, really thoroughly
justifying, and that means arguing it out and getting it straight.
That is what Social Security under the new government has an opportunity
to do now. It has to get it all right, and use one of the first
opportunities to think through these objectives.
89. One of the
things which the new government have to do is to try to get away
from some of those old ideological debates, have we not? You talk
about the "scourge of child poverty sounds very much like
Old Labour, if not older still".[4]
You would not consider child poverty to be a scourge under your
approach to trying to define success measures? It would not be
one of the things you would wish to reduce or eliminate perhaps?
(Professor Marsland) It is not helpful to put
it under that label. You do not want to enter now into the old
argument about poverty. Those arguments have to be had by the
group which is working at this. I would not have thought myself
that it will help a group which in this part of its work is doing
technical work, to sort out the concepts underlying the technical
measures if we have to wade back into these things by either side
presenting badges of the past.
90. I was interested in one of your assertions
which was in the role of pensions in the success measures suggestion
that there should be a partnership between the public and the
private sector working towards providing some insurance and security
in retirement. You say that it is no part of the private sector's
proper function to ensure this happens. That would suggest that
you are rather much in favour of the idea of wholly publicly funded
pensions which I thought was moving in a direction other than
the current debate within government at the moment.
(Professor Marsland) No, I can see how that could
have been understood. I do not see how you can write into the
success measures a task for the private sector which it cannot
properly take on. I think that points to difficulties in the concept
of partnership generally, which I am not wanting to make any demonstrative
argument about at the moment obviously. The concept of partnership
here and in other aspects of the new Government's work is very
important. It will have to work out closely what it means. One
of the areas of test of what it means will be when you get to
assessments of effectiveness, if the private sector is being brought
in with some obligations.
91. Do you think it should be?
(Professor Marsland) No, I do not think it should
be and I do not think it could be. In respect of pensions, I do
not see how, within the principles or the success measures, you
can set up this aspiration which cannot be guaranteed.
Ms Hewitt
92. Thank you Professor Marsland for this
extremely interesting, challenging paper. One of the Government's
objectives is very clearly to reduce the number of people who
are dependent on out of work benefit and increase the proportion
of people of working age who are in paid work. Do you think that
is a proper objective? Do you agree with it? Do you think it is
adequately argued through? If so, what success measure do you
think would best be used to see whether we are going in the right
direction?
(Professor Marsland) I do agree that is a proper
and important objective of welfare policy of course and I am very
pleased to see that is being addressed. When it comes to that
part of the work here, it seemed to me the indicators were not
tied closely enough to what the welfare system as such was doing
and therefore you will get mistaken measurements because you will
be measuring the effects outside of the influence of the welfare
system, of the world market, of aspects of the educational system,
all sorts of things which are not within the direct ambit of the
objective, it seems to me.
93. It is very hard to think of success
measures which wholly exclude those real world effects which are
the most important thing. How would you measure the impact specifically
of welfare reform or the welfare state on achieving that goal
of getting more people into a job?
(Professor Marsland) Of course it is extremely
difficult to measure it but you only come to the proposition that
it is difficult to measure it if you acknowledge in the first
place that the distinction needs to be made empirically. Once
that has been made then people like Dr Marsh can set about the
kinds of longitudinal—because you have to make comparisons—and
large-scale and subtle studies which would distinguish. The area
that I would come back to would be looking much more sharply at
the apparatus of the state in its dealings with the unemployed
and exploring in some social psychological detail what the impacts
are. To make that more concrete, I work with a charity which in
a way does for the peculiarly disadvantaged, or some such concept,
some of the work which the state employment agencies should do.
It does it better in my judgement, which is why I put a little
of my time into it, because of the whole way in which it construes
the problem of being employed. That kind of fairly simple mundane
thing.
94. How does that charity evaluate its success?
(Professor Marsland) I do not think it does. These
charities are in a competitive market of demonstrating that they
are better than the next man. Whether they are, I do not know.
I believe so.
95. Another objective—you do not like
the way it is phrased—is clearly to improve the wellbeing
of disadvantaged children in this country. I hope you will agree
that is a proper objective, even if you do not like the way it
is phrased in the Green Paper. Would you think that progress towards
that goal should be measured by a traditional indicator of poverty
like the number of children growing up in families with less than
half average income, or by something like a health indicator,
it might be the number of low birth weight babies or a nutrition
or malnutrition measurement, that stands as a proxy for poverty
but actually guides you towards the real wellbeing or otherwise
of the children?
(Professor Marsland) I work in the health area
and some of the health indicators are very secure and reliable
measures of what is generally indicated by poverty or prosperity.
It is an awkward one. In my recent book "Welfare or Welfare
State?" I used the literature on stature in looking at it
over historical time. The continuous improvement in stature over
the last 150 years demonstrates the increase in general prosperity
on my analysis, though no doubt someone else could argue with
it very powerfully. We do need long run health and physical data
of that sort to track the effects both of welfare and of general
public policy. If a society is not managing to keep the level
of improvement in the stature of its population below some norm—and
I could name the countries which are—there is something
seriously wrong with its general ideological position.
96. What do you mean by "real families"?
(Professor Marsland) I put that in just to make
sure that even with New Labour these alternative ways of thinking
had not been forgotten.
97. I am genuinely intrigued. What do you
mean by a "real family"?
(Professor Marsland) I mean married couples with
children with divorce minimised. I did not put it in as a joke
but I mean it seriously. If there is one key aspect of the concern
of the Green Paper and of this Committee in its work, it is in
the situation of children. The research demonstrates that changes
in the structure of families over the last 40 or 50 years are
the most damaging sources of harm to children. One of the indicators
which should be tracked is what is happening to the family. I
realise of course as soon as I say that, that I shall have a ton
of bricks dropped on me but I wanted it said.
Ms Hewitt: I was merely
seeking information and enlightenment.
Ms Stuart
98. I am not moving very far. I am taking
you to the phrase before you used the term "real families".
May I take you back to principles? I have no problem with "maximising
self-reliance". One way of measuring the self- reliance or
the degree of it would be certain benefits and their take-up rate.
We have one million pensioners at the moment who would be entitled
to income support and they do not claim it. By some ingenious
use of interpretation I could actually claim that this shows that
one million pensioners are really doing quite well and maximising
their self-reliance by actually managing to do without these.
(Professor Marsland) You are faced with one of
the three people in England who would agree with that interpretation.
I can find almost no-one, even among my close circle of friends,
who thinks like me that it is a good thing. I am reminded of my
father, now dead—forgive me a brief anecdote but it bears
directly on it—who had cataracts and the NHS doctor—here
is something else to measure—said it was not worth doing
the operation because he would be dead soon, or words precisely
to that effect. So he did not bother. He was eventually classified
as partially sighted. As soon as he was classified young women
came round every other day on bikes, in cars, giving him things,
expensive tape recorder machines, books, magnifying glasses. I
have some wonderful magnifying glasses. It was absolutely absurd.
He would reach in his back pocket, never having earned more than
£20 a week, and get out rolls of £5 notes which he had
saved. It was ludicrous. I know it is a big argument but let us
measure it. What I would do with self-reliance if it were a different
government and a different committee perhaps—you will perhaps
not be interested in doing this—if self-reliance is a proper
product of a genuine welfare system let us have some of not just
the economists but the psychologists who can measure attitudes,
see what the distribution of self-reliant attitudes is in the
population. Let us see whether it is higher, as I suspect, in
Scotland and in Northern Ireland than in England. Let us see what
the difference is between Liverpool and Leeds in those sorts of
attitudes. Let us see which schools manage to enthuse children
with belief that they can manage. That is the sort of way it would
lead.
99. How would you measure this?
(Professor Marsland) If you construed it that
way then it is a perfectly simple technical measure. There are
American measures, and some pale English imitations of them, of
those kinds of dimensions, of self concept, which it would be
worth the Department giving a little money to someone to work
at and develop and then see whether it told us anything. Do those
with self-reliant attitudes go on to get jobs for example.
100. If the whole concept of the current
government's policy on welfare to work is a change of thinking,
an increase of reliance, saying that increasing benefits as such
is not the way out of poverty, it is a greater degree of work
involvement and with that you could bring in that element of self-reliance,
that brings me back to a question I asked the previous witness:
how do you really monitor the change of attitudes? I do not think
we have mastered that at all other than there appears to be a
kind of gutsier behaviour in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
(Professor Marsland) No, we have not.
101. It is not quite as easy as you make
it sound.
(Professor Marsland) It is not easy. An expression
of this and the dissatisfactions expressed with merely economic
measures is that while we have and have had for many years a Government
Economist, there is no Government Sociologist or a Government
Psychologist. The sort of routine development work of how you
look in terms of evidence and coherent concepts at these dimensions
of things is still in its infancy. There is a reference in the
documentation of one of your previous witnesses to the social
indicators movement in the 1960s/1970s when I was already involved
in this sort of thing. That tried to rush into it and got into
it too ambitiously and did not get the thinking straight and then
people lost faith in it because it did not seem to help.
The other end of your question is: what do you
do when you have understood these things? Dr Marsh is much cleverer
than I of course but I did not think his answer was terribly good.
There is an aspect of evaluation research which comes in my note
on evaluation which is about how you shift between knowing and
doing. Academics in general are not very good at that. I have
done commercial research. There they have to know how; when you
know something, what you do about it. Our academic world needs
to be shifted a bit in that direction before you can get a better
answer than you got.
Ms Hewitt: I think
we would approve of your self-reliance.
Mr Goggins
102. You make a point right at the beginning
of your submission which soon becomes evident in discussions like
this and that is the unavoidability of interpretation. We can
all look at the same data and draw all kinds of different conclusions
but that has bedevilled debates about poverty, relative poverty
and inequality over many years. You used an interesting phrase
before, the peculiarly disadvantaged, about some clients of a
particular charity you worked for. We discussed earlier the issue
of severe disadvantage. I wonder whether that is something, a
label or a measurement around which we could build the consensus.
How would you measure it, what data would you look at, what success
measures would you be arguing for?
(Professor Marsland) These are all treacherous
waters but the concept of disadvantage is more useful both intellectually
and practically than either poverty or certainly inequality. Supposing
one had got that far, that involves a lot of argument. Then to
focus on the worst disadvantaged is the obvious thing, if you
do not have infinite resources. Severely disadvantaged is a helpful
concept. Then to get to the indicators, some of the work is done
here but it would not be too difficult to itemise the most severely
disadvantaged. I would start with looking at particular types
of families, runaways, homelessness, as regards children, as regards
women, the sorts of conditions which routinely generate women
being physically assaulted. It is small in scale but the most
awful things continue. Whatever else the welfare state does it
ought to be able to clear up those sorts of eighteenth century
things.
103. I should like to think that you are
right in arguing that we could build a consensus. I assume that
is what you were saying. I might argue that not having two pairs
of shoes is severely disadvantaged. Somebody else may say it is
not having any shoes which means you are severely disadvantaged.
Would we not run into the same problems even in trying to measure
severe disadvantage that we run into in measuring relative disadvantage?
(Professor Marsland) You do run into some but
once you start bringing in economic facilities and defining them
like Professor Sen tries to do, as though they were opportunities,
then you get right back into the core of your problem. It is easier
if you leave out attention to traditionally conceived poverty
as such altogether. I am not doing that well enough now. I will
reflect on that and come back if I may on the concept of disadvantage.
Mr Roy
104. I should like to focus on the part
about the eight principles in the paper itself and particularly
principle four which speaks about the disabled and their dignity
and the new deal for disabled. I am intrigued by your statement,
"Who is to judge `dignity'? How widely and loosely is the
term `disabled' being used?" Could you expand on that?
(Professor Marsland) Most of the Green Paper and
the thinking underlying the principles seems to me to avoid Old
Labourism or simply old sentimentality and romanticism, which
I think is helpful realism. It is not that I have anything against
the disabled. Having mentioned my father, my mother was caught
up in the polio epidemic just after the First World War and had
a really severe limp, she was disabled. I thought the disabled
part was an area where it is proving very difficult to be rational.
To put terms like "dignity", which is a perfectly proper
concept but it is a very difficult abstract sort of notion, into
what are supposed to be the objectives of an exercise in rationalising
the welfare state in such a way that it can be measured, seems
to me not very helpful. I do not think dignity should be in there.
We should be told more here about who we mean by the disabled,
and perhaps disabled, like disadvantaged, should read seriously
disabled. The concept gets broader and broader. We are all disabled
in one way or another in the end. It is not a prejudice of mine
but it seemed to me that disabled people manifestly, even if no-one
else, deserve the help which only the state should be providing.
That makes it all the more important that we are clear about whom
we mean and the sort of help we give them.
105. Surely anyone with a disability is
disabled, whether it be mental disability or physical disability.?
(Professor Marsland) It really does shift as much
as poverty. For example, I have always been severely disabled
by being of modest if not low stature. If I start arguing and
get an interest group going, no doubt I could get a benefit—but
probably more likely from a Conservative than New Labour Government!
Mr Pond
106. In your response to Frank Roy you talked
about the concept of dignity and then very soon afterwards you
used the concept of deserving, almost in a following sentence.
It seems to me that is an equally difficult concept to define
and to measure scientifically but you seem to be prepared to use
concepts like that and indeed to see them built into the success
measures in the Green Paper but not to accept other measures such
as dignity which we all admit here are rather difficult to define
and measure themselves. Does this not just come down at the end
of the day to ideology? There are certain concepts which you feel
are more acceptable than others.
(Professor Marsland) There is a deal of truth
in that. In a way my job is merely to remind you, without your
needing reminding, that the concepts do need sorting out at that
level, in a quite technical way. Some of the earlier evidence
suggested that some of the Members were a bit impatient with what
you were having to do. There are problems to get on with, helping
people. You will have to sort those things through. Whether you
have the concept of dignity or deserving and undeserving, then
you have the important task of making sure that Parliament and
Government know what they are saying. If I can help with that
in relation to either of those or any other concepts, then I shall
be very happy to do so.
Mr Wicks: In thanking
you, you made one or two references to old and new parties on
the left of British politics, may I say that at least two of our
colleagues on the Conservative side are in Standing Committees
at the moment which is why they have not been able to address
you and ask you questions. May we thank you very much? May I say
that we found that very helpful and I in particular found helpful
the idea of the psychological indicators or whatever one might
want to call them? If you could point us in the direction of any
useful work on that, we would find that helpful. Clearly if you
are looking at, say, the welfare to work programme, although much
of it depends on technical benefit issues, working family tax
credits or whatever they might be, it is also about senses of
dignity and self-esteem I suspect. We would find that useful.
We are actually a multi-ethnic committee, so your remarks about
the gutsier Scottish character are ones which will not be in our
final report. As a researcher myself, may I say that in France
this afternoon that is a hypothesis which will be tested. Thank
you very much.
4 Note by witness: Specifically in the main NAPS strategy
document but examples of European and international examples of
anti-poverty programmes are included in Appendix Five. Back
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