How to cut spending without being cruel 19/06/09
Extract
In 1948, six years after (William Beveridge’s) great attack on the five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, he wrote another report that expressed his fear that his reforms might encourage people to focus too passively on their needs. He wondered if there was enough “room, opportunity and encouragement for voluntary action in seeking new ways of social advance… services of a kind which often money cannot buy”. This argument fell on deaf ears at the time, in the face of the manifest good done by the NHS and social security. Now, some brave organisations are facing up to it.
One is Participle, run by Hilary Cottam. She spent many years trying to help the disadvantaged by starting out from where they are, rather than categorising them by “need”. She thinks in terms of what people can still do, not what they can’t. She has lured “sick” people on to trampolines, by promising not to remove their entitlements, and watched them come off benefits by themselves as they became fit. She has got people to design their own schools. She has paid them for helping others, another heresy. She has freed countless people - and saved the State money - by upending conventional wisdom.
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