Social Fund 20 Years On

Dr Chris Grover, Lancaster University, UK

• Contents: Introduction; Enter loans: the Act to Amend the Laws for the Relief of the Poor 1819; Loaning poor relief; Industrial conflict and poor relief on loan; The Crossman Review of loaning supplementary benefit; Loaning supplementary benefit and strikes; The Fowler Reviews, special expenses and the antecedents of the social fund; Social fund loans: consistencies and concerns; Social fund loans; Relieving need? Social fund loans in operation; Social fund loans and financial inclusion; Conclusion; Postscript; Bibliography; Indexes.

'In tracing Britain’s history of making loans part of the array of relief offered to its most economically vulnerable citizens, author Chris Grover raises a number of important practical and ethical questions for scholars of welfare policy in developed nations... This work will be mostly of use to readers who are professional students of comparative welfare policy, and historians of the welfare state and labour policy. It is conveniently organised into chapters that may be read independently; each deals with a specific aspect of the development and use of loans as a partial provision of British welfare policy... Rather than an evaluation of the effectiveness of state-sponsored loans to the poor, this work guides the reader through the question of what is behind such a policy’s formation and acceptance, and lodges each incarnation of the policy squarely within the socio-political and economic contexts in which loans became a part of British poverty policy. In so doing, readers gain an increased ability to reflect on the motivations and ethics behind poor relief strategies in complex societies while learning how loans to the poor evolved as a segment of poverty policy in the United Kingdom.' Contemporary Sociology