Debate: A Beveridge report for the 21st century? The implications of self-directed support for future welfare reform
本文探讨了基于个人化和自我导向支持的英国福利国家转型，分析其对未来福利改革的启示，适合关注社会政策与福利改革的学者。
In the early 21st century, elements of the English welfare state are in the middle of a ‘transformation’ process based on the concepts of personalisation and self-directed support (HM Government, 2007; Glasby and Littlechild, 2009; Carr, 2010; Needham, 2010). Beginning in adult social care, these approaches seek to recast users of state welfare away from being passive recipients of prepurchased services towards a situation where they are active citizens with a right to control and shape their own support. Central to this agenda has been the concept of direct payments (pioneered by disabled people’s organisations and developing in the United Kingdom from the mid-1980s onwards) and personal budgets (developed from 2003 onwards by a national social innovation network known as In Control). Beginning with 60 people in six local authority pilots in late 2003, there are now over 200,000 people receiving a personal budget and the government has stated that all adult social care will be delivered by this mechanism in future (HM Government, 2007). This approach is now also being piloted in children’s services (Carlin et al, 2006; DfES, 2007; Crosby, 2010) and in healthcare (Alakeson, 2007; Darzi, 2008), with several leading think tanks and commentators exploring its scope to extend to other areas of state welfare (such as the tax and benefits system, housing, education, rehabilitation for ex-offenders, substance misuse services and support for young people not in education, employment or training – see Needham, 2010, for an overview of the spread of personalisation). Underpinning much of this is a broader sense that the values, frameworks and ethos of much current statutory welfare remains too dominated by 1940s thinking and assumptions – and that some of the concepts inherent in debates about personalisation and self-directed support could help to shape ongoing debates about the future of welfare reform. If the Beveridge Report (1942) is widely credited with establishing the thinking behind the post-war welfare state, is a similar document or process needed to clarify thinking and options around the relationship between the state and the individual in the 21st century?