Six - Better to satisfy the coroner than the auditor: social policy delivery in challenging times

Summary

Introduction

This chapter is a very personal examination of issues about social policy delivery, rooted in my early experience in the National Assistance Board (NAB) and a subsequent academic career in which much of my research and writing has been about aspects of the place of discretionary decision making in public policy implementation.

In 1960, on my first day as an executive officer (EO) in a local office of the NAB I was called in to meet the manager. He had been a Poor Law relieving officer before the Board was formed and was within a few weeks of retirement. The only thing I recall from that conversation was the statement I have used as my title: ‘Better to satisfy the coroner than the auditor’. This memory sums up my surprise at the emphasis placed upon satisfactorily meeting need by many of those who trained and managed me in the NAB. I do not want to exaggerate this; of course there was also a considerable amount of cynicism and stereotyping of poor people from many of my superiors and colleagues. But there was a clear identification that we could not pass on our responsibility to meet need to anyone else. Indeed, before being selected as an EO, I had been a temporary clerk in a Labour Exchange where the ‘social insurance culture’ involved a view that the role played by the NAB sometimes undermined the rules about unemployment entitlement.

In the House of Commons debate on the 1948 National Assistance Act, the Minister of National Insurance, James Griffiths, said in his response to the debate:

In the field in which the Assistance Board will make cash payments after July, there will be an infinite variety of human needs to meet – such an infinite variety that I am certain it cannot be met by any general scale or special standard scales, however generous. It is, therefore, essential that from the beginning the Board should realise that they will not be able to fulfil their tasks adequately unless they exercise a wide measure of discretion in their payments over and above the standard scales. (Hansard, 1947)

One cannot imagine such a statement being made today as political parties compete with each other to demonstrate their tough attitudes to public support for poor people.