1 - Introduction: The case for considering taxation and social policy togethe

Summary

Taxation and Social Policy aims to fill significant gaps in both the social policy and tax literature by providing an overview of the role of tax in shaping UK social policy, broadly defined, and examining its distributional and behavioural significance.

Social policy analysts have long touched on aspects of taxation or on specific taxes in their work but have seldom sought to place taxation centrestage or offer a broad-based approach to exploring the interactions between it and social policy. Indeed, though the interplay between the two was highlighted in the discipline's founding literature (Titmuss, 1958, 1962), and the first volume of the Journal of Social Policy included a call for joint research (Atkinson, 1972), direct interest in doing this has been patchy.

A key study that did address the interrelationships between the two, and the inspiration for this text, was Taxation and Social Policy, edited by Cedric Sandford, Chris Pond and Robert Walker. Greeted with much enthusiasm when it was published in 1980, it opened up many important questions and crucially emphasised the role of taxation as an instrument of social policy.

After 40 years, it is, unsurprisingly, in many respects quite dated and long out of print. The impetus behind it, however, has not lost its saliency. Both taxation and social policy, its editors suggested, had ‘developed in an independent and largely ad hoc manner. This process of separate development has created an overlap and interaction between the two systems which makes it impossible to consider satisfactorily either system in isolation from the other’ (Sandford et al, 1980, p vi). In this volume, we seek to revisit this concern, explore the extent to which it remains unresolved and provide a basis for a long overdue consideration of the social policy– tax interface.

At best, this complex interface between taxation and social policy has since received only fitful attention, as Chapter 2 indicates. In the last few years, however, the linkages between the two have begun to attract increasing interest among social policy analysts (Hills, 2015; Byrne and Ruane, 2017). In 2018, Sally Ruane initiated the Social Policy Association's Taxation and Social Policy Group, which facilitates workshops, symposia and research, including a themed section in Social Policy and Society (2020).