Poor Relief or Poor Deal?: The Social Fund, Safety Nets and Social Security by Trevor Buck

Author:Trevor Buck [Buck, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351910132
Goodreads: 34476958
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Perceived Irrationality

The complexities described raise questions about the experience of users. If the processes are not readily understood, how is the service received to be understood? Researching the social fund, two official reports suggest the difficulty in understanding the patterns of decisions that emerge (National Audit Office, 1991; Huby and Dix, 1992). The first, a value for money study conducted by the National Audit Office, examined cases in a number of offices and concluded.

This [demand leading to budgetary pressures] meant that, during 1989-90, although these offices met the requirement that the funds available should always be concentrated on those whose needs they had identified as having greatest priority, they were unable to treat similar applications consistently throughout the year. (National Audit Office, 1991, paragraph 2.14) and,

The Department told the National Audit Office that these variations [in the priority level given to the same groups of applications] reflect the discretionary nature of the scheme and the requirement for local offices to establish their priorities in the light of local circumstances. In addition there were evident variations between different parts of the country under the schemes which preceded the Fund. In response to changes in the local level of demand and the consequences for their budget local offices are required to review and revise their priority lists, so as to meet the overriding policy requirement that the funds available should always be concentrated on those with needs of greatest priority, (ibid., paragraph 2.17)

The response of the Department of Social Security was to await the findings of a further research project it had commissioned. This was undertaken by the Social Policy Research Unit at York University. It reached similar conclusions, identifying apparent irrationalities in the decisions of social fund officers, consequent failures to meet real needs and hardship caused by loan repayment. Commenting that there was no clear way to understand the difference between applications refused and those awarded, they observed.

Social fund officers are the repository of the administrative definition of needs and their decisions have a major impact on the extent to which the social fund can be said to be meeting need. Yet officers can reach different decisions about the same applications. They sometimes make identical decisions but for very different reasons. (Huby and Dix, 1992, p.86)

Evidence suggests irrationality remains a key characteristic of the social fund. Discussing with colleagues the experience of exercising discretion in a consistent fashion, one social fund officer observed.

That’s the hardest thing about decision-making, isn’t it? It’s discretionary, and no two cases are the same. But on our shoulders is the fact that we’re supposed to be consistent. There’s ten of them, and we’re supposed to be consistent. I don’t know what’s going on inside your [colleagues] heads. We communicate with one another, and we discuss cases, but you don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s brain all the time. So I think it’s really difficult being discretionary and consistent. (Social fund officer)

A social fund inspector, commenting on the differences she had observed in the cases she dealt with, commented thus.

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