Targeted Antipoverty Strategies

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century or earlier social security provision has been the major plank of antipoverty policy in Britain. State support through social security is a response to identification of the structural relationship between poverty, income and the labour market; and the payment of benefits to act as a substitute for or to supplement wages from the labour market is intended to prevent or relieve poverty. In modern welfare capitalist societies social security has become an extensive and expensive antipoverty strategy. In the mid 1990s social security expenditure in Britain was running at over £80 billion a year, by far the largest item of public expenditure. Without this expenditure it is certain that many people would experience significantly increased deprivation. However, as critics have frequently pointed out, it is debatable whether social security provision has succeeded in either preventing or relieving poverty.