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Hilary Land, University of Bristol
Previously holding the post of Head of the School for Policy Studies, Hilary Land retired in January 2002. She is now an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Bristol. Her main research interests include family policies from historical and comparative perspectives, feminist theories and social policy, the commodification and marketisation of care, women and pensions, changing family structures and the growing contribution of grandparents to childcare and social care, return of mature women to education, training and employment and children's rights.
Hilary was elected to the Academy of Learned Societies of the Social Sciences in 2003. She is also a member of the management committee of the Women's Budget Group.
Speech
Peter Townsend was very important to me as a junior research assistant on the Poverty Survey in the 1960s and then again when I was in Bristol in the 1980s and 1990s. Peter had an interest in older people for a very long time. His very first paper on pensions was published in 1954 when he was still in his 20s. Yesterday people talked about Peter’s work being very focussed, very rigorous, and all through his career one could see a real commitment to social justice. I would add another adjective and that would be persistent. So, for over 50 years, he’s been concerned about the pension system, as well as other issues about older people. In the 50s, with Brian Abel-Smith, Richard Titmuss and Tony Lynes he developed the national superannuation scheme for the Labour Party. Of course, this fed firstly into the Crossman proposals which fell in the late 1960s and then Barbara Castle built on it for her state earnings related pension scheme. Had we kept her scheme with the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) there would be far fewer older people in poverty today. Sadly, when the Conservatives came in, in 1980, they broke the link between the basic pension and prices or earnings, whichever was the greatest, changing the link to prices. They also watered down the redistributive elements of the earnings related component. What Peter understood very well and I think too many policy people today have forgotten, was that pensions are not just about the distribution of resources between the generations – they are also about the distribution and redistribution of resources between income groups. I think we have lost sight of that second part.
Of course, as we know, Peter’s concern was not just with pensions. His Family Life of Older People was published in 1957. In 1960, he was concerned with the lives of disabled people in institutional care and at this time he did the study of nursing homes with Caroline Woodroffe. In 1962 came the first edition of The Last Refuge. That was the first time I came across Peter Townsend’s work. I remember reading The Last Refuge when I was a student at LSE in 1963/4, and feeling absolutely outraged at what I was reading about the condition of some older people in our society. I think one of the things that Peter always did throughout his career was that he provoked anger. But he also taught one how anger could be used in a constructive way to try to think of policies and push for and campaign for them to make things better. It was not a negative kind of anger, it was one that could be used constructively. Peter was rightly very often angry about poverty and other bad social conditions and I think that was one of the very important contributions that he made. Of course, he was not only concerned about describing and analysing the lives of older people, whether at home or in institutional care, he was also very interested in methodological issues about studying extended family. He got involved early on in comparative research in Europe, North America and he certainly worked with people like Ethel Shanus, Hening Friis, and Dorothy Wedderburn in a very important study of Old People in Three Industrial Societies which was also published in the 1960s. So by the end of the 1960s, Peter had really looked at older people in the round. He had looked at them in terms of their financial situation, in terms of their family life, and including those who were living in residential and institutional care. This was a very rounded picture and too many times these days research is fragmented and you only look at one part of the picture. Peter always took a broad perspective. He continued working and giving papers on elderly care, though that was not the main focus of his work in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he developed (working with Alan Walker in particular the notion of constructed dependency of the elderly and ageism in society. Again, these are issues which have certainly not gone away. In the 1990s, he returned to the issue of pensions and, working with Barbara Castle, in 1998 he produced Fair Shares for Pensions. As he described it, it was an attempt to construct an alternative policy on pensions to that being proposed by the Labour Party. It was what he called ‘a last ditch attempt to change the course of policy’. This is what I mean about persistence: there he is 40 years later still trying to get a decent pension system off the ground. Then at the end of the 1990s, I have to say I was immensely privileged to join Peter with Barbara Castle, Tony Lynes, Bryn Davies and Ken McIntyre to develop further papers on pension policy. I think Barbara Castle perhaps was one of the very few people Peter was a little frightened of. It was very interesting seeing Peter slightly in awe of somebody. I had not observed that in all the years I’d known him and I thought he had every reason to be in awe of Barbara Castle. She was an amazing person. I can remember, at a National Pensions Convention meeting in 1997 before New Labour came into power, she asked Harriet Harman: ‘We know you won’t be able to introduce all you would like in terms of pensions, because there’ll be all kinds of economic constraints and difficulties, but what are the principles underlying your pension proposals?’ All Harriet Harman could say was ‘Free television licences for the over 80s.’
One of the things I learnt from Peter and indeed from Barbara Castle was the importance of having principles underlying policies so that when you have to compromise, as you do, you know you are conscious of the compromise and you think of ways of getting back on track. Peter, even last year, was still writing about the importance of, in his view, restoring a contributory system properly and revitalising social insurance. He would make an argument for having employer’s contribution from transnational corporations and a new international Tobin Tax. So his belief in universal provision, non means tested, at least as a very basic platform for pensions, was absolutely crucial. On top of that, one had to think about how one redistributes money from the high earner to the low earner and of course that raises a number of issues. Again the huge and growing gap between original incomes and earnings came up yesterday. That is something that still needs to be addressed.
Peter clearly believed that it was important that policies should be well informed by evidence and I think sometimes he had too much faith in the rationality of the policy making process. I think it is interesting that he never became a government advisor like so many of his colleagues — Richard Titmuss, David Donnison, Tony Lynes and, of course, Brian Abel-Smith. He decided he would work better from the outside, to challenge and campaign from the outside. At one point, I think he believed that it was either one or the other. Of course it is both — one needs the Brian Abel-Smiths and the Peter Townsends of this world. We have not solved the problem of pensioner poverty, indeed, I think it is probably worse rather than better, partly because we are unwilling to talk of redistribution between income groups and we are unwilling to talk about social class. I think that, when we talk about inter-generational relationships, too often older people are seen as a burden and dependency is something to be avoided. We need to think and be much more clear-sighted about the huge contribution that older people go on making to their children and grandchildren and not see them just as a burden. Of course, there is an enormous amount of care that goes on within generations as well as between them. There are issues about social care, community care, family care which still have not been resolved at all. I would agree entirely with Randall when he says institutional care, residential care, should not be seen as something to be avoided at all costs. In community care terms, intensive care only means 10 hours or more a week care. So I do think we need to consider much more carefully the relationship between residential care, family care, and care in the community. At the moment, thank goodness, these issues are on the political agenda but I am not at all clear about what the underlying principles are, as Barbara Castle no doubt and Peter would be asking today.
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