Caroline Norrie is Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (1,049 words)
The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) is 50 this year. As part of the celebrations, last month the Social Care Workforce Research Unit jointly hosted a seminar with the Social Work History Network to highlight the history of CPAG and its links with the social work profession.
CPAG is the leading national pressure group working to end poverty among children, young people and families. It campaigns to influence policy; produces information about access to benefits; and provides training for professionals across the UK about welfare rights (including tax credits, and universal credit).
The event was chaired by Professor Pat Thane from the King’s College London’s Institute of Contemporary British History who is compiling a history of CPAG. She introduced the afternoon’s four speakers as well as describing her own research examining archive material acquired from national and local branches of CPAG. As she explained, CPAG emerged in 1965 as one of the first of a wave of pressure groups set up to promote social issues in the UK as it became clear that the post-war welfare state had not eliminated poverty and associated social problems. Pat described CPAG’s role in important campaigns such as improving Family Allowances (1965), improving take-up of benefits by running Welfare Rights Stalls across the country in the 1960s and being instrumental in the introduction of child benefit (1977). Records show at its inception CPAG membership was predominantly made up of social workers and university sociologists, many based in the local branches.
Researcher on the history of CPAG, Ruth Davidson, continued the presentation of archive material highlighting key CPAG publications such as, A Guide to National Welfare Benefits (1972), which was influential in kick-starting the UK Welfare Rights movement. Audience members recalled how the Welfare Rights Handbooks were ‘part of every social worker’s toolkit’ and debated whether social workers had ‘lost the confidence to campaign on behalf of their clients or speak out to the press about issues’. One audience member pondered how in the 1970s part of the social worker’s role was to understand welfare benefits and activate these for clients, whereas nowadays there seemed no time for this work.
Frank Field MP (Director of CPAG from 1969-79) and Baroness Molly Meacher, social worker and crossbench peer (who ran the CPAG campaign for what became child benefit in 1971-2) were the next joint speakers. Frank argued that politics had to be put at the very centre of the history of the CPAG—as its achievements could not be understood outside of this context. Frank took the opportunity to highlight his current concern that charities are failing to hold the government to account and their campaigning wings have been silenced as charities have ‘effectively been bought’ owing to their dependence on government funding, which has increased hugely with the out-sourcing of services to the private/charity sector. However, this is not so with CPAG, which has never taken government funding.
Moving the discussion back to the past, Molly outlined the important role of high quality research in the history of CPAG. The Family Allowance Campaign for example (where politicians were persuaded to pay funds to the primary carer, generally mothers), was influenced by a study which had identified poverty as a life course problem, as well as research which highlighted the lack of take-up of benefits by those who were entitled to them. More recently, she observed, a study has shown how grotesque inequality has become accepted within society.
Professor Jane Tunstill, social worker and Visiting Professor at SCWRU, explored the relationship between poverty and social work in her talk. She described the ‘critical friendship’ between CPAG and social work and the role of CPAG in helping to promote progressive models of social work (encompassing ideas of class and poverty) rather than previous dominant psychoana