Professor Peter Taylor-Gooby gave an invited lecture on Attitudes to Welfare and the Progressive Trilemma in the Churchill Room at the Treasury on 7 October to an audience of senior policy-makers from the Treasury, HMRC, BIS, DWP, DH and DfE. He analysed recent quantitative and qualitative data on attitudes to health care, education and welfare benefits and to the taxation necessary to sustain them, pointing to widespread public misconceptions about the relative size of different areas of spending and about the impact of benefits on work incentives. He argued that government should seek to correct these misunderstandings and to pursue social programmes which supported a solidaristic citizenship, rather than dividing the population into groups that see themselves as net beneficiaries and as net contributors.
This led to a lively discussion which stressed the limitations that public attitudes and the way they are understood by ministers impose on policy.