SSPSSR Professor of Social Policy, Peter Taylor-Gooby OBE, addressed the provision of post-pandemic welfare when he delivered the prestigious Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture (now in its Centenary year) at Oxford
Professor Taylor-Gooby’s talk on ‘COVID-19 and the UK Welfare State: where next for post-pandemic welfare provision?’ argued that in recent years state welfare in the UK has become increasingly divisive.
Professor Taylor-Gooby said: ‘Recent governments have directed spending to pensions and health care for older people and imposed heavy cuts on the education, housing support and childcare used by young people and families of working age. The gap between skilled workers and professionals and those on low-pay or Universal Credit grows wider.
‘The early days of the first lockdown cut across these divisions, in a surge of generosity, goodwill and neighbourliness embracing low-paid insecure key workers, homeless people and those in need.’
Professor Taylor-Gooby’s lecture (delivered on Thursday 12 November 2020) analysed new material from his research on food banks to chart shifts in public generosity and community resilience as the pandemic developed. It examined whether we succeeded in grasping the opportunity to build greater social cohesion or squandered it.
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The Sidney Ball Memorial Lectures were established after the First World War in memory of Sidney Ball who was a philosophy fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. Sidney Ball was both a political radical and ‘an energetic university reformer’ concerned that contemporary social and economic problems should be studied at Oxford.
Professor Taylor-Gooby is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Founding Academician at the Academy of Social Sciences and, previously, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sociology and Social Policy Section. He was awarded an OBE for services to social science in 2012.
His main research interests are in current developments in the welfare state: the cuts and welfare state restructuring, the social divisions association with inequality and the struggles over multiculturalism. He has written extensively on the topic and is the author of 28 academic books, over 140 articles, and more than 130 chapters in academic books. He is also an experienced presenter having delivered more than 100 keynote presentations at international conferences.