Peter Taylor-Gooby, OBE, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Kent, will deliver the prestigious Sidney Ball Lecture in its Centenary year on Thursday 12 November from 16.00 – 17.30 online.

His theme will be:

COVID-19 and the UK Welfare State: where next for post-pandemic welfare provision?

Professor Taylor-Gooby will argue that in recent years state welfare in the UK has become increasingly divisive. Recent governments have directed a spending to pensions and health care for older people and imposed heavy cuts on the education, housing support and child care used by young people and families of working age. The gap between skilled workers and professionals and those on low-pay and on 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. The lecture will analyse use new material from Professor Taylor-Gooby’s research on food banks to chart shifts in public generosity and community resilience as the pandemic developed. It will examine whether we succeeded in grasping the opportunity to build greater social cohesion or squandered it.

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.

The lecture will be available online and you can register via the Eventbrite website.