Social Policy

nef aims to find ways of achieving sustainable social justice, by which we mean the fair and equitable distribution of natural, social and economic resources between people, countries and generations.

An unprecedented squeeze on public spending threatens to dismantle what remains of the post-war welfare state.  In its place, we have been promised a ‘Big Society’, with more power to citizens and ‘communities’ to take more decisions and actions locally. Yet the cuts have been making it hard for all but a few to improve their lives and opportunities.

So we must seek more creative solutions - by building better knowledge, working with others to develop ideas and testing them out in practice.  We are committed to locally based, practical work that makes a tangible difference to people’s lives, improving their well-being. Our research aims to understand and change the systems and structures that contribute to inequalities, vulnerabilities and risks.

Our current work, which includes general trends in social policy, is grouped around six broad goals.  Together, they should help to build a new social settlement that is fit for the 21^st century:

• Growing the core economy: By the ‘core economy’ we mean the human resources that comprise and sustain social life, embedded in the everyday lives of each individual (such as time, wisdom, and experience) and in the relationships among them (like love, empathy, care, reciprocity, teaching, and learning). These resources are largely uncommodified and routinely overlooked and undervalued by policymakers and economists, yet are essential for the market economy to function.
• Developing co-production: Building equal and reciprocal partnerships between people to transform and improve their lives, through locally-based activities including design and delivery of public services. Co-production emerged as a critique of the way that professionals and service ‘users’ have been artificially divided, ignoring the human capabilities of the very people our ‘services’ are set up to ‘help’. nef's aim is to establish co-production as the paradigm for designing and delivering services, by learning from existing practice, generating evidence on the effectiveness of co-production, developing guidance.
• Redistributing paid and unpaid time: Time is a key human resource, essential in both the market and the ‘core economy’. Some people have much less control over their time than others, especially those with low-paid jobs as well as caring responsibilities. We propose a slow but steady move towards shorter and more flexible paid working hours, spreading employment across the population, with more people earning and paying taxes and fewer claiming benefits. A redistribution of paid and unpaid time could help us to get off the consumerist treadmill, have more time for caring, and live more sustainably.
• Preventing harm: Shifting the balance of investment upstream to prevent social, environmental and economic harm. Although widely accepted as an ideal, it is not only hard to achieve in practical terms, but also likely to encounter opposition from a rich mix of economic and political interests. Early action can have four major advantages: it improves human well-being; it safeguards public resources; it reduces the need for heavy-handed intervention 'downstream'; and it helps to safeguard the future for our children.
• Reducing inequalities: Identifying and tackling underlying causes of inequalities is central to the quest for social justice. The government’s promise of a ‘Big Society’ side-steps the issue, while spending cuts hit the poorest first and hardest – widening inequalities. This is not just bad for the poor but bad for the whole of society. If we want to narrow rather than widen inequalities, we must create conditions for more equal participation: encouraging, enabling and supporting individuals and groups, especially those disadvantaged and disempowered. We must distribute more equally the material resources that make participation possible, opening up access to decision-making at all levels.
• Promoting sustainable development: In all our work we take account of three interdependent 'economies' - the resources of planet, people and markets – and how they can work in mutually reinforcing ways, to achieve sustainable social justice. This approach guides our efforts to tackle health inequalities, to promote sustainable local economies, to envisage and implement a ‘Green New Deal’, to safeguard natural resources and develop sustainable food systems. In social policy we have an abiding interest in how to make the transition to a low carbon economy in ways that reduce rather than exacerbate social inequalities.