The foregoing discussion captures a contradictory tension in the history of the British welfare state. Firstly, that the period from 1945 to 1974/1976 constituted its “classic” form, informed by social democratic ideology and collectivist, unitarist, redistributive principles that produced a more equal society through the realisation of social policy. This was aligned with the professionalisation of social work which provided a human face to the bureaucratic dimensions of social policy, with expertise and discretion the means to realise these ends. There remains some disconnection between this teleological view of a “golden age” and the critical historiography outside members of academic social policy and social work. Secondly, that these frames of reference align with contemporary thinking: the “classic” welfare state with the “Titmuss Paradigm”; the place of social work with Pinker’s critique of Titmuss, although his emphasis on subjective states of welfare rather than the welfare state also extended to the capacity of social work; and Wootton’s socialist-feminist critique from the left of the undemocratic and technocratic assumptions of social administration.

The proliferation of inquiries into historical child abuse have foregrounded lived experience to reconstruct the public record and bring about forms of redress. These experiences are plural rather than singular, and the state remains a powerful arbiter in sanctioning or discrediting revised narratives of the past and ascribing responsibility. Yet despite these limitations they show the fundamental limits of the top-down contours of debate about the welfare state when explored from the bottom-up. Although not their original intention, their centring of testimony and lived experience offers a “standpoint critique” which contrasts and contradicts existing frames of reference of the welfare state. Currently, the top-down narratives prioritise need, provision, redistribution and services. This is evident in narratives of post-war child welfare where archival policy sources and contemporary sociological and psychological studies continue to shape narratives.Footnote 83 Conversely, the bottom-up alternatives show the place of control, violence, harm and power. This has been validated through scholarship using feminist methods and approaches for the pre-war period which have reconsidered women’s experiences with, and to, welfare.Footnote 84 Inquiries into harm and abuse have enabled this approach to be applied in relation to children for the first time due to the onus placed upon disclosures grounded in lived experience thereby shifting concern from private states of welfare to the public welfare state.

Repurposing Titmuss’s notion of diswelfare and drawing on Wootton’s critique of expertise, the coercive power of the state is foregrounded in seeing how the welfare state functioned as a corporate parent. Here, the proportions of the “classic” child diswelfare state can only be fully grasped by revisiting, rereading and repositioning archival and documentary historical sources in light of the challenge of lived experiences. As I have argued elsewhere: “everyday decision-making by officials… exposes processes of mundane governance and networks of power and authority which underpin the state”.Footnote 85 Understanding how expertise within the welfare state was realised, rather than idealised, shifts the focus of attention from larger, political questions of welfare recognisable within the historiography, to intimate questions of the state and the power it exercised in shaping the lives of children and families.Footnote 86 It locates responsibility and accountability for what is effectively social harm by the state, child diswelfare, within a fragmented, complex, and diffuse welfare state. This is a welfare state underwritten by a mixed economy of care spanning the moving frontier of statutory and voluntary provision under central social policy auspices.Footnote 87

Part of the answer can be found in asking what, and where the welfare state was located. For all intents and purposes, the “phalanx of officials” who constituted a range of services and functions in everyday experience, were the welfare state to the children and families who encountered them.Footnote 88 This is not to forget that behind the phalanx was a looping column of apparatchiks which enabled officials to march through the working-class homes and communities. This included local authority councillors, committee administrators, accountants, clerks, voluntary organisation secretaries, dignitaries and fundraising collectors. Moreover swathes of junior and senior civil servants alike, who both managed continuity in everyday decision-making below and change in the work of high politics, were involved. Asking how the footsoldiers of the phalanx conceptualised and legitimised their function, gathered, filtered and drew on expertise and knowledge to undertake their role, and how they engaged with other officials and organisations, begins to reconstruct the everyday operation of the welfare state from within.Footnote 89 It is only by extending this approach and centring lived experience as the frame of reference, whilst at the same time recognising the complex apparatus surrounding them, that provides a view of the welfare state from below.

Glimpses of this everyday operation of the “classic” welfare state taken from historical anthropological and ethnographic studies of children’s services provide such a view, although primarily from within rather than below. These studies begin to scratch beneath the veneer of social democratic intent to reveal how widespread lived experiences of harm were normalised and embedded through policy and practice. Like other contemporary expert accounts of child welfare seen through a disciplinary lens, their use is not without its problems. However, notwithstanding Burnham’s oral history of social work, there are few studies which explore such social work “as work” in understanding how services for children in the welfare state operate. Selina Todd provides an exception, offering a class-based analysis which positions social workers as progressive, empathetic and caring figures opposed to the forms of social harm such as poverty, squalor and poor health which beset the families they supported. Todd is at pains to distinguish them from their “lady bountiful” middle-class forebearers, and the elites of officialdom inflected with eugenic assumptions, arguing that most “ordinary welfare workers… disagreed with such judgmental attitudes”.Footnote 90 Such a view accords with Burnham’s own distinction between the officer class and the footsoldiers of the phalanx.

The view of Todd and Burnham provides necessary balance to totalising analysis, but their position is hard to sustain. Social control rather than class solidarity abounded.Footnote 91 John Offer, summarising Pinker’s contemporary contribution to social work knowledge, noted that whilst services were rarely oriented solely and purposively around extending stigma, that the “need to ration provision or the normative orientations of staff may be experienced as forms of coercion by the users of a service”.Footnote 92 Others offer a less generous interpretation of the motivations which lay behind the actions of social work which reinforced stigma and control through the authority of the state. Carole Satyamurti’s ethnography of several children’s departments in the late 1960s shows how social workers became socialised into harmful norms which contradicted professional idealism, reflecting the purpose of social work as work within a larger system “rather than being a function of the personal qualities of the social workers”.Footnote 93 Given her Marxist persuasion and focus on labour practices, she noted the “interesting similarity” in their relative positions of powerlessness echoed in relations between social workers and departmental managers operating under pressure within constraints.Footnote 94 This latter point is significant to contextualise narratives of lived experience which, within inquiries, reflect upon the personal dimensions of harmful encounters. These affirm a narrow, legalistic focus on individual blame rather than situating it within the state and its organisational structures.Footnote 95 This contextualisation returns private troubles back into the domain of public policy.

This distinction can then be traced through the fabric of the individual (personal, micro), organisational (local, meso) and institutional (national, macro) within the welfare state apparatus. This in turn can reveal how the activities of social workers were embedded in authority which stemmed from expertise to manage and control, rather than care for, the purported best interests of the child. Control encompassed policy and professional purposes.Footnote 96 Joel Handler’s study of children’s departments during the 1960s traced this coercive control beyond the confines of personal encounters between workers and clients—primarily mothers, although the outcome of their decisions impacted children—to its broader context, situating it as a “structural relationship extend[ing] throughout all levels of government and all social classes”.Footnote 97 Handler recognised that decisions were not a product of private judgement alone, but based on the purpose of the social work and the professional, policy and practice determinants of the best interests of the child. These determinants were emphatically rooted in professional expertise incapable of recognising and valuing the experiences of administratively subjectified clients. Instead, they produced professional projections which reified and nullified the perspective of others, especially for the gap between adult and child.Footnote 98

What Pinker, Satyamurti and Handler are describing is different forms of Michael Lipsky’s “street-level bureaucracy”. Lipsky argues that

At best, street-level bureaucrats invent benign modes of mass processing that more or less permit them to deal with the public fairly, appropriately, and successfully. At worst, they give in to favouritism, stereotyping, and routinizing—all of which serve private or agency purposes.Footnote 99

In thinking about what and where the welfare state can be located, Lipsky’s analysis and the above examples show the layers of complexity involved. In order to relocate private troubles back into public policy, and the harm of the child diswelfare state, the activities of social workers and officials in the welfare state need to be recast as work. Such work returns the coercive power of the state, rather than the distribution of welfare, to the fore, and its concomitant child diswelfare omissions and commissions. Omissions amount to bureaucratic indifference shaped by the socialisation of officials into working norms. These were sanctioned from above by civil servants providing “paternal care of the state” and routinised from within by social workers working through process determined by expert delineations and resource limitations.Footnote 100 Commissions are shaped in two ways. First, by individuals operating within and empowered by such contexts, aware of their authority relative to both clients in general and children in particular. They then use this relation of the corporate parent to enact forms of harm and abuse. Second, by the state seeking to preserve its veneer of benevolent intent in the interests of its citizens’ welfare, and its commitment to act paternally, using experiential expertise of children and childhood to engender social policy as social engineering and social control.

Ultimately, seen through Titmuss’s lens of diswelfare, the state offset its modest gains catalogued in the existing historiography and social work teleology through a failure to discharge its responsibility as corporate parent. During its “classic” period from 1945 to 1974/76, it constituted not a lost “golden age” of social democratic welfare, but a “classic” child diswelfare state. This has only become visible through the lived experience of children as they have become adults and obtained the capacity to speak truth to power, albeit within significant limits. These disclosures have cut across and through the available top-down sources of the state which constitute the established social work and social policy literature by reconstructing and rendering the same encounters through the lens of subjective experience. Lived experiences foreground control, and their undemocratic and technocratic assumptions within professional, paternalistic social administration, over care and “faring well”. Accordingly, when viewed from beyond the administrative angle—or spectacles—of Wootton’s critique, the benevolence of welfare recedes in the face of state violence.