Social Assistance

SOCIAL ASSISTANCE IS a term used widely in En-glish-speaking countries, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, to mean public financial aid given on the basis of need. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) International Social Assistance Study, undertaken in 1994 at the University of York in England, notes: “The term social assistance does not have a fixed or universal meaning. For the purposes of this study we are concentrating on those income-related or means-tested benefits, available to people whose resources are officially held to be insufficient to maintain a minimum standard of living without such additional help.”

The OECD study, released in 1996, surveyed academic experts and government officials from the 24 member countries concerning aspects of social assistance.

Canada, which uses the term extensively, provides the following official definition from the Department of Finance: “Payments made to Canadians on the basis of need by provinces and municipalities, supported by federal contributions provided under the Canada Social Transfer.” The same governmental source describes the Canada Social Transfer as a program of federal revenue sharing with provinces and territories to support higher education and social services, as well as social assistance. Federal participation includes the prohibition of residency requirements for recipients of social assistance.

In the British Commonwealth and other former English colonies, including the United States, social assistance provisions are descended from the English Poor Laws, a series of statutes enacted and amended from medieval times into the 19th century. Social assistance is akin to what once was called “outdoor relief,” or benefits available to eligible individuals who did not reside in institutions, such as poorhouses.

The Poor Laws established public responsibility for poor relief, and they also introduced features that continue to be issues in modern social assistance programs, including the residual concept of public aid as a last resort and local residency requirements. Poor Law concepts have remained stronger in the United States than in many other English-speaking countries, where labor or socialist political forces advanced the concept of social assistance as an entitlement.

In the United States, the terms public assistance and welfare have been used more frequently than social assistance for means-tested aid. Public assistance programs in the United States have been residual in nature, have carried stigma for recipients, and have lost public support in recent years. There have been two very significant changes in public assistance in the United States since federally funded programs began with the Social Security Act of 1935.

In 1974, assistance programs for the elderly, blind, or disabled poor were combined into Supplemental Security Income and placed under the federal Social Security Administration. This move served to standardize eligibility and grants on a national basis and to remove much of the stigma associated with receiving help from state welfare offices. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) remained a state-administered assistance program. Then welfare reform in 1996 placed new limitations on the period of time a recipient may receive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, formerly AFDC).

Even in European countries long considered social welfare states, where social assistance has been an accepted entitlement, eligibility for services and levels of support became matters of political controversy during the 1980s and 1990s. In many other countries, as in the United States, social assistance provisions have been scaled back.

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