Rebecca Wright (Newcastle upon Tyne): How Warm Should the Welfare State Be? The Origins of Britain’s Heating Benefit System and the Challenge of Defining Adequate Heat, 1948 to 1970

Wir laden Sie herzlich zu unserer nächsten Kolloquiumsveranstaltung mit Rebecca Wright am 9. Januar 2025 ein. Rebecca Wright wird einen Vortrag zu How Warm Should the Welfare State Be? The Origins of Britain’s Heating Benefit System and the Challenge of Defining Adequate Heat, 1948 to 1970 halten. Für mehr Informationen zu den Inhalten des Vortrages siehe das Abstract unten.

Die Veranstaltung findet von 18:15–19:45 Uhr, online via Zoom statt. Für den Zugang zum Zoom-Meeting bitte E-Mail an sekretariat.wsu@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de.

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How Warm Should the Welfare State Be? The Origins of Britain’s Heating Benefit System and the Challenge of Defining Adequate Heat, 1948 to 1970 

This paper traces the development of Britain’s Heating Addition between 1948 to 1970 to show how Britain’s welfare apparatus struggled to accommodate heat within its benefit system. Alongside the growth of the welfare state, Britain’s heating infrastructure underwent a rapid transition in the 1960s with the rise of all electric and gas heating within local authority housing, where many of Britain’s most vulnerable, in particular elderly pensioners, would be housed. With growing concern that a public health epidemic of hypothermia was blighting Britain by the late 1960s, the British Government was forced to develop a benefit to support those struggling to afford to stay warm. As this paper will demonstrate, however, determining what constituted adequate heat remained very much up for debate and depended on a set of assumptions about bodies, households, heating systems, and most importantly, how warm the welfare state should be. Tracing how this debate continued through the different agencies administering a heat benefit, this paper will foreground the challenge that heat posed to the British welfare system. Ultimately, it will show the impossibility of trying to determine a social measure of heat and foreground its contextual, contiguous grounding, in the social.