A team of St John’s College researchers have published a report opposing the idea that welfare and health spending is a burden on the country’s economy, arguing instead that economic prosperity is intrinsically tied to welfare provision.

“The interests of the poor and the wealthy are not mutually opposed in a zero-sum game,” said Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy at Cambridge’s Faculty of History. “Investment in policies that develop human and social capital will underpin economic opportunities and security for the whole population.”

Publishing their findings in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, Szreter and his colleagues question the idea that health and welfare are a burden on the state, saying: “The narrow view that spending on the National Health Service and social care is largely a burden on the economy is blind to the large national return to prosperity that comes from all citizens benefiting from a true sense of social security.”

To support their claims, the researchers point to the period of economic growth Britain experienced following the formation of the welfare state after the Second World War, something which they argue also brought about the rich-poor divide falling to an all-time low during the 1970s.

The report also follows the effect of welfare provision on the nation’s economic prosperity prior to the creation of the modern health and welfare apparatus we know today, arguing that the concept of a British welfare state can be traced back to the reign of Elizabeth I.

According to the researchers, laws passed in 1598 and 1601 that enshrined the “right of relief” instigated a “precocious welfare system”, which operated at a parochial level and was essential to England’s emergence as “the most dynamic economy in the world” due to mobility of labour and urban growth it created.

There are also parallels drawn in the report between the perceived problem of the “idle poor” during the Victorian era and contemporary narratives that label benefit claimants as “scroungers” that benefit unduly at the expense of “hard-working families”.

The researchers claim that this kind of viewpoint implies those in need of welfare are unproductive and also, in the long run, proves economically damaging.

This is a claim they support through recourse to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which completely overhauled the welfare system that had been created in 1601. The Act’s is best known today through its connection to the workhouses that were infamously instituted across Victorian Britain.

The researchers argue that, though the Act passed out of concerns that the welfare system was being abused and was an unduly heavy burden on taxpayers, there isn’t any evidence that it had much an economic benefit. They also point out that Britain’s growth actually fell behind that of rival nations after 1870, only recovering in the 1950s.

“We are arguing from history that there needs to be an end to this idea of setting economic growth in opposition to the goal of welfare provision,” he also said. “A healthy society needs both, and the suggestion of history is that they seem to feed each other.”