LSE academic Brian Abel-Smith served as a special adviser with Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s, writes his biographer Professor Sally Sheard, beginning in 1968 with the newly-created Department of Health and Social Security where he had a profound impact on health and social policy.
In the new Labour government, Secretaries of State and ministers are refining manifesto policy commitments in the cold light of larger than expected budget deficits. Most will also have appointed their Spads – special advisers. These are individuals with expertise in specific policy areas, some from academia or business, many of whom are already well-known to the government departments that give them their contracts. At the last census in March 2023, the Conservative government employed 117 (115.35 FTE) special advisers at a cost of £15.9mn p.a.
The role of special adviser has evolved from the first such posts in Lloyd George’s government, who were housed in 1917 in the “garden suburb” of temporary huts in the garden of 10 Downing Street. In 1930 the Economic Advisory Council was formed to ensure that governments had access to the highest quality advisers, but until Harold Wilson’s 1964 government, the employment of such advisers was rare. Although Wilson’s ministers never employed more than a dozen or so special advisers, they represented a sea-change in parliamentary and Whitehall attitudes to policy formation. They reflected a growing concern about the quality of advice provided by the civil service, which continued to value abstract intelligence rather than specialist skills and knowledge. Civil service mandarins also then had a reputation for institutional obstructiveness, which Wilson needed to circumvent. Labour had been out of government for 13 years, leaving it with few MPs who had experience of ministerial office, or ability to work the Whitehall system.
Special advisers were mainly used in the Treasury. The Ministry of Health was too low in the political pecking order to justify one until it was merged into the new Department of Health and Social Security, created to satisfy the political ambitions of its first Secretary of State Richard Crossman. Known in Whitehall as the Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity, it had been hastily bolted together in 1968. One of Crossman’s first requests was for a special adviser, and he already had a person in mind: Brian Abel-Smith, Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Brian Abel-Smith (1926-1996) was already well-known in political circles for his expertise on health and social welfare issues. He’d been recruited by Richard Titmuss, while still finishing his PhD in Economics at Cambridge, to help with the Guillebaud inquiry into the cost of the NHS, which demonstrated in 1956 that it was good value for money, and should be better resourced. He was appointed as a lecturer in Titmuss’s department, and spent the rest of his academic career at LSE. His impact on policy – both British and global – from this base was considerable. He laid the foundations for new approaches to benefits, confirmed (with fellow LSE academic Peter Townsend) the relationship between poverty and ill-health, and proposed new financing systems for health and social welfare. Much of this was “backroom” work, and his pioneering role is not well-known.
Abel-Smith had initially considered a political career, but turned down the offer of taking Hugh Dalton’s safe Labour seat in 1957 because he was concerned about being outed as gay at a time when it was illegal, and the impact this would have on his family (he was a cousin of the Queen Mother). He opted instead to use his research within the Fabian Society, on government committees and NHS boards.
Working with Titmuss and Townsend, he forced an acknowledgment that William Beveridge’s welfare state, initiated by Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1945, was not alleviating the “five giant evils” afflicting British Society as promised. He enhanced Titmuss’s philosophical texts with his exceptional ability to shape academic research into politically charged rhetoric, always underpinned by solid economic authority. Crossman recognised his talents, and used him extensively, sometimes testing his loyalty to LSE colleagues on issues such as reform of supplementary benefits. When Labour lost the 1970 general election, Crossman noted in his diary that Abel-Smith was “my closest personal friend, and without whom I could have done very little in the past two years.”
Abel-Smith returned to his full-time professorship at LSE, but also sought new expert adviser opportunities internationally, especially in the global south through the World Health Organization. After Labour’s return to government in 1974, the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, Barbara Castle, immediately re-appointed him as her special adviser for his “high brilliance” to balance the “low cunning” of her other special adviser Jack Straw. After Castle was sacked in 1976, her successor David Ennals kept Abel-Smith on at DHSS, and he was key to the creation of the first effective resource allocation tool for the NHS, and selected members of the Black Committee on Health Inequalities. He moved in 1978 to be Peter Shore’s special adviser at the Department of the Environment. This partnership lasted only five months until Labour lost the 1979 election, and were to remain in opposition for the rest of Abel-Smith’s life.
Abel-Smith’s value as a special adviser was his ability to translate academic research into feasible policy proposals. His loyalty to LSE was both personal and professional. Although he received offers to move to other universities, he stayed because of Titmuss, who died in 1973, and because of the benefits of having an academic base close to Whitehall and Westminster.
London also provided a congenial environment in which to live a private gay life – he didn’t publicly acknowledge his partner John Sarbutt, with whom he had lived since 1960, until his LSE retirement party in 1991. He also found London the ideal location from which to run his clothing store business Just Men, which he started in 1965, and had regular celebrity customers such as the Rolling Stones, Joan Collins and Warren Beatty.
Despite his aristocratic background, Abel-Smith tied his political colours firmly to Labour while still a teenager. But he was also close to politicians from other parties. His overriding commitment to health and social justice meant that he was pragmatic in developing solutions that some socialist purists found unacceptable, such as user fees for health services, and the introduction of market competition in the NHS. He would have felt at home as a special adviser again in the new Labour government under Blair in 1997. Sadly he died the previous year, railing until the end about the folly of shrinking the state and abandoning commitments to address health and welfare inequalities.
Read more
A Passionate Economist: how Brian Abel-Smith changed global health and social welfare by Sally Sheard
