ABSTRACT
In the past two decades planning procedures have been introduced against a background of sharply increasing social welfare expenditure in both Britain and the United States. A popular British misconception about the United States is that it is a basically free enterprise society almost entirely lacking in social services. General economic prosperity provides the context within which any social welfare system must develop. Nevertheless, the degree of UK central government involvement in the social services, simply measured in financial terms, is overwhelming. It is clear that in the aggregate such spending does still form a significantly larger part of the nation's economic activity in the UK - equivalent to over 24 per cent of the GNP as against nearly 18 per cent. In some ways US experience in the 1960s parallels that in the UK in the 1940s.
