Bleddyn Davies, DPhil

Lifetime Achievement Award--International

Bleddyn Davies was Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Kent, and Honorary Professor of Social Policy Research at the University Manchester. Dr. Davies lectured in Richard Titmuss’s Department of Administration at the London School of Economics from 1962 until 1974 when he became Director of the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU). After retiring as Director of PSSRU in 2003, he became Emeritus Professor at LSE and Kent and Professorial Fellow at the Oxford University Institute of Ageing. Dr. Davies holds an MA in economics from the University of Cambridge and a DPhil in economics from the University of Oxford.

Having developed a theory of ‘territorial justice’ in the 1960’s, Dr. Davies applied it in work commissioned by the Seebohm Committee on social services, the Royal Commission on Local Government, and the Plowden Committee on primary education. His work and membership of the Social Policy Committee of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, at that time, raised political interest leading to the increased use and greater sophistication of indicators of service need and deprivation for resource allocation by the British government.

Dr. Davies is a pioneer in research on experimental case management and home and community care models. The policy lessons he deduced from his British Kent Community Care Project drew greatly on early American models including Monroe County (NY) ACCESS, On Lok, Georgia AHS, South Carolina LTCP, California’s MSSP, Florida’s Pentastar, New York City’s HCP, TRIAGE, Wisconsin CCP and the DHHS/ASPE Channeling Demonstration. The case management model developed by Dr. Davies has been described as the ‘cornerstone’ of the policy reforms in the UK government’s white paper of 1989.

A long time member of American Public Health Association, Dr. Davies was honored as a recipient of the Gerontological Health Section’s Nobuo Maeda International Research Award.

Among his honors, Dr. Davies is an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to social science and social policy. He is also an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences in the U.K. The papers and scurrilous anecdotes from a day conference in his honor were published in a volume of festschrift essays by scholars, policy makers and managers, including several members of the APHA (Gerry Eggert, Dennis Kodner and Josh Wiener).

Since 2003, Davies has lived with his wife Elizabeth and daughter Angharad in Oxford, close to his other daughter Rachel, son-in-law Andrew Weir and grandchildren, Jemima, Benjamin, and Naomi.