Digital exclusion and distance in the British welfare system

Abstract

This article explores how the digitization of the UK’s benefits system has affected welfare service encounters and digitally-excluded citizens’ relationship with the state. Digitization is a key feature of Universal Credit – the Conservative government’s flagship welfare reform policy - that has been subject to limited critical enquiry to date. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in third-sector welfare service centres before and during the rollout of Universal Credit, the analysis contrasts the way advice was given under the old ‘legacy system’ with the new online system.Drawing on an original ethnographic study, the article argues that digitization has profoundly changed the dynamics of welfare service encounters and welfare governance more broadly. It identifies a shift towards a more transactional mode of service encounter and the emergence of new forms of claimant passivity as established routines centred on physical documents were supplanted with less-accessible digital technologies. In making inefficient but relationally-demanding negotiations obsolete, the article details how digitization has worked to further disempower and distance digitally-excluded citizens from meaningful engagement with their benefits claims. Potential implications of the findings for the study of contemporary welfare governance and the state are discussed in the concluding sections.