Guiding principles for social security policy: Outcomes from a bottom‐up approach

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AbstractCovid‐19 has highlighted the inadequacy of UK social security but also the lack of consensus among progressive actors about what would be a better system. One way forward is to focus on the principles that should underpin social security. We present outcomes from a project in which principles were considered by a panel of Expert by Experience benefit claimants. We argue that while scholars often engage in descriptively identifying social security principles in existing policy, the bottom‐up approach presented here offers a way of generating normative principles to guide an improved future system. We identify key contributions of this bottom‐up approach relating to: the critical importance of principles as a guide to the fundamental purpose of social security, and policy making; the relationship between the treatment of claimants and benefit levels as co‐dependent; and how a bottom‐up process can produce results that engage with and contribute holistically to the debate.