The Impacts of Welfare Conditionality

Abstract

Welfare conditionality combines compulsory engagement with various interventions to move social welfare benefit recipients into work and/or promote the cessation of problematic or antisocial behaviour, with different types of sanction for non-compliance. It is now an established aspect of policy within many social security, housing and antisocial behaviour regimes across the globe. This book explores the efficacy and ethicality of welfare conditionality in changing behaviour over time. The first part of the book (Chapters 1–3) set the scene by offering definitional and theoretical discussions, tracing the expansion and intensification of welfare conditionality within UK policy and offering a critical review of the behavioural science and rationales used by policymakers to justify its use. The second part (Chapters 4–7) provides original analysis of qualitative, longitudinal data generated in repeat interviews conducted with 339 UK welfare service users over a two-year period. The authors conclude that that welfare conditionality largely fails to trigger and sustain the behaviour changes that advocates cite in its defence. Instead, they argue that making eligibility to collective social provisions contingent on individual responsibilities routinely triggers a range of profoundly negative outcomes that exacerbate existing and create new inequalities which undermine the concept of social citizenship.