UK Welfare State Research Articles

Sticking plaster support: the Household Support Fund and localised assistance in the UK welfare state

The Household Support Fund is a creature of crises. Initially conceived as a temporary palliative for struggling UK households in 2021 amid the devastating COVID-19 crisis, the local authority administered support is now in its fourth wave. Accounting for over £2.5 billion of funding since its introduction, it is a flagship component of the UK government’s response to the cost-of-living crisis. Drawing on interviews with 12 local authorities, we argue this scheme is part of an ongoing shift towards dependence on localised discretionary funds to mitigate increasingly insufficient central social security support – although the fund provides essential support for struggling households, this is not a role it can fulfil in its current form. The article falls into three parts. The first provides an overview of the origins of this cash-limited HSF scheme and situates it in the shifting role of localised support in the UK social security system. The second provides an overview of the method. The third draws four key themes from the interview data: a lack of funding leading to sticking plaster provision, problematic tensions between supporting those most at need and concerns about dependency on crisis funds, administrative capacity shaping scheme design, and third sector organisations’ increasing role in both mediating and providing support. We conclude that the HSF signifies a significant ongoing shift towards patchwork, localised support in the UK welfare state, subject to unpredictable renewal. Rather than comprehensive centralised provision, funds like the HSF are increasingly being tasked with mitigating insufficient working-age social security.

When impairment impairs: a reply to ‘Fairness, generosity and conditionality in the welfare system: the case of UK disability benefits’ by Elliot Johnson and Daniel Nettle

Provides a response to Johnson and Nettle’s paper, discussing justifications for the UK welfare state, and associated perceptions of disability and fairness. Rather than the ‘stick’ of sanctions and conditionality, more investment is required in return to work efforts.

The next UK welfare state? UK welfare after COVID‐19, by ChristopherPierson, Bristol: Policy Press, 2021, 162 pages

Social Policy & AdministrationEarly View BOOK REVIEW The next UK welfare state? UK welfare after COVID-19, by Christopher Pierson, Bristol: Policy Press, 2021, 162 pages Gbenga Akinlolu Shadare, Corresponding Author Gbenga Akinlolu Shadare gbenga.a.shadare@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0002-0484-2032 School of Criminal Justice, Arden University Ltd, Coventry, West Midlands, UK Correspondence Gbenga Akinlolu Shadare, School of Criminal Justice, Arden University Ltd, Coventry, West Midlands, UK. Email: gbenga.a.shadare@gmail.comSearch for more papers by this author Gbenga Akinlolu Shadare, Corresponding Author Gbenga Akinlolu Shadare gbenga.a.shadare@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0002-0484-2032 School of Criminal Justice, Arden University Ltd, Coventry, West Midlands, UK Correspondence Gbenga Akinlolu Shadare, School of Criminal Justice, Arden University Ltd, Coventry, West Midlands, UK. Email: gbenga.a.shadare@gmail.comSearch for more papers by this author First published: 25 December 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12885Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Prescripted living: gender stereotypes and data-based surveillance in the UK welfare state

Prescripted living: gender stereotypes and data-based surveillance in the UK welfare state

The “Pull Factor” Problematization in the Emergence of Everyday Bordering in the UK Welfare State

The “everyday bordering” concept has provided key insights into the effects of diverse bordering practices upon social life, placing the bordering of the welfare state among wider state interventions in an autochthonous politics of belonging. Sociological contributions have also introduced new explanations as to why states pursue such measures, positing that neoliberal states seek legitimacy through increasing activities to (re)affirm borders within this politics of belonging, compensating for a failure to govern the economy in the interests of citizens. To what extent is this visible in the state-led emergence of (everyday) borders around welfare in the United Kingdom, often cited as a key national case? This article draws from 20 elite interviews to contribute to genealogical accounts of the emergence of everyday bordering through identifying the developing “problematizations” connected to this kind of bordering activity, as the British state began to distinctly involve welfare-state actors in bordering policies in the 1990s and early 2000s. This evidence underlines how these policies were tied to a “pull factor” problematization of control failure, where the state needed to reduce various “pull factors” purportedly attracting unwanted migrants in order to control immigration per se, with little evidence that legitimacy issues tied to perceived declining economic governability informed these developments in this period. These findings can inform future genealogical analyses that trace the emergence of everyday bordering.

‘Locked in the Rat Race’: Variegated financial subjectivities in the United Kingdom

In the past four decades, the UK welfare state has been continuously reduced while asset ownership has gained in importance. Rather than relying on publicly funded welfare when not working, individuals are expected to mitigate future risks such as ill health, unemployment or old-age poverty through accumulating assets. Previous research employing a Foucauldian governmentality framework has explored how these norms of asset accumulation come into being through institutional changes and discourses. Documenting the narratives and practices of 60 UK individuals and bringing in an understanding of resistance being immanent in power technologies, the author sets out two key contributions to the everyday financialisation literature. First, this paper is the first study to conceptualise differential financial discourses and practices as distinct subject positions within the realms of financialisation. Due to feeling ‘trapped’ in having to provide financial security themselves, governable subjects amend asset norms to their own needs. Five subject positions emerged from the complex interplay between norms of conduct and counter-conduct. Second, these variegated financial subjectivities and practices are, it is argued, not only deviating from a theorised investor subject but are also necessary for everyday financialisation to take place. Counter-conduct helps to smoothen ambiguities inherent in norms of conduct, enabling asset accumulation and reinforcing a welfare system based on individual responsibility.

Social citizenship and social psychology

AbstractThis paper outlines the concept of social citizenship, which was first theorized in the late 1940s alongside the creation of the UK welfare state and concerns citizens' rights to a basic income and standard of living. It suggests that social citizenship—particularly welfare provision—is a useful and important topic for social psychological research, albeit one that has been largely overlooked. We provide an overview of key developments in social citizenship and consider the impact of 30‐plus years of neoliberal governance in Western democracies, which has resulted in ongoing changes to how welfare rights and responsibilities are configured, such as policies that make social citizenship rights contingent on conduct. We outline social scientific work that examines these shifting ideas of citizenship, personhood, welfare, and conditionality and make the case for a critical discursive psychological approach, which we illustrate with a brief empirical example. We suggest that critical discursive social psychology is particularly well‐placed to examine how psychological assumptions are built into both policy and lay discourse and how these can legitimate interventions designed to work on the conduct of the unemployed, such as therapeutic and behavior change initiatives. Finally, we argue that psychology is faced with a choice; while there are opportunities for the discipline to contribute to the design and implementation of such initiatives, to do so requires accepting the basic values of the underpinning neoliberal agenda. Instead, it is vital to place these assumptions under the critical microscope and explore how they work to obscure structural disadvantage.

Welfare Convergence, Bureaucracy, and Moral Distancing at the Food Bank

AbstractThis paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus.

Basic Income in the UK: Assessing Prospects for Reform in an Age of Austerity

Of all the European welfare states, the UK most clearly represents the liberal regime type – notwithstanding a shift towards ‘social investment’ under New Labour – as defined by its residual, targeted benefit structure and increasingly punitive activation regime. The idiosyncratic institutional characteristics of the UK welfare state give rise to challenges and opportunities with respect to prospects for the introduction of (some form of) basic income. Despite a large and growing population of ‘disaffected’ precarious and low-paid workers and widespread dissatisfaction with the increasingly punitive sanctions regime, significant barriers to the emergence of a sufficiently large and coherent constituency of support for basic income remain. Thus, while institutional inertia and political considerations may preclude anything more than marginal changes to the existing system, a number of policy options falling short of a ‘full’ basic income – but retaining some of its core features – appear relatively feasible.

Cash not care: the planned demolition of the UK welfare state

Cash Not Care: The Planned Demolition of the UK Welfare State is an impassioned appeal against the encroachment of neoliberal privatization and the dismantlement of the United Kingdom’s welfare sys...

Cash not care: The planned demolition of the UK welfare state

Cash not care: The planned demolition of the UK welfare state

Reversing the Negative Experience of Unemployment: A Mediating Role for Social Policies?

AbstractThis article examines why unemployment is often experienced in a profoundly negative way, and explores the potentially mediating role of social policies. Three dominant theories of unemployment are described, which are often treated as competing, mutually exclusive explanations of the deleterious effects of unemployment. Subsequently, and through drawing upon a qualitative study of unemployed people, it is argued that all three theories are of worth and can be synthesized into a broader explanation of the experience of unemployment as an overarching process of loss. Three forms of loss are identified: loss of agency; loss of the functions of paid work; and loss of social status. The article then explores how these forms of loss can be both ameliorated and intensified through social policy interventions. Concluding, it offers policy recommendations to increase the efficacy of social policies in reversing the negative experience of unemployment, with the conclusion that this will require significant reform of the UK welfare state.

Beyond Continuity? Understanding Change in the UK Welfare State since 2010

AbstractOne approach to identifying policy change stresses policy instruments, settings and policy paradigms, while another also considers the process and culmination of various shifts and consequent outcomes. This article illustrates the debate through an examination of how far developments in social security policy between the 1997–2010 New Labour and 2010–15 Coalition Governments in the UK constituted real policy shifts. It shows that, despite continuities in instruments and approach, there have been substantial changes in the impact of welfare state policies related to short‐term benefits, employment and housing. The article identifies new policy directions leading to a different kind of welfare state, concerned less with living standards and equality and more with individual responsibility and paid work. It suggests that this has been achieved without the need for radical changes in instruments and their settings.

Making the case for the welfare state

The UK welfare state is under attack from harsh spending cuts, focused particularly on women, children, low-paid people and claimers of working age, and a restructuring programme. This paper examines why it is hard to make a case for generous state welfare that is both inclusive and electorally attractive. It discusses the way the issues are understood, the trilemma that pro-welfare policy-making faces, proposals for new directions in policy and a reform programme that might help build a more inclusive welfare discourse. A more inclusive society requires policies that reframe the way people think about work, reward and welfare.

‘The sweetest music you will ever hear’: structural and programmatic uses of concrete by Denys Lasdun & Partners

Sir Denys Lasdun (1914–2001) was one of Britain's leading Modernist architects. This article investigates his use of concrete both as a structural material and as an exposed finish, pre-cast and in situ. It investigates the evolution of Lasdun's structural thinking about concrete, and proposes that Lasdun used concrete as one of a number of means of establishing and protecting his artistic prerogative. Client opinion, Corbusian influence and pressure from Lasdun's architect contemporaries are considered as possible forces shaping Lasdun's decision making on finishes for his buildings. Finally, the National Theatre, London, is examined as a case study of the relationship between politics and exposed concrete architecture under the UK Welfare State. The article concludes that this relationship is complex and does not conform to the conventional narrative of the Welfare State years.

Shifting the Goalposts: A Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Study of the Health of Long-Term Incapacity Benefit Recipients during a Period of Substantial Change to the UK Social Security System

AbstractThe UK social security safety net for those who are out of work due to ill health or disability has experienced significant change, most notably the abolition of Incapacity Benefit (IB) and the introduction of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). These changes have been underpinned by the assumption that many recipients are not sufficiently sick or disabled to ‘deserve’ welfare benefits – claims that have been made in the absence of empirical data on the health of recipients. Employing a unique longitudinal and mixed-methods approach, this paper explores the health of a cohort of 229 long-term IB recipients in the North East of England over an eighteen-month period, during a time of significant changes to the UK welfare state. In-depth interviews with twenty-five of the survey cohort are also presented to illustrate the lived experiences of recipients. Contributing to debates surrounding the conceptualisation of work-readiness for sick and disabled people, findings indicate IB recipients had significantly worse health than the general population, with little change in their health state over the eighteen-month study period. Qualitative data reinforced the constancy of ill health for IB recipients. Finally, the paper discusses the implications for social policy, noting how the changing nature of administrative definitions and redefinitions of illness and capacity to work can impact upon the lives of sick and disabled people.

Disability and Social Change By ShahS, PriestleyMPolicy Press: Bristol, 2012 ISBN 978‐1‐84742‐786‐1, 217 p. Price: £19.99 (paperback)

I was delighted to be invited to review this book as it sets out to achieve an elusive goal — an assessment of the impact of changing policy on people's lives in an area of growing interest, the history of disability. At the centre of the book are the stories of 50 individuals with physical impairments who narrated their experiences to the authors, divided into three age cohorts, those born in the 1940s, 1960s and 1980s. Arguably policy relating to disabled people, and children, has changed dramatically since the 1940s. Although the 40s saw the ushering in of the UK welfare state, there was, for example, no public challenge to the assumption that disabled children needed separate schooling; there was no legislation to address physical barriers, like step-free access and low floor buses; and there was no overt political commitment to social inclusion. Studies like the one reported in this book help us evaluate the extent to which policy change really has made a difference to young disabled people growing up in Britain today. The book is divided into seven chapters, the most overtly relevant to readers of this journal being chapter 5 ‘learning about life’, the focus of which is education and schooling, and this is where I will start. It gives a nuanced picture, far more complex than a Whiggish progression from segregated schooling to real inclusion in schools and colleges. The authors observe ‘there has been no steady trend towards inclusion over the historical period in question’ (p. 117). But there have been changes. In the early period, many people's experiences were shaped by institutional frameworks for healthcare and provision of therapy, with education for independence focussing on overcoming the impairment by learning how to walk or dress without assistance, for example. But the growth of special schools in the 1970s appears to have increased rather than decreased segregated life pathways; while a recent growth in specialist residential colleges ‘has introduced new forms of segregation and surveillance under the guise of “further education”’ (p. 118). This mixed picture characterises the book overall, across the dimensions of family life, health care and employment. Policy may look more enlightened, but peoples' lives have not necessarily changed in line with political reform. Public policy can still drive a wedge between disabled children and young people and their local communities, by, for example bussing children to distant specialist schools or residential colleges; though this was more prevalent and all encompassing for some in the earlier generation, subject to long stays in hospital with no parental visits, open air and residential specialist schools in remote locations. However, the authors do note one unambiguous set of changes; an increasing range of life scripts available to young disabled people now compared to those born in the 1940s. The pressure to ‘pass’ as normal has decreased, the option to stand up with pride and celebrate difference is available, and taken by many. There are disabled role models. There have been real opportunities opened up in employment and related activity by the emergent disability arts movement; by new kinds of ‘disability work’ in organisations controlled by disabled people; in local authorities as access officers and in universities as disabled student advisors; and in government quangos like the Disability Rights Commission. IT opens up employment which is not reliant on physical accessibility in ways inconceivable to earlier generations. The irony is noted that disability activism was made possible by segregated environments which clustered young disabled people together, these settings ‘marked impairment in very negative ways’ (p. 172), but also ‘sometimes acted as a catalyst for resistance and consciousness raising about the commonality of disability as oppression’ (p. 172). The book ends with a consideration of the value and the limitations of biographical narratives. The value, the authors argue, is that they enable the reader to consider the personal as political, to challenge assumptions, for example that the earliest generations experienced the most segregated childhoods. Some did, but equally some did not. Mindful of the disabled people's movement's well-documented suspicion of using personal tragedy to elicit charitable sympathy, the authors contend, with justification in my view that personal narratives must be read with a focus on social relations, and institutional practices rather than as ends in themselves. It's a narrow line, to give individual stories credibility and prominence and at the same time to use those stories to illuminate public issues. I think Shah and Priestley do it pretty well here, and have produced a book that is well worth reading.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink: love, sex and gay men with intellectual disabilities – a helping hand or a human right?

How do human rights help us with the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) who face discrimination and barriers in their sexual lives? Men with ID who are gay face a whole range of rights violations when it comes to exercising their sexual identity. How can such a seemingly marginalised group draw on rights based claims for better and equal treatment? This paper explores how the power of men's own stories may usefully challenge prevailing social norms and in turn strengthen human rights claims in this area. It also reflects on the challenges posed to such an agenda by current economic difficulties and changes in the organisation of adult social care in the UK. The paper draws on empirical research with gay men with ID completed in the UK in 2005 and briefly revisits some key messages from the data. It also considers the wider literature on the power and possibilities of human rights, 'intimate stories' and translating human rights into everyday change. Gay men with ID tell powerful stories of love, longing and exclusion. Such stories have the capacity to transform wider social attitudes and in turn strengthen the rights claims of this marginalised groups. There are question marks about the possibility of such change in a time of austerity and the broader move in the UK's welfare state from the collective to the individual consumer of services. However, the telling of men's 'intimate stories' creates an almost unassailable challenge to current discriminatory practices and norms.

The changing architecture of the UK welfare state

This article looks at the way in which the role of the state has evolved within different aspects of welfare activity (broadly defined) in the United Kingdom since 1979 and forward to the possible impacts of the plans of the Coalition government that took office in 2010 for changing that role through reform and fiscal retrenchment. Even as governments restrained the growth of public social spending, total public and private activity grew by more than 150 per cent in real terms between 1979-80 and 2007-8, and from 34 to 42 per cent of GDP. If state services have not grown rapidly enough, some have paid more privately for the services they want, and in other cases governments have ended up financing activity through indirect routes. There has always been a 'mixed economy' of welfare in terms of the balance between public and private provision, finance, and control. Changes in this balance have been slow, with the largest growth being in the 'pure private sector' (with private provision, finance, and control), but with some growth in publicly financed services that are contracted out to the private sector. The experience suggests that the Coalition government's initial ambitions for radically transforming the overall structure of public-private boundaries may be hard to realize.

Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century (review)

Reviewed by: Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century Darren O'Donnell (bio) Clarke Mackey . Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2010. Click for larger view View full resolution Cover image for Random Acts of Culture. © 2010 Between the Lines. Cover design by Gord Roberson; cover images by Clarke Mackey and Jennifer Tiberio [End Page 90] Filmmaker Clarke Mackey's Random Acts of Culture is a broad survey of vernacular culture, which he defines as "a set of imaginative activities that go back to the beginnings of human life and are still active today ... activities that take place outside of the consumer marketplace and the world of trained professionals" (11). The book is wide-ranging in its search for cultural activities that resist consumerist commodification and includes dips into the worlds of the !Kung Bushmen, Toronto's Dufferin Grove Park, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, the invention of the written word, a riveting chapter on the rise of the modern notion of spectatorship, and a surprising and detailed appearance by folk singer Pete Seeger. Mackey's portrayal of contemporary existence is perhaps bleaker than it needs to be, and tends toward hyperbole with statements like "we are dealing with apocalyptic times" and repeatedly ticks off familiar themes to illustrate this: portraits of the suburban family picking their children up from school in exhaust-belching cars, the preteen daughter buying too-sexy clothes at the mall, the constant invocation of the zombie-walk of consumerism in phrases like "the chronic basic dissatisfaction leads us to buying more and more stuff in an ever-continuing effort to distract ourselves" (24). And the television! The television! The television! The poor ol' TV gets a particularly thorough shit-kicking, which has merit but, hopefully, the evolution of screen-based entertainment toward more sophisticated interactivity will attend to some of Mackey's concerns with the Internet offering a least some fortification of vernacular culture. Clips of laughing babies are about as vernacular as you can get. A chapter on African-American musical forms—with a focus on blues—and its global function as a form with plenty of room for improvisation (in contrast to the rigid Western classical canon) and therefore less vulnerable to standardized consumption, neglects to mention the contradictory nature of hip hop. Hip hop is a musical genre that has managed somehow to remain profoundly open to improvisation, variations, manipulations, sampling, and remixes, while hysterically trumpeting egomaniacal, triumphalist consumer tendencies, all the while managing to function as the global community art form de jour for engaging and empowering disaffected youth. It's this contradiction that is most missed in Mackey's analysis. The book is filled with a never-ending labyrinth of fascinating information. A standout chapter, "Literacy and Its Discontents," focuses on the invention of the written language—featuring an examination of Spanish, in particular, as a modern contraption intended to codify the minds and bodies of the conquered masses. The chapter "The Invention of the Spectator" is another great read, as Mackey creates a parallel track with the evolution of the participatory audience who, in sync with the movements of capitalism, is literally displaced from a raucous position actually sitting on the stage to the dark and silent auditorium where they are now most commonly found. His call for a survey of the history and function of applause was hilariously spot-on for me, as a theatre-practitioner who has often wondered why those damn monkeys out there in the dark keep slapping their hands together. The book is its most disappointing when outlining practices that Mackey considers vernacular (with his admission that he's been meaning to write the book for thirty years ringing true, as his examples don't feel as fresh as they could). While there certainly is a place for the pageantry works of US-based Bread and Puppet, Canada's Shadowland Theatre, and the UK's Welfare State, there is a whole swathe of more current work he overlooks both in the visual arts and theatre worlds that would satisfy his definition—and add some complications to the...