Social Welfare in Britain

1. Social Welfare in Britain From Welfare to Workfare: Recasting Social Security

2. Three prior announcements… • No lectures or seminars next week: Writing Week • Updated Guidelines on Assessment on SWIB Module Outline Page: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/academic/mizenp/mizenp_index/teaching/swib/moduleoutline • Reading on NHS Week 7: Alcock 2008, Baggott 2004, Pollock 2004

3. Aims of today’s session: • Examine changes to social security and welfare to work – growing integration • Focus on the relationship between social security and the labour market • Consider the impact of post Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) reform agendas – 3 waves of New Labour • Provide a critical assessment

4. Beveridge’s foundation stones • Social security for all ‘from the cradle to the grave’, through a dual system: • National Insurance – contributory, universal, subsistence levels of benefit, by right/contributions record • National Assistance – a ‘safety net’, means tested, residual (the Poor Law if not by name?)

5. Cracks in the foundations • Social security based on full (male) employment, in a situation of: • Growing unemployment • Decline in full-time male employment • A crisis of national insurance • Growing use of the means test • Welfare Reform has abolished dual sets of rule, and 2008 proposals will abolish B’s of dual system • Single tough, means-tested regime

6. The ‘problem’ of social security • Beveridge’s social security the ‘problem’, not the solution (cf Dean and Taylor-Gooby 1992). New right critique that generous and unconditional benefits leads to: • Disincentives to work • Passivity among recipients • Creation of a dependency culture and self reproducing ‘underclass’ • Distorts wage levels • Is expensive and bureaucratic

7. Shift to conditionality, activation, and sanctions • Solve unemployment or ‘worklessness’ by (Jones and Novak 1997): • Reduce ‘real’ value of benefits (change method of up-rating) • Make benefits harder to access (e.g. initially by Restart interviews) • Erode their scope (Jobseekers Allowance) • Extend conditionality (actively seeking work) • Increase punishments for non-compliance e.g. dock benefits

8. Create an ‘Active’ Benefits System • Get the unemployed ‘active’ – ‘workfare’ (Finn 1998; Deacon 1997): • ‘soft’ forms – re-motivation courses, counselling, job search programmes, informed by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) principles • ‘hard’ forms – compulsory government funded training and work for benefits (shift to workfare) • Agency rather than structural explanations: psychology rather sociology

9. Getting the Nation Working? • No sustained downturn in unemployment until 1993-4 • Workfare schemes for the unemployed (e.g. Youth Training Scheme (YTS) Employment Training (ET) of modest impact (Peck 2004; Mizen 2003) • Older workers late 1980s encouraged onto more generous ‘Incapacity’ (Invalidity) Benefit’ esp in ‘industrial’ areas – massage statistics • Social security reform underscored greater labour market polarisation – disappearance of well paid unskilled jobs • Some emphasis training and skills, but mainly ‘work first’ • Push the unemployed into low paid, insecure and ‘flexible’ forms of working: ?

10. A Third Way for Social Security? • No return to Beveridge – JSA 1996 stays, and DSS becomes DWP • Old welfare state too much emphasis on ‘rights’ rather than ‘responsibilities’ • Work the primary source of welfare; the best form of welfare is work • Work for all those who can, welfare for those who (genuinely) can’t • Social security to be a ‘springboard’ into work, not a ‘sofa’ • Some support and help

11. A strategy of ‘progressive competitiveness’ • Replace austerity measures of neo-liberalism with progressive measures (Thomson 1998) • The idea is to create a ‘virtuous circle’ by: • State-led ‘retooling’ of the unemployed and the low skilled to create ‘full employability’ • Up-skill the workforce to attract investment and improve economic competitiveness – employers will want to use skilled labour • Improving social justice as individual workers get jobs and their earnings increase • Everyone is a winner: the individual, their communities and the economy all benefit

12. The carrots – emphasis on employability More resources for the unemployed (but not on benefit levels) Improve support and guidance (Jobcentre Plus, Connexions) Better quality programmes ( e.g. New Deals incl NDYP) Improve skills and qualifications (vocational ed) Make work pay (NMW, Tax Credits) The sticks Extend compulsion further (NDYP) Extend means-testing further Keep benefit levels low Increase punishments for non-compliance even further Generalise this approach across the welfare state (Labour’s New Deals) Compulsion started with young people, spreading to disabled people, lone parents More sticks and carrots

13. New Labour’s Flagship policy involves New Deals for: Young People, 25+, 50+, Lone Parents, Disabled People, for Partners, and Musicians! NDs involve: individual assessment personal guidance & counselling work experience training and education NDs involve varying degrees of compulsion – increasing over time More recently targeted at ‘hard-to-reach’: Lone Parents (compulsory interviews when child reaches 12)), Incapacity Benefit (‘Work-Focused Interviews’, Blindness no longer guarantees benefits) If we are to eradicate child poverty, then I believe we will also need to go further in challenging existing assumptions about who - and at what point - someone should be in work (John Hutton, Work Secretary, 20.1.07) New Labour’s New Deals

14. Assessing New Deal • By 2005 1.25m participants on NDYP (75% male) • Jan 2005, 70,000 on programme • But difficulties involve: • Finding work: only 38% enter jobs, of which 25% leave within 3 months • Addressing inequalities: black young people less access to employers • Participants’ ambivalence: positive on access to employers, negative on quality, training and education • Ensuring quality training: criticism of placement quality • The very modest creation of new jobs: substitution, displacement, deadweight • NDYP: a diversion (Peck 2001; Mizen 2003) or a good beginning (Kemp 2003)?

15. Assessment: institutionalising inequality • Work has been placed at the centre of welfare, but at the cost of hardening society’s response to poor (Byrne 1999): • Measures like New Deal have been of limited impact • Polarisation of incomes and inequality • Growth of working poor • Institutionalisation of low wages • Huge public subsidies for low wages in public and private sector (NWM, Tax Credits) • Growth of a low skilled, low paid, insecure workforce

16. If it doesn’t work try, try again • If doesn’t work must because not tough enough, however: • Helped those who might have got jobs anyway • Those left often long way from nearly ‘job ready’ (Dean, Carpenter) • Recession and large scale unemployment coming – need to rethink • But: Government pressing ahead with further wave of welfare reform based on Freud Report • Privatisation of employment • Increased sanctions against disabled and lone parents • Drift to US style work

17. Third Wave of Welfare Reform • (1) New Deals then (2) Welfare Reform Act 2007 - Incapacity Benefit now ‘Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) new claimants • Green Paper 2008 No one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility • Some hoped Brown would lead to softer approach, but pressing ahead with Conservative support • James Purnell bringing in tough rules, tough sanctions, no-one exempt – except mothers of young children, severely disabled • Everyone expected to do something, CVs voluntary work, work-trials, etc • Abolition of Income Support, work for benefits – back to the poor law

18. Reading on 3rd Wave of Welfare Reform Gov’t Information: http://www.dwp.gov.uk/mediacentre/pressreleases/2008/welfare-reform/ Initial Political Reaction: www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/10/jamespurnell-welfare