Sarah Lamble

From social security to individual responsibility: sanctions, conditionality, and punitiveness in the Welfare Reform Bill 2009 (part one)

The Welfare Reform Bill 2009 is the latest development in New Labour’s ‘responsibility’ agenda. Based largely on commissioned reports by former investment financier David Freud (2007) and economist Paul Gregg (2008), the Bill extends reforms contained in, among others, the Welfare Reform Act 2007, which increased levels of benefit conditionality, expanded requirements to undertake work-related activity, and introduced sanctions for non-compliance with various obligations (see Puttick 2007). As outlined in the Green Paper, No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility (DWP 2008a), the new reforms require welfare claimants to ‘work for [their] benefit’, criticising what the government refers to as a ‘something for nothing approach’ that purportedly characterized welfare until relatively recently. Aiming to address ‘inactive benefits’, these new reforms target those people who, in the government’s view, had been ‘written off’ either as long-term benefits claimants or by being moved on to incapacity benefit (see, for example, DWP 2008a, p. 14). Collectively, these reforms move further away from the basic social security entitlements that characterized earlier welfare ideals, and towards more disciplinary, contractual, and consumer-based models of service delivery and individual responsibilisation. In other words, we suggest that the ‘universal social security without means test, uniformly administered by a Ministry of Social Security’ of the Beveridge Report (Fraser 2009, p. 254) is evolving into a conditional, partly privatized, market-like environment, in which the state uses the provision of basic needs as both carrot and stick to regulate the behaviour of welfare claimants. In this two-part article, we (along with our colleagues Emily Grabham and Jenny Smith, in Part Two) examine key proposals contained within Part One of the Welfare Reform Bill 2009, as it was introduced into the House of Lords on 18 March 2009. Part One of the Bill makes significant changes to social security provisions, including: simplifying the system through a single system of benefits; imposing sanctions for failure to comply with work search requirements and other misdeeds; privatizing (‘contracting out’) job search services for long-term claimants and those with complex needs; and introducing ‘work for your benefit’ requirements for most claimants, including some who were previously claiming incapacity benefits and single parents.

From social security to individual responsibility: sanctions, conditionality and Punitiveness in the Welfare Reform Bill 2009 (Part One): Current Developments

The Welfare Reform Bill 2009 is the latest development in New Labour’s ‘responsibility’ agenda. Based largely on commissioned reports by former investment financier David Freud (2007) and economist Paul Gregg (2008), the Bill extends reforms contained in, among others, the Welfare Reform Act 2007, which increased levels of benefit conditionality, expanded requirements to undertake work-related activity, and introduced sanctions for non-compliance with various obligations (see Puttick 2007). As outlined in the Green Paper, No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility (DWP 2008a), the new reforms require welfare claimants to ‘work for [their] benefit’, criticising what the government refers to as a ‘something for nothing approach’ that purportedly characterized welfare until relatively recently. Aiming to address ‘inactive benefits’, these new reforms target those people who, in the government’s view, had been ‘written off’ either as long-term benefits claimants or by being moved on to incapacity benefit (see, for example, DWP 2008a, p. 14). Collectively, these reforms move further away from the basic social security entitlements that characterized earlier welfare ideals, and towards more disciplinary, contractual, and consumer-based models of service delivery and individual responsibilisation. In other words, we suggest that the ‘universal social security without means test, uniformly administered by a Ministry of Social Security’ of the Beveridge Report (Fraser 2009, p. 254) is evolving into a conditional, partly privatized, market-like environment, in which the state uses the provision of basic needs as both carrot and stick to regulate the behaviour of welfare claimants. In this two-part article, we (along with our colleagues Emily Grabham and Jenny Smith, in Part Two) examine key proposals contained within Part One of the Welfare Reform Bill 2009, as it was introduced into the House of Lords on 18 March 2009. Part One of the Bill makes significant changes to social security provisions, including: simplifying the system through a single system of benefits; imposing sanctions for failure to comply with work search requirements and other misdeeds; privatizing (‘contracting out’) job search services for long-term claimants and those with complex needs; and introducing ‘work for your benefit’ requirements for most claimants, including some who were previously claiming incapacity benefits and single parents.

From Social Security to Individual Responsibility

The Welfare Reform Bill 2009 is the latest development in New Labour’s ‘responsibility’ agenda. Based largely on commissioned reports by former investment financier David Freud (2007) and economist Paul Gregg (2008), the Bill extends reforms contained in, among others, the Welfare Reform Act 2007, which increased levels of benefit conditionality, expanded requirements to undertake work-related activity, and introduced sanctions for non-compliance with various obligations (see Puttick 2007). As outlined in the Green Paper, No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility (DWP 2008a), the new reforms require welfare claimants to ‘work for [their] benefit’, criticising what the government refers to as a ‘something for nothing approach’ that purportedly characterized welfare until relatively recently. Aiming to address ‘inactive benefits’, these new reforms target those people who, in the government’s view, had been ‘written off’ either as long-term benefits claimants or by being moved on to incapacity benefit (see, for example, DWP 2008a, p. 14). Collectively, these reforms move further away from the basic social security entitlements that characterized earlier welfare ideals, and towards more disciplinary, contractual, and consumer-based models of service delivery and individual responsibilisation. In other words, we suggest that the ‘universal social security without means test, uniformly administered by a Ministry of Social Security’ of the Beveridge Report (Fraser 2009, p. 254) is evolving into a conditional, partly privatized, market-like environment, in which the state uses the provision of basic needs as both carrot and stick to regulate the behaviour of welfare claimants. In this two-part article, we (along with our colleagues Emily Grabham and Jenny Smith, in Part Two) examine key proposals contained within Part One of the Welfare Reform Bill 2009, as it was introduced into the House of Lords on 18 March 2009. Part One of the Bill makes significant changes to social security provisions, including: simplifying the system through a single system of benefits; imposing sanctions for failure to comply with work search requirements and other misdeeds; privatizing (‘contracting out’) job search services for long-term claimants and those with complex needs; and introducing ‘work for your benefit’ requirements for most claimants, including some who were previously claiming incapacity benefits and single parents.

The marketisation of prison alternatives

A short article on why market logics curtail possibilities for genuine alternatives to prison.