Welfare Conditionality

Beth Watts, Suzanne Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138119901
• eBook ISBN: 9781317311850
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Work

Welfare conditionality has become an idea of global significance in recent years. A 'hot topic' in North America, Australia, and across Europe, it has been linked to austerity politics, and the rise of foodbanks and destitution. In the Global South, where publicly funded welfare protection systems are often absent, conditional approaches have become a key tool employed by organisations pursuing human development goals.

The essence of welfare conditionality lies in requirements for people to behave in prescribed ways in order to access cash benefits or other welfare support. These conditions are typically enforced through benefit 'sanctions' of various kinds, reflecting a new vision of 'welfare', focused more on promoting 'pro-social' behaviour than on protecting people against classic 'social risks' like unemployment.

This new book in Routledge's Key Ideas series charts the rise of behavioural conditionality in welfare systems across the globe, its appeal to politicians of Right and Left, and its application to a growing range of social problems. Crucially it explores why, in the context of widespread use of conditional approaches as well as apparently strong public support, both the efficacy and the ethics of welfare conditionality remain so controversial. As such, Welfare Conditionality is essential reading for students, researchers, and commentators in social and public policy, as well as those designing and implementing welfare policies.

1

INTRODUCTION

The use of increasingly conditional forms of welfare is widely understood to be a relatively recent and radical shift in the nature of social policy across advanced economies. Usually dated from the 1990s, ‘welfare conditionality’ has been described as reflecting a ‘new vision of the welfare state’ (Watson, 2015, p.646), focused less on protecting individuals from the risks associated with market forces or smoothing income over the life course (Hill, 2014) and instead ‘intent on converting the welfare benefits system into a lever for changing behaviour’ (Rodger, 2008, p.87). The intensification of conditionality in Western welfare systems, and in particular in the UK, is the main focus of this book. But an adequate account of these developments requires framing within the much-longer-term history of welfare provision being deployed as a mechanism of ‘social control’ to shape the behaviour of those who avail themselves of state-funded support. It must also make connection with the rolling out of conditional forms of welfare in the very different social, economic and policy contexts of the Global South.

The starting point for our analysis is that access to welfare provision is necessarily structured by legally or administratively defined boundaries, requirements and rules – in other words, ‘conditions’. Typically, claimants must share relevant information with ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980), attend interviews and respond to letters (Griggs and Evans, 2010). Whether cooperation with these processes will afford claimants access to the welfare benefit or good sought will further depend on their meeting some combination of conditions concerning their status (are they eligible based on criteria such as citizenship, local residency and age bracket?), need (do they require assistance because they are sick, disabled, homeless, unemployed or on a low income?), and conduct (have they behaved in the ways required to access the benefit or good in question?). The requirement for claimants to meet at least some minimum relevant criteria is thus inescapable, even in the case of so-called ‘universal’ benefits (Spicker, 2005; Clasen and Clegg, 2007; Dwyer, 2010).

These conditions need not, of course, include conduct elements, and can instead be limited to the domains of status and need just noted. However, it has long been recognised that welfare provision, whether or not it includes explicit behavioural conditions, will have behavioural effects. The unintended ‘perverse’ incentives or ‘moral hazard’ associated with welfare systems is held responsible in some quarters for creating a dependent ‘underclass’ unwilling and/or unable to work (Mead, 1986, 1997; Murray, 1984, 1990, 1994; Dunn, 2014; Perkins, 2016), with concerns about such an underclass not limited to the political Right (Field, 1989; Wilson, 1997). Writing from a very different perspective, and reflecting a well-established tradition of applying Foucauldian insights to social policy concerns, Hartley Dean (1991) argues that the very act of claiming social security benefits ‘brings into play an intricate set of rules of entitlement which announce the duties of the claimant as a citizen and which, by tests and obstacles so imposed upon the claimant, bear upon him/her with “normalising” effect’ (pp.42–43). Welfare policies are, from this perspective, intrinsically socially controlling (Chriss, 2007), in that provision of goods and services by the state or other welfare providers inevitably creates an ‘incentive architecture’ (Grant, 2006) that shapes, moulds and constrains the choices people make.

That welfare policy explicitly and intentionally influences behaviour through conduct-related conditions is also not a new phenomenon. The historical antecedents of such behavioural conditionality in the UK are usually traced back to the emergence of and subsequent reforms to the Poor Laws (both the ‘old’ Elizabeth Poor Law, and in particular the 1834 ‘new’ Poor Law), which sought in their different ways to both relieve poverty and to deter reliance on that relief. The new Poor Laws marked a key attempt to encourage self-reliance through the principle of ‘less eligibility’, which prescribed that conditions in workhouses had to be worse than conditions available outside to deter the claiming of poor relief (Mitchell Dean, 1991). John Stuart Mill described the problem facing social reformers in the mid nineteenth century as ‘how to give the greatest amount of needful help with the smallest encouragement to undue reliance on it’ (Mill, 1848, cited in Goodin, 1985, p.28). Hartley Dean (1991) traces the origins of behavioural conditionality back even further, pointing to Edward III’s attempts in the mid fourteenth century to ensure that ‘valiant beggars … may be compelled to labour for their necessary living’ and commenting that since that time ‘the state has continued by various means of repression to attempt to compel those who are capable of productive work to “labour for their necessary living”’ (p.43).

Bringing us back to the modern era, numerous commentators have emphasised that the foundations of the post-war UK welfare state were not laid on the promise of universal and unconditional social rights. On the contrary, the principle of work-related conditionality was integral to the thinking of its architects – Beveridge, Temple and Tawney (Deacon, 1994; Freud, 2007; Daguerre and Etherington, 2014). Certainly, the formative Beveridge (1942) report made clear that after a certain period, cash benefits should be conditional on attendance at a work or a training centre. Scholars differ, however, in the extent to which they see the current system of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions in the UK as in the spirit of the post-welfare settlement (Freud, 2007), as a gross exaggeration of it (Dwyer, 2010) or as a manifestation of its intrinsic flaws and contradictions present from the very beginning (Philips, 2000).

Likewise, there has been much attention paid to the ‘activation turn’ across Continental Europe since the 1990s (Eichorst and Konle-Seidl, 2008; Keune and Serrano, 2013), intrinsic to which was an increased emphasis on conditional forms of welfare (Clasen and Clegg, 2006). However, this movement has longer-term roots going back at least as far as mid twentieth century Sweden, where successive administrations sought to balance social democratic ideals of equality, solidarity and social protection with the desire to maintain full employment and the need to ensure economic competitiveness and growth (Bonoli, 2010). Denmark’s ‘flexicurity state’ is now seen to represent the apotheosis of this active labour market approach (Brodkin and Larsen, 2013), with its emphasis on enabling citizens to adjust to changing labour market trends, while maintaining their security and wellbeing, through retraining and human capital development programmes. German reforms to unemployment benefits in the mid 2000s (the ‘Hartz reforms’) drew on developments in Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK (Bonoli, 2010), the latter of which had taken lessons from the US’s ‘work first’ approach, with its much stronger ideological commitment to work as a moral duty and conception of welfare dependency as a personal failing (Murray, 1994; Mead, 1997).

Placed in such historical context, it is clear that the recent intensification of behavioural conditionality through the ‘tools’ of welfare provision in the UK and elsewhere must be seen as the latest chapter in the ebb and flow of more and less ‘activating’, ‘responsibilising’ and ‘disciplinary’ manifestations of welfare states (Brodkin and Larsen, 2013). Nonetheless, while perhaps not quite the fundamental departure that some of its critics appear to suggest, this ‘conditional turn’ in welfare systems has elicited great interest and significant controversy with good reason, given the sharp expansion in both its reach and impact.

The broadening and deepening of welfare conditionality

The controversy surrounding recent intensification of behavioural conditionality in Western democracies relates in part to the increased severity of the sanctions applied to those whose conduct fails to conform to requirements. In the UK, there is now provision for full removal of benefits for up to three years from unemployed people who fail to meet work-related activity requirements (Watts et al., 2014), while in the US immediate full-family sanctions operate in a variety of states (Casey, 2010; Mead, 2011). The stringency of conditions and severity of sanctions has also increased in Canada and New Zealand in recent years, and in many developed welfare states claimants are required to accept job offers at much lower rates of pay and in different occupations than their previous employment, as well as at considerable distances and travel times from their home (Langenbucher, 2015). While sanctions tend to be less severe in north-western European countries, there has nonetheless been a tendency for these to be strengthened in recent years (Langenbucher, 2015). For example, in Germany the 2003–05 ‘Hartz’ reforms introduced significantly more onerous obligations on unemployed people than had previously been the case, backed by stronger sanctioning mechanisms involving benefit reductions and suspensions of up to 12 weeks (Jacobi and Kluve, 2007; Langenbucher, 2015; Bothfeld and Rosenthal, 2017). In the UK at least, evidence is accumulating that the intensification of benefit sanctions is associated, for example, with the recent sharp escalation in the use of foodbanks (Sosenko et al., 2013; Lambie-Mumford, 2014), as well as with heightened risks of absolute destitution (Fitzpatrick et al., 2016) and homelessness (Batty et al., 2015).

Moreover, extensive evidence from the UK, US and elsewhere has indicated the disproportionate effect of work-related welfare sanctions on particular sections of the population including young people (Pavetti et al., 2003; Peters and Joyce, 2006; Watts et al., 2014; de Vries et al., 2017), homeless people (Oakley, 2014; Reeve, 2017), and ethnic minority communities (Peters and Joyce, 2006; Dwyer, 2009; Schram et al., 2009; de Vries et al., 2017), as well as a variety of other groups such as those with mental health problems or low levels of qualifications, work experience, literacy or numeracy (Bonjour et al., 2001; Pavetti et al., 2003; Peters and Joyce, 2006; Fording et al., 2013; Church Poverty Action Group et al., 2015). This has served to heighten disquiet about both the fairness and the impacts of such sanctions (Griggs and Evans, 2010; Watts et al., 2014; Reeve and Loopstra, 2017).

There has also been an expansion in the range of welfare claimants affected by behavioural conditionality. Benefits for sick and disabled people now embrace substantial elements of conditionality in a wide range of developed economies, spanning the UK and Australia, as well as Scandinavian and Northern European countries, albeit that the emphasis on accompanying supports tends to be stronger in Continental Europe, with a willingness to employ sanctions stronger in the Anglosphere countries (Geiger, 2017). Lone parents, too, have been brought within the ambit of conditionality, with almost all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries applying a ‘work test’ to this group when the parent’s youngest child reaches a certain age (under one in some US and Canadian states, though usually higher in Europe and Australasia) (Finn and Gloster, 2010). The UK was relatively late in applying work-related conditionality to this group, but since 2008 incremental reforms have brought increasingly higher numbers of lone parents, with ever-younger children, inside the conditionality regime (Whitworth and Griggs, 2013; Johnsen, 2016). In the US, lone parents have long since been key targets of conditionality, particularly since the introduction of ‘Temporary Assistance for Needy Families’ in the mid-1990s, which explicitly aimed to end the dependence of recipient households (largely Hispanic or African American single mothers) on such benefits via work-tests and time limits on assistance (Falk, 2016). A further frontier is now being crossed, in the UK at least, with the extension of welfare conditionality beyond those who are unemployed to those in low-paid or part-time work. The phasing in of the ‘Universal Credit’ regime, which combines a range of previously separate working-age benefits, means that those whose weekly gross earnings fall short of a ‘conditionality threshold’ will be expected to meet the threshold by working more hours and/or increasing their pay rate to avoid sanctions on their in-work benefits (Dwyer and Wright, 2014).

There is also a broadening in the range of welfare spheres within which conditional approaches have been introduced (Watts et al., 2014). This includes the housing realm, with social tenants in England and parts of Australia, for example, who previously could have expected open-ended lifetime tenancies, now offered more conditional fixed-term contracts, with renewal procedures potentially taking into account income, employment status and various aspects of behaviour (Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2014; Fitzpatrick and Watts, 2017). In the related field of homelessness, too, there has been a (highly controversial) trend across the Global North towards increasingly conditional offers of support alongside enforcement and other ‘interventionist’ policies which seek to alter the behaviour and lifestyle of rough sleepers (Mitchell, 1997; Amster, 2003; DeVerteuil, May and von Mahs, 2009; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010; Whiteford, 2010; Parsell, 2011; Bowpitt et al., 2014; Watts et al., 2017). Relevant examples are to be found too in the health, education and child protection spheres, especially in the Global South, where ‘conditional cash transfers’ often seek to incentivise parents to enrol their children in school and have them immunised (Bastagli, 2009; Barrientos, 2011; Pellerano and Barca, 2014). Australia has pioneered a range of child welfare-focused conditionality measures, including highly controversial ‘compulsory income management’ policies which disproportionately impact on Indigenous claimants (Taylor et al., 2016). Proposals to reform social security benefits as a lever to force people to address drug or alcohol addictions (e.g. through drug testing), and other health and ‘lifestyle’ issues like obesity, have also emerged across the Global North in recent years, including in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, though in many cases they have not yet progressed into law given their highly controversial reception and concerns about their likely efficacy (Wincup, 2014; Black, 2016; Pérez-Muñoz, 2017).

Conditionality, austerity and public opinion

A key reason why the current ‘conditionality turn’ in welfare might be viewed as particularly controversial is its association with post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) ‘austerity politics’. Theories of policy change generally emphasise the importance of path dependence and incremental change, with ‘destabilising large exogenous shocks’ such as the financial crisis understood to create potential windows of opportunity for more radical change (Hudson and Lowe, 2009; Farnsworth and Irving, 2011; Vis et al., 2011). It has been hypothesised, on the one hand, that the GFC would lead to a renewal of support for and appreciation of the value of social spending as reliance on the labour market to provide security and welfare became less tenable, and on the other, that it would lead to a greater emphasis on active labour market policies (including behavioural conditionality) and efforts to reduce public spending in response to the fiscal crisis (Vis et al., 2011; Marchal et al., 2014; see also Farnsworth and Irving, 2011). In reality, the response to the GFC seems, at least initially, to have been surprisingly similar across a range of European countries and the US, with initial support to banks followed by macro-economic policies which ‘upheld and expanded rather than retrenched welfare programmes’ (Vis et al., 2011, p.339). An austerity-driven retrenchment phase then ensued in most instances, albeit that the nature and extent of these governmental bids to significantly reduce public expenditure varied, with hostile public opinion offering resistance in a number of countries (Kersbergen et al., 2014; Vis et al., 2011).

The connection to be made between austerity politics and behavioural conditionality may seem self-evident, with intensified conditionality offering policy makers a win/win tool: either claimants comply with behavioural requirements and (assuming at least some degree of effectiveness of these kinds of approaches for the time being) make less use of welfare benefits and services, thus reducing public expenditure, or they do not, in which case sanctions and exclusions from these services nevertheless accrue savings (Adler and Terum, 2017). The US experience, and some recent work in the UK, certainly demonstrates the significance of these measures in diverting substantial numbers of claimants away from welfare programmes via the ‘hassle factor’ associated with making and maintaining a claim, regardless of whether those affected subsequently find paid employment (Finn and Goodship, 2014; Mead, 2014; Loopstra et al., 2015a).

However, austerity and conditionality are perhaps less closely aligned than might initially be assumed (Adler and Terum, 2017). For a start, substantial pushes towards behavioural forms of conditionality occurred in the UK and Germany, and certainly in the US and Sweden, well before the GFC. Moreover, a core contribution of comparative research in this field has been to demonstrate the distinct varieties of active labour market policies pursued in different countries, some of which combine stringent conditionality with heavy investment in employment support and other ‘enabling’ elements, such as childcare provision, as well as high ‘replacement rates’ (i.e. the extent to which out-of-work benefits replace the level of income received when employed) (Eichhorst and Konle-Seidl, 2008). Denmark is archetypical of this model, while the US and UK, in stark contrast, combine strict conditionality with much lower replacement ratios and weaker human capital investment (Eichhorst and Konle-Seidl, 2008; Langenbucher, 2015).

It is also worth noting that, in cases where decision-makers and political elites are intent on welfare retrenchment and reducing social spending as their overriding aims, increased behavioural conditionality is unlikely to represent the most straightforward means to these ends. Indeed, armed with the necessary political will, alongside the required public appetite or indifference, it is much easier and cheaper to simply remove or severely restrict the welfare entitlements of entire sections of the population and/or to impose cuts on other kinds of social spending (for example, grants to local government or the third sector). There is certainly plenty of evidence of these types of policies post the GFC. From 2009, cuts in benefit levels were pursued aggressively in Ireland, one of the countries first and worst hit by the GFC, with single unemployed people – especially young people – and one-parent families particularly badly hit (Keane et al., 2014). Cuts to unemployment benefit levels and/or the duration of entitlements have also been pursued in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark since the financial crisis (Kersbergen et al., 2014).

In the UK, too, the period post 2010 has seen very substantial cuts in the coverage and generosity of working-age benefits, with younger people, larger families and various migrant groups worst affected (Hills, 2014; Fitzpatrick et al., 2017). All of those entitled to working-age benefits will also see their entitlements progressively whittled down over the coming years as payment rates are ‘frozen’ in cash terms rather than rising with inflation (Beatty and Fothergill, 2016b). This ongoing benefits freeze is associated with far larger savings to the public purse (an estimated £3.5 billion in 2019/20 alone and £10 billion over five years) than any direct reductions in welfare expenditure attributable to the ramping up of the sanction regime (an estimated £135 million in 2015) (Department for Work and Pensions, 2015; National Audit Office, 2016). Indeed, the UK’s National Audit Office has warned that the cost of administering benefit conditionality and the knock-on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Context for Conditionality
• 3 The Techniques of Conditionality
• 4 The Subjects of Conditionality
• 5 The Impacts of Conditionality
• 6 The Ethics of Conditionality
• 7 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index