Welfare reforms in the UK: from security to conditionality to sanctions

The widespread "cancellations" and experiences of insecurity amongst research informants that I have described in the preceding section are part of wider and ongoing changes and transformations in the UK welfare system. Importantly, I conducted my fieldwork throughout 2012, at a time when various, partly contradictory developments with regard to welfare entitlements of A8 nationals were taking place. On the one hand, transitional restrictions on access to benefits for Czech and Slovak nationals had just expired in the previous year, giving them, in theory, the same legal rights to state support and public funds in the UK as other EU nationals. At the same time, with the current UK coalition government coming to power in 2010, the already widely negative public and political discourse around immigration (Anderson 2008) reached new heights, perhaps most poignantly signified by the trope of "benefit tourism" being declared a key concern in the government's policy-making (Hough and Whitehead 2011).110 Furthermore, social welfare provision by the British state became highly prominent on the political agenda as well as in public discourse; most notably, the introduction of the Welfare Reform Act by the current Coalition government in March 2012 was touted as the single most significant reform of the welfare state in sixty years. A far-reaching piece of legislation aimed at "simplifying the existing system and making sure work pays" (Duncan Smith 2014),111 _{the Act was the result of a continuous focus of the current UK government,}

which had come to power in 2010, on reducing the welfare bill and tackling what it called "welfare dependency" and "worklessness" (unpaginated). Prior to the Act becoming law in 2012, "tougher penalties" had already been introduced for benefit claimants, the effect of

110 _{Similar concerns underpinned both the introduction of 'transitional measures' by the UK government as well}

as a significant part of the existing empirical literature assessing post-accession migrants' impact on the British welfare state which I discussed in chapter 1, section 1.1.1.

which is also visible in the significant increase in the number of sanctions imposed on people receiving welfare support. For example, Webster (2013) found that the number of people having their Jobseeker's Allowance sanctioned rose considerably from 500,000 in 2009 to 860,000 in 2013, the latter figure amounting to one claim in five being sanctioned. Although benefit sanctions have intensified since the start of the Conservative-led Coalition government, it is worth noting that the introduction of such measures and, connected with it, the aim of cutting welfare predate this period.

Various researchers have identified the late 1970s and early 1980s as the beginning of a crucial period that marked a significant shift in welfare provision in the UK and elsewhere (Korpi and Palme 2003; Starke 2006). Under the leadership of the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and the Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US, both governments argued that the welfare system had become "a source of social and economic problems instead of a solution" (Starke 2006, p. 105, emphasis in original). In addition, it was argued that having a large welfare state was not only difficult to sustain financially but also a threat to individual empowerment and freedom (Korpi and Palme 2003). This marked the launch of neoliberal policies based on ideas of "deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision" (Harvey 2005, p. 2). Adopting a laissez-faire approach, the then Conservative UK government started to restructure the welfare system and cut welfare expenditure with the goal of diminishing the size and interventionist role of the state. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal policies and what has been termed 'welfare retrenchment' in social policy and welfare studies became dominant (Starke 2006): "a reduction of welfare state generosity, i.e. lowering of the level or conditionality of benefits for the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the elderly" (Schumacher and Vis 2012, p. 3). Despite a change in administration, the aim of putting an "end to the Big government", called for by US President Clinton in his State of the Union address to Congress in 1996, was also adopted in the UK by the New Labour government which came to power in 1997, as well as by other governments elsewhere in Europe such as in France, Spain and Italy (cited in Wacquant 2009, p. 42). With regard to the UK, the government stepped up the privatisation of public services while simultaneously extending the element of conditionality from the unemployed to other categories such as single parents and the disabled. Conditionality referred to mechanisms that tied the provision of benefits to the

behavioural compliance of claimants, for example, the requirement to evidence a minimum number of job applications in a specified time period. With responsibility (and blame) shifting from the state to the individual and reframing social problems as individual failings, the attention turned away from social guarantees (Rustin and Chamberlayne 2002) and increasingly towards sanctions (Griggs and Evans 2010).

As already mentioned, the current UK Coalition government has continued with this neoliberal tradition and introduced measures to cut the welfare budget even further, while simultaneously introducing more conditions and sanctions for benefit recipients. These sweeping measures have received a significant amount of criticism (and continue to do so), especially from civil society campaigners and organisations. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a prominent British social policy research and development charity, for example, has published several reports in the last two years detailing the financial, social and emotional impacts of these reforms.112 Even a recent independent review on benefit sanctions for JSA claimants on mandatory back-to-work schemes, commissioned by the Department of Work and Pensions, found that the most vulnerable were affected the most by such measures (Oakley 2014). Yet despite the criticism voiced in different sectors of society, the major political parties as well as large sections of the mainstream media remain, to a large degree, supportive of these reforms and the accompanying strong rhetoric (Oakley 2014, p. 6), leaving the current government relatively unchallenged to press ahead with cutting welfare.