This article is part of a blog series published in partnership with Academics Stand Against Poverty UK, as they develop their third manifesto audit in the build up to the 2024 election. They will analyse the policies in the manifestos in relation to poverty to assess how confident they are that they will enable British society to flourish.
When politicians start talking about millions of lazy Britons taking advantage of a ‘sicknote culture’, about mental health diagnosis having ‘gone too far’, or about the need to ‘get a grip on worklessness’, one knows that a general election is looming into view.
These are the same old attacks on benefit claimants employed so successfully by David Cameron and George Osborne back in 2010 when Conservative Party posters declared ‘Let’s cut benefits for those who refuse to work’.
The incoming Coalition – and then Conservative – governments subsequently shifted the benefits system to one that was ever more punitive, with more conditionality and tougher sanctions. While conditionality had been a feature of the benefits system since the mid-1990s, and had been extended to lone parents of children under 16 in 2008, the new rules became significantly harsher, with an increase in the maximum length of Jobseeker’s Allowance sanctions from 26 to 156 weeks, an expansion of conditionality to new groups of people on benefit with the switch to Universal Credit, and in 2016, a reduction in the age of the child for which exemptions for lone parents were applied to under five.
As a result, the number of people sanctioned rose to record levels and unprecedented levels of severity were imposed, both in the amounts of money deducted and the length of time covered. It caused enormous damage to those sanctioned and their families, including increasing anxiety and depression, rising use of foodbanks, and deeper levels of debt. Though rates of sanctioning subsequently declined and, in 2017, the maximum length of sanctions was reduced, sanction-backed conditionality remains at the heart of government benefit policy, with the number of claimants subject to conditionality having more than doubled over the last decade to 2.7 million.
There is, however, little evidence that it even achieves its stated aims of getting people back into work – and some that it has the reverse effect. A major ESRC-funded project running from 2013–2018, Welfare conditionality: Sanctions support and behaviour change, found that conditionality and sanctions were ‘routinely ineffective in facilitating people’s entry into, or progression within, the paid labour market over time’. The Institute of Fiscal Studies 2023 report Benefits and tax credits for the Deaton Review of Inequality concluded that the reforms of the 1990s had had ‘no positive impacts on employment’ and that while the extension of conditionality to lone parents since 2008 had increased employment, it was ‘almost entirely in part-time and low-paying jobs’, exactly the kind of jobs that continue to trap people into poverty. Qualitative research and charities working first-hand with claimants suggest, meanwhile, that the anxiety-invoking threats associated with conditionality actually had a negative effect on claimants’ ability to find work.
But the evidence will not stop the government electioneering at the expense of vulnerable people – this time, the sick and disabled. Eliding those who are temporarily off work with sick notes with those unemployed with long-term health problems, and disability benefit (a non-means-tested benefit paid to cover the extra costs of living with a disability) with incapacity benefit (a means-tested benefit paid to those unable to work because of health problems), the government descended into what has been described by charities as a ‘full-on assault on disabled people’. This diverts attention from some very serious issues that need addressing in the election campaign.
The first is the rapid rise in the number of people needing support for health-related conditions. This has risen from 3.2 million in 2019 to 4.2 million in April this year and now covers one in ten of the working-age population. The rise has been particularly sharp for those receiving disability benefits (known as PIP, Personal Independence Payment), with numbers having risen by more than a million since the pandemic. Some of this will be related to long COVID but much of it will simply be down to the worsening health of the population, a trend seen before COVID-19 and brought about primarily because of the cumulative impact of the cuts associated with austerity. This ill-health has, of course, been, in turn, worsened by the growing waiting lists for NHS treatment, waits that are particularly long in deprived areas. What’s needed is not to declare that these people aren’t sick at all and therefore should only be on benefits with work-related conditionality (the government’s idea) but rather to tackle the underlying problems that are causing ill-health. Central to this is dealing with the stressful and inadequate nature of the benefits system, and the resultant deprivation and ill-health associated with it.
The second key issue is how the benefits system can enable people to move into good-quality jobs rather than, at present, low-paid, insecure jobs trapping them in poverty. Unemployment benefits in the UK are at present woefully low, with workers who lose their jobs experiencing a larger income loss than most OECD countries. Most are on the means-tested Jobseeker’s Allowance or Universal Credit (as the switch to that system is completed) and subject to the conditionality and sanctioning that has been such a failure. In the short term, rates need to be increased and the use of sanctioning removed until a substantial period of time has passed. In addition, the ability of work coaches to initiate sanctions should go. An ‘active labour market’ policy that merges help with compulsion is fatally flawed – anything can be palmed off on its recipients.
In the longer term, there needs to be much more fundamental changes that move the system towards non-means-tested benefits that are much more generous and not subject to conditionality. The Resolution Foundation has proposed a new, and reimagined, unemployment insurance system that would be available to all workers who had been in work for over a year, reflect prior earnings, and paid unconditionally for a limited amount of time. Such a system would protect and improve the incomes of low-paid workers who lose their jobs, enable searches for better jobs rather than any job, encourage worker mobility and career progression. It would also benefit those on higher incomes and, as such, would gain broader support than unemployment benefits. This would need to be part of a wider set of workplace reforms that would strengthen worker rights, improve collective bargaining, and end insecure employment practices. The benefits system would then be playing its part as a springboard out of poverty.
Joanna Mack is co-editor of the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. She was the Open University’s lead for the ESRC-funded Poverty and Social Exclusion research project (PSE UK) and is a member of UNICEF’s “Applying the consensual approach to measuring child poverty” advisory group.
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