Suchergebnisse

Britain's 2015 summer budget introduced a policy extending the use of loans in its social security system. From April 2018 support for mortgage interest will be loaned, rather than granted. Its repayment is to be via a charging order on the homes of benefit recipients and/or from wages when they (re-)enter work. This development is examined in relationship to the use of loans in British social assistance provision. The paper argues that it is consistent with the philosophical underpinnings of loaning social assistance, but it also involves new developments with regard to charging interest and the recovery of the loans.

This commentary focuses upon two developments – cuts to wage supplements and an increase in the National Minimum Wage – announced in the first full Conservative government budget in Britain for 18 years. The commentary analyses these through the concept of predistribution and critiques of it. The commentary argues that the two developments can be understood as a weak version of predistribution that will reproduce and deepen class and gender inequalities because of their bases in retrenching collective provision for households living in wage poverty, while increasing the emphasis upon market mechanisms (wages) as the predominate means of supporting such households.

This paper focuses upon the development in Britain of a new out-of-work benefit, the Employment and Support Allowance —and a new employment service intervention (the Work Programme) which is supposed to support groups described as 'hard-to-help' people (one of which is disabled people) into wage work. The paper examines the ways in which such a combination of social security and labour market policies can be understood in political economic terms. The paper uses a theoretical framework drawing upon the ideas of commodification and proletarianizsation to argue that, rather than being concerned with the economic position of disabled people in Britain, the development of the Employment and Support Allowance and the Work Programme was concerned with relationships between the supply of labour and wage inflation, and with developing new welfare (quasi) markets in employment services. The paper concludes that attempting to address the economic disadvantages disabled people face through what are essentially market mechanisms will entrench, rather than address, those disadvantages.

In the first UK budget by a Conservative Government for 18 years, £13 billion per annum savings in social security spending by 2020/21 were announced. Of these, 4.9% (£640 million per annum, and up to £900 million in the years after 2020) is to come from the withdrawal from April 2017 of the work-related component of the Employment and Support Allowance. This means that new claimants will be worse off by £29.05 per week (2015/16 figures) than would have been the case had the measure not been introduced. This brief commentary critically analyses this development as the extension of an ideological assault upon the out-of-work benefits for disabled people which has been gathering momentum for about a decade in the hope of forcing such people into competing for wage work in the open market.

In Britain since the 1930s social assistance recipients have in certain circumstances been able to claim 'exceptional expenses' in addition to their weekly benefit income. From the 1940s these were administered by its central government. However, in April 2013 the then incarnation of such payments (the discretionary Social Fund) was partly replaced by locally administered Local Welfare Assistance. Drawing upon material held in files at Britain's National Archives and central government documents framing the development of Local Welfare Assistance, this paper examines how concerns raised in the 1980s meant it was not possible to then transfer responsibility for 'exceptional expenses' from central to local government. The paper explores those concerns and how in contemporary Britain they are no longer deemed to be problematic because of the Coalition government's emphasis upon localism and because of changing local government views on the possibility of delivering a mainstream social assistance function.

This paper examines the development of the idea 'personalised conditionality' in social security policy in Britain through the report, Realising Potential, commissioned by the last of the 1997-2010 Labour governments and the documents and policies of the coalition government formed after the 2010 general election. Using the idea of active proletarianisation from Offe (1984), the paper argues that 'personalised conditionality' is part of a long and ignoble policy tradition that has criminalised workless people and held them responsible for their lack of work as a means of discouraging worklessness and forms of subsistence outside of paid work. The tensions in such a policy are discussed and it is concluded that the consequence of 'personalised conditionality' may be to detach increasing numbers of people from labour markets, rather than active proletarianisation.

The wave of social protest that swept across England in August 2011 has predominantly been explained by political elites through appeals to various approaches that have in common individualistic frameworks of reference. Issues related to the material condition of society are either little analysed or, among the political elite, ruled out as an explanation of the protests. However, it is clear from both the historical literature on social protest and the contemporary literature on relationships between crime and inequality that explanations ignoring inequalities, particularly economic inequalities, are problematic.

This paper uses the work of Jock YOUNG (2002 , 2003 ) on the emergence of vindictiveness in late modern society to examine two recent developments – the withdrawal, in certain circumstances, of Housing Benefit from those people evicted for 'anti-social' behaviour and the proposed introduction of a Treatment Allowance for 'problem drug users' – in social security policy. The paper argues that while since the development of collective responses to poverty there has been concern with the behaviour of individuals in relation to paid work, we are entering a new period of social security policy where it is the general behaviour of individuals that increasingly defines access to social security benefits, rather than their financial needs.

In his last Budget as the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2007, Gordon Brown abolished the 10p starting rate of income tax. This was to prove to be a controversial move and one that was of significance for income maintenance policy. This article focuses on this significance by examining the competing economic, political and social objectives that framed the abolition of the 10p tax band, the messages that its abolition sent to low paid childless workers and the impacts of its abolition.

This paper focuses upon the privatization of Britain's employment services. It explores the extent to which the private sector is involved in the delivery of state-funded employment services, and the reasons why its involvement is to be extended in the future. The paper examines the catalyst — the Freud review of work-related social security policies — for extending private sector involvement in employment services before going on to critically engage with the privatization of such services. Here, the focus is upon ways in which such developments commodify non-employed people by creating an economic value for them, and the amount and nature of paid work that will be available through such services. The paper argues that the privatization of employment services will be more advantageous to the private sector than it will be to non-employed people because it is essentially a conservative policy that will not address the barriers that people face in securing paid employment.