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Inequalities is moving to Substack!
The Inequalities blog is moving to Substack, as part of breathing life into the blog again. If you’re an email subscriber, then you have automatically been added as a subscriber on Substack (because this is the same blog, just at a different home), and will shortly receive the first post there. You can unsubscribe at any time, most easily by clicking the ‘Unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of all Substack emails – though obviously just email me if that’s easier. I hope you like the return of the blog!
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The rise and fall of anti-welfare attitudes
Today sees the publication of the latest British Social Attitudes report, and I – along with the amazing team of Rob de Vries, Tom O’Grady and Kate Summers – have a chapter in it on ‘the rise and fall of anti-welfare attitudes’.
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Worse jobs have raised the level of incapacity benefits
This post explains a claim I made on a BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Fit for Work’ (episode 3), by Jolyon Jenkins – for transparency, I wanted people to be able to go and scrutinise the evidence behind it.
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What’s happened to the WCA under UC? At last we know!
This is a rapid post in response to statistics released earlier today – please let me know if you do further analyses of these statistics and I’ll link them in the comments below.
After continual pressure from campaigners, academics, and politicians, the DWP have finally published some statistics on the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) under Universal Credit. This is a crucial step: it has been almost impossible to understand what has been happening to benefits disability assessments over the past few years, and UC WCA’s are now moving into the light. In this post, I quickly summarise a few headline findings.
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The WCA is bad – but will scrapping it be better? (part II)
In the first part of this post, I explained that hundreds of thousands of sick/disabled people with limited work capacity – particularly those with mental health conditions – may end up with less money. In this post I look at other risks and benefits of scrapping the WCA.
For the Government – and for many others, including policy wonks like Deven Ghelani and Torsten Bell – the strongest reason for scrapping the WCA is to improve work incentives. (The same is true for international experts like Christian Ståhl and the OECD, who don’t talk about the WCA, but have interesting views on disability assessments in general). For these people, it is self-defeating to ask people to prove that they can’t work before they receive enough money to live on – it’s a clear disincentive to working, and feels pretty awful to boot. Moreover, starting to work part-time then becomes very risky, because it will look like you are able to work; and if you start try and then lose a job, you might be counted as ‘unemployed’ and receive much lower benefits. It makes sense not to even try.
So how can I possibly think that scrapping the WCA will push people away from work? Well, there’s actually two reasons.
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The WCA is bad – but will scrapping it be better?
Is it ever bad to scrap a hated policy? For over a decade, disabled people have feared the ‘brown envelope’ from DWP that might mean that they are being called in for a Work Capability Assessment, or ‘WCA’. They have been worried by the prospect of a process that makes them feel less-than-human, and the prospect of unfair decisions that make their lives impossible.Coroners have blamed the WCA on some individual people’s deaths, backed up by research that suggests the WCA caused 200-1,000 suicides. It has been condemned by disabled people and almost professional group that deals with it, and nearly every political party at some point said they would abolish it.
But before being swept along by a wave of relief that the Conservatives have today said they will scrap the WCA, we need to think: what will replace the WCA, and will it really be better?
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Should we talk about ‘social security’ instead of ‘welfare’?
When discussing unemployment and social security benefits, should those of us who believe in a more generous system try to avoid talking about ‘welfare’?
Many researchers and campaigners believe that that the term ‘welfare’ activates ideas about ‘handouts’ and dependency which reduce public support benefits. For example, at a recent event hosted by the Commission on Social Security, the charity communications expert Nicky Hawkins argued that “talking about the social security system is probably the best way to go, moving away from talking about welfare or benefits” [at 46:20].
She (and others) make a highly plausible case. Where the terms ‘welfare’ and ‘benefits’ have come to imply ‘handouts’ to ‘dependents’, ‘social security’ draws on an older, more universal idea of protection from uncertainty.
However, no-one has tested whether these terms actually make any practical difference to how the public think about the benefits system. This is something we therefore decided to do as a small part of a much larger project on the British welfare system during the pandemic.
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The cut to Universal Credit is not the real problem
This week’s cut to Universal Credit is an eye-catching policy, in all the wrong ways.
It’s the largest overnight cut to the basic rate of benefits since WWII, taking money away from nearly two million people who are already food insecure. To make matters worse, it’s happening at a time when basic costs for low-income families are going up. Claimants’ struggles will come alongside political risks: in nearly 200 Conservative constituencies, this will hit over a third of working-age families with kids. And it’s not even popular among the wider public.
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