The latest DWP statistics show ever more sanctions being imposed on claimants. Is there a link with food poverty? Janis Bright comments on Dr David Webster’s latest statistical briefing
People sanctioned by the welfare system are having to ‘rely on the kindness of strangers’, according to the YMCA. The UK’s oldest youth charity cites the sanctions regime introduced in 2012 as the ‘main cause’ of the rise in food banks. To an extent, the All Party Parliamentary Inquiry into hunger agrees, saying sanctions are among the reasons for more people turning to food banks. And then there are widely publicised individual cases like that of John McArthur, Read More
Read our latest blog and briefing paper on the ongoing attempt to ‘rewrite the welfare contract’ for disabled people and the arguments on this controversial topic within UK welfare policy.
Peter Dwyer, Jenny McNeill, and Lisa Scullion introduce our latest briefing paper, on disability and welfare
Welfare conditionality has only relatively recently been extended to disability benefits. The change has brought reclassification of some people as fit for work, alongside increased requirements for many others with impairments to undertake job search and training activities or face harsh benefit sanctions. All of that has made the rights and responsibilities of disabled people a flashpoint of recent welfare reforms.
Read More
The Sustainable Housing & Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU) at the University of Salford has an exciting opportunity for a researcher to support our research activities for a fixed term period and help shape and deliver its growing portfolio of work. A significant component of the role will be to engage, as the University of Salford partner, with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project Welfare Conditionality: Sanctions Support and Behaviour Change.
Read More
We are pleased to announce an opportunity for a funded PhD at the University of Salford.
Exploring the impact of welfare conditionality on Roma migrants in the UK
Supervisor: Dr Lisa Scullion
Successive Governments have sought to extend the use of welfare conditionality, as a defining feature of many recent welfare reforms. At the same time, successive Governments have also increasingly curtailed migrants’ rights to welfare in the UK. Literature that explores welfare to work policy in relation to migrants and ethnicity suggests that discriminatory attitudes may be significant in influencing both higher levels of sanction and lower quality of support for migrant communities.
Read More
In the next of our series of blogs highlighting the project’s briefing papers, Peter Dwyer and Lisa Scullion examine attitudes to migration and conditionality in the UK.
Migration, it seems, is never far from the minds of politicians and the public alike. Only last week the government minister Michael Fallon spoke of certain towns being “under siege, [with] large numbers of migrant workers and people claiming benefits”. Although he has since apologised for his remarks, and accepted he should have used less emotive language, the rights and responsibilities of migrants who enter the UK to live and work and the impact that migration may have remain subject to contentious debate. Read More
Professor Del Roy Fletcher introduces his briefing paper on conditionality and offending:
Offenders have traditionally been subjected to sanctions and support in the criminal justice system to promote behavioural change. This approach is increasingly defining their experience of the benefits system. Successive UK governments have sought to help offenders into work as a means of reducing the high rates of re-offending. This has extended the active welfare state into the criminal justice system and led to a close alignment of welfare and criminal justice policies (see DWP and MOJ Joint Strategic Review of Offender Employment Services). It is in this context that offenders have been targeted for specific behavioural measures and this is the focus of the next in our series of briefing papers. Read More
In the next of our highlighted briefing papers, John Flint explores anti-social behaviour in relation to conditionality.
The riots in English cities in 2011 magnified debates about the extent to which a ‘Broken Britain’ had emerged in which urban disorder, and more mundane but persistent anti-social behaviour, were manifestations of crumbling community fabrics, declining citizen responsibility and a failing criminal justice system. Despite the furious debates following the summer of 2011, tackling anti-social behaviour has not been given the rhetorical or legislative prioritisation by the Coalition that had characterised the New Labour administration and, in particular, the personal commitment of Prime Minister Tony Blair to a ‘Respect Agenda’ which had seen a plethora of new measures and the introduction of the now infamous ASBO. However, as our recently published Briefing Paper: Anti-Social Behaviour discusses, the Coalition Government has recently introduced the new Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.
Read More
Part of our series highlighting the recently published briefing bapers, this blog by Sarah Johnsen examines the current state of conditionality and homelessness.
Earlier this year, the installation of ‘spikes’ to deter rough sleepers from bedding down in the doorway of a luxury London apartment block prompted a social media storm and widespread public outrage. Attempts to make towns and cities less conducive to rough sleeping do in fact have a long history in the UK and overseas. They first hit the headlines in the USA, when a number of metropolitan authorities installed ‘anti-homeless sprinklers’ and seats that were impossible to lie on within public spaces. Here in the UK, the practice of gating off alleyways or removing seating is relatively commonplace in areas deemed to have a rough sleeping or street drinking ‘problem’.
Read More
In the first of a series of blogs highlighting our recently published briefing papers, Beth Watts and Suzanne Fitzpatrick explore the issues surrounding conditionality in social housing.
What is the role of social housing? Alongside other aims – to provide affordable accommodation of a decent standard to households on a low income (see here and here), and to create and maintain ‘mixed’ and ‘sustainable’ communities (see here and here) – some would argue that social housing is increasingly serving the function of ‘disciplining the poor’ via the regulation of tenant behaviour (see Alex Marsh’s blog on this theme here). It is this aspect of social housing policy and practice that is the focus of the next in our series of briefing papers. Read More
