Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Part 1 Setting the scene
- Part 2 Benefits for unemployed people
- Part 3 Benefits for disabled people
- Part 4 Benefits for children and families
- Part 5 Benefits for retirement
- Part 6 Towards a welfare class?
- References and further reading
- Index
1 - The conundrum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Part 1 Setting the scene
- Part 2 Benefits for unemployed people
- Part 3 Benefits for disabled people
- Part 4 Benefits for children and families
- Part 5 Benefits for retirement
- Part 6 Towards a welfare class?
- References and further reading
- Index
Summary
Summary
More than half of the British population now receives some form of social security benefit and the number of claimants has been rising. This book begins to explain why this is the case by systematically collating existing evidence.
It is important to know why benefit caseloads are increasing in order to determine whether or not public money is being well spent. Such knowledge should be used to guide the process of continual reform that characterises British social security policy.
It is widely accepted that social security expenditure is too high, and that the system of provision creates perverse incentives and varying forms of inappropriate dependency on the state.
Some argue that the social security system fosters the growth of an underclass or welfare class of people who are both economically and socially excluded.
Whether either of the above beliefs can be substantiated by evidence is among the questions addressed in this book.
The volume is structured around a simplified model of the four sets of factors that could affect the size of the benefit caseload: economic, demographic, institutional and ideological.
Benefits for unemployed people, disabled people, children and families and retirement pensioners are considered separately, before comparing and contrasting the different reasons why caseloads have grown.
Why, 50 years after the flowering of the British welfare state, are increasing numbers of people seemingly dependent for their livelihood on cash benefits?
The pattern of growth is evident from Figure 1.1. It records the numbers of people receiving key benefits in 1949/50, close to the origin of the postwar welfare state, and in 1970/71 and 1998/99, the beginning and dates of the period covered by this review. In every case, the number of claimants in 1998/99 far exceeded that in 1949/50. Likewise, caseloads in 1998/997 were all higher than in 1970/71: the number of people receiving insurance-based Unemployment Benefit or Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) grew by 50% and those receiving Income Support (IS) by 436%.
The opening question is not simply rhetorical – it is unlikely that the architects of the welfare state would have contemplated that so many individuals and families would be ‘living off the state’ at the turn of the 21st century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Making of a Welfare Class?Benefit Receipt in Britain, pp. 3 - 20Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2000