Introduction

Agency refers to the ability to determine one's own daily life (Annesley, 2007) and relates to the capacity for free choice (Gould, 1983; Lister, 2003; Wright, 2012; McNay, 2016) (see Chapter Two). Enlarging women's ability to exercise agency regarding engagement in both unpaid care and paid work is a key aspect of creating a more gender-inclusive citizenship framework, given the importance of enabling women to participate in both unpaid care and paid work (see Chapter Two). Therefore, policies are needed that not only promote the valuing of unpaid care and women's position in the paid labour market but also enable women (and men) to make genuine choices regarding engagement in unpaid care and paid work (Lewis and Giullari, 2005). However, there have been concerns that rather than promoting genuine choice regarding unpaid care and paid work, conditionality may deny mothers the choice to carry out unpaid care and restrict their agency in regard to decisions about their engagement in the paid labour market (Grabham and Smith, 2010; Davies, 2012, 2015; Whitworth and Griggs, 2013; Rafferty and Wiggan, 2017; Millar, 2019). To investigate these concerns and how mothers respond to the compulsion within the Universal Credit regime, this chapter explores the extent to which mothers experience compulsion through being subject to the welfare conditionality within Universal Credit and how they respond to it over time.

This chapter starts by detailing the participants’ work– care choices. It then investigates the extent to which the participants’ Claimant Commitments were negotiated before discussing the participants’ experiences of compulsion over time. Following this, the chapter explores the participants’ views on the compulsion within Universal Credit and then discusses their responses to it. The final section explores the overall impacts of the compulsion on the participants’ agency regarding engagement in unpaid care and paid work.

Participants’ work– care choices

In line with previous research (for example, Thomas and Griffiths, 2006; Coleman and Riley, 2012), the majority of the participants reported that they wanted to undertake parttime paid work. While there was variation in the number of hours the mothers wanted to work, they consistently referred to wanting paid work that fitted in with their caring responsibilities: