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.