Introduction

Following several decades of welfare reform, a principle of welfare conditionality is now firmly embedded within the UK welfare state. Indeed, many commentators view the UK as the epitome of a ‘work first’ welfare state in which continued access to collectively provided welfare benefits and services is now directly linked to particular compulsory responsibilities or patterns of behaviour on the part of recipients (Deacon, 1994). More specifically within the contemporary UK social security benefit system welfare conditionality links eligibility to continued receipt of work-related benefits to claimants’ specified job search requirements, attendance at regular work-focused interviews (WFIs) and/or mandatory engagement with welfare to work (WTW) training and support schemes. Failure to undertake such activities leads to the application of harsh benefit sanctions. Since the establishment of UK unemployment benefit in 1911, receipt has always been conditional on claimants signing on at the labour exchange and declaring they were actively seeking work, and, as such, an element of conditionality is not inherently new. However, since the 1980s successive UK governments (of all political persuasions), have placed ever more onerous mandatory requirements on increasing numbers of benefit claimants while simultaneously making individuals subject to tougher benefit sanctions of longer duration for non-compliance. This ongoing intensification of conditionality culminated in the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government introducing an enhanced benefit sanctions regime in 2012. Under this system, punitive sanctions, which range from 100 per cent loss of benefit for a four-week period for a first low-level infringement (such as being late for a WFI) up to three years’ disqualification from benefit for a third, repeat high-level offence (such as refusing to take up an available job), could be applied for non-compliance. These sanctions routinely have profoundly negative impacts on claimants’ lives and have few, if any, tangible positive impacts in enabling individuals into paid employment (Dwyer, 2018a).

Established and consolidated under the New Labour administrations (1997– 2010), the UK's conditional welfare state has been further strengthened and extended under the subsequent Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition (2010– 15) and the current Conservative government.