Introduction: defining and understanding welfare conditionality

Before outlining in a little more detail each chapter's specific focus, it is important to consider how welfare conditionality might be precisely defined, to outline the extent to which it has become an accepted part of welfare policy and practice within and beyond the UK, and to consider what its purported purpose may be.

Looking first at issues of definition, Clasen and Clegg (2007) offer a useful starting point. Considering the concept of welfare conditionality in its broadest sense, and exploring how it might be defined and operationalised to enable a comparative consideration of welfare state regime change, Clasen and Clegg identify three ‘levels’, or types, of conditions operating within welfare states which may govern an individual's access to social security. The purpose of their discussions was to offer insights into the qualitative shifts in the relationship between social rights and responsibilities that define the quality of social citizenship in different settings, at different times:

This approach reminds us that very few rights to social benefits and services in contemporary welfare states are in effect ‘unconditional’ and that when operating alone, or in conjunction with one another, conditions of category, circumstance and conduct – as identified by Clasen and Clegg – routinely function to define and limit an individual's right to social security. It is also worth noting at this point that conditionality operating at a fourth level, that of front-line implementation, operationalised by what Lipsky (1980) famously called ‘street level bureaucrats’, may also be significant.