To avoid a long silence, I just wanted to flag that I won’t be writing any proper posts during the UCU strike action which I’m part of, but I’ll return to regular posts next week from the w/c 19th March (or earlier, if UCU’s demands are met!).
Ironically, sometimes it is a policy’s failures rather than successes that make it difficult to reform.
The Work Capability Assessment (WCA) for out-of-work disability benefits has been a failure by almost any criteria – yet it is still with us, with little prospect of any change soon. One reason is that having seen the WCA unravel, people seem to have lost faith that it is even possible to have a disability assessment that is either popular or deliverable, making the risks of reform seem like a gamble that is not worth taking in the face of an inevitably losing battle.
This is why a vision for a better WCA is so important. In a new Demos report, I therefore describe a clear and realistic vision for a better WCA, based on a four-year research project that includes international comparisons, many focus groups with experts and the public, and a new survey (see here). Central to this vision are two distinct areas for improvement. Continue reading
One of the reasons that the Inequalities blog has been quiet for a little while is that I set up a separate blog to focus on my 2014-17 project on disability, work and the benefits system, called Rethinking Incapacity.
That blog has now closed – but just in case you’re interested in what I was writing, the highlights include:
After a long gap and an intermittent return last year (including a great post by Paolo Brunori), the Inequalities blog is back!
We have a series of posts lined up, including on disability & the benefits system, whether the public believe ‘benefit myths’ and if this matters, whether talking about how benefit claimants are ‘deserving’ only makes things worse, and what the public thinks about health inequalities – as well as the usual takes on the latest public debates and interesting inequalities-related research that catches my eye.
I’m looking forward to resuming the conversation!
Ben
I have just blogged about this over at my other blog, Rethinking Incapacity – you can read the full blog post (with the link to the research articles) here.
Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a major and widely-reported change in British attitudes towards benefit claimants: simply put, we are less positive about benefit claimants than we used to be. More of us think that ‘large numbers falsely claim’ or that ‘many claimants don’t deserve help’, and attitudes have become particularly hostile to unemployment benefit claimants, as has been repeatedly catalogued in the annals of NatCen’s British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey.
But suddenly, there is a sign that this might be changing. Continue reading
In a guest post, Paolo Brunori – an Assistant Professor at the University of Bari, and blogger at Lavoce – summarises his new paper on the perception of inequality of opportunity in Europe, recently published in the Review of Income and Wealth.
When thousands of Egyptians gathered to protest in Tahrir Square in January 2011, many commentators listed rising inequality as one of the main explanations of the unprecedented wave of protests. However, in a recent publication, Paolo Verme (World Bank) has shown that in the years before the beginning of the Arab Spring perceived inequality was increasing in Egypt, but actual inequality – as measured by economists – if anything was falling. What does explain this misperception? What does determine how we perceive inequalities? Continue reading
After being dormant for most of the last two years, the Inequalities blog is starting up again!
It won’t return to its heyday of weekly posts from the US and UK (at least, not yet), but I will be starting to blog periodically about the same issues as always (now with a slightly different name), and we’ll be open to occasional guest posts as well – starting with a post to go up later today from Paolo Brunori.
It’s good to be rejoining the debate 🙂
Ben
According to one commentator in The Times, an underclass of benefit claimants is “now contaminating the life of entire neighbourhoods—which is one of the most insidious aspects of the phenomenon, for neighbours who don’t share those values cannot isolate themselves”. No, this isn’t a contemporary columnist repeating some of the more debatable claims of the programme Benefits Street, ‘where 90 per cent of the residents are on benefits’. Instead, it’s the American commentator Charles Murray on a visit to the UK back in the 1990s. Benefits Street may be a new type of programme, but it taps into an older idea.
Despite this, we have no idea whether high-benefit claim neighbourhoods genuinely do stigmatise benefits less than low-claim neighbourhoods. In a new paper in the Journal of Social Policy (or here), , I try to fill this gap by presenting the results of a specially-commissioned nationally representative survey, which merged-in information about people’s local areas alongside their responses about benefits stigma itself. Continue reading
To (loosely) coincide with my paper on benefits stigma coming out in the Journal of Social Policy, I’ve written a short summary on the LSE Politics and Policy blog. (Long-running readers of the blog will see that this is a developed version of the earlier report that I did with Kate Bell and Declan Gaffney in 2012 – you get bonus points for spotting how the analysis has changed between versions…). I’ve also written a further blog post here on Inequalities, called ‘Are there neighbourhoods where benefit claims aren’t stigmatised?’
It’s been a while since I’ve been regularly posting on the blog, but I’ll also be posting in the coming months on some other work I’ve been doing on benefit myths – so watch this space.
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