Tag Archives: benefits

Has Amber Rudd fixed the DWP’s disability assessments?

Posted on March 5, 2019 by

It’s been a while since a DWP Secretary of State made a major speech on disability assessments – and given the WCA’s continuing failures (not to mention those of PIP), we should be grateful that Amber Rudd has devoted her … Continue reading →

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Further increases in public support for benefit claimants

Posted on July 31, 2018 by

We’ve reached high summer, and this means intense heat, test cricket – and the latest installment of the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, our bible for showing how our attitudes have been changing. As ever, I like to review trends … Continue reading →

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What effect do sanctions & conditionality have on disabled people?

Posted on July 10, 2017 by

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.

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Sharp softening of attitudes to benefit claimants, reveals new data

Posted on June 28, 2017 by

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 … Continue reading →

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Trends in out-of-work benefit claimants in Britain

Posted on June 23, 2015 by

As long-term readers will know, I’m intrigued by people’s beliefs about the benefit system, and their truthfulness or falsity of these beliefs. Later in the summer, I’ll talk about a new aspect of this: people’s perceptions of how many out-of-work benefit claimants exist, … Continue reading →

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Back of the envelope policy-making

Posted on July 31, 2013 by

This post was originally going to be about the pros and cons of two recent UK government policy announcements. The first proposes to force people to wait a week after losing their jobs before claiming JSA (Jobseeker’s Allowance), and the … Continue reading →

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Benefits: Fact and Fiction

Posted on July 16, 2013 by

As part of the International Year of Statistics (by the way, it’s also the International Year of Water Cooperation, and the International Year of Quinoa, so good quinoa recipes in the comments please), Ipsos Mori recently conducted a survey looking … Continue reading →

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‘Infrahumanizing’ benefit claimants

Posted on May 6, 2013 by

I’ve written before about how I think a lot of people’s antipathy towards the benefits system comes from their ideas about the sort of people benefits claimants are. That they are a special, different sort of person that is unworthy of … Continue reading →

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Lying with statistics

Posted on April 18, 2013 by

In the midst of the argument we in the UK are currently having about welfare, it’s worth highlighting one factor that’s standing in the way of honest debate. This is politicians’ routine, wilful abuse of numbers. It’s an old complaint. … Continue reading →

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When are we going to stop banging on about benefits?

Posted on January 22, 2013 by

Does the amount we spend on benefits for the unemployed justify the attention they get? We write a lot about welfare benefits on this blog. They’re an important part of social policy that rarely spends long out of the newspaper … Continue reading →

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