Inequalities

Tag: benefits

  • The elephant in the room of social security reform

    Lots of smart people on the left are thinking about how to create a better social security system – but I’m worried. Most seem to agree that there’s a lot wrong with Universal Credit (UC). The five-week wait, the benefits cap, the two-child limit, the Work Capability Assessment, the generally low levels of payments –…

  • Has Amber Rudd fixed the DWP’s disability assessments?

    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 speech to it today. Her announcement has been mainly positively received so far (at least…

  • Further increases in public support for benefit claimants

    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 in attitudes towards benefit claimants on the blog (see 2017, 2015, 2014 and 2013) – and…

  • What effect do sanctions & conditionality have on disabled people?

    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.

  • Sharp softening of attitudes to benefit claimants, reveals new data

    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…

  • Trends in out-of-work benefit claimants in Britain

    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, and whether they think this has risen or fallen. In preparing for this, though, we…

  • Back of the envelope policy-making

    Back of the envelope policy-making

    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 second to get new immigrants to pay a £1000 levy on entering the country, in…

  • Benefits: Fact and Fiction

    Benefits: Fact and Fiction

    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 at people’s factual beliefs about the UK. I’m sure you’ll all be shocked to hear…

  • ‘Infrahumanizing’ benefit claimants

    ‘Infrahumanizing’ benefit claimants

    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 help. There’s a horrible sort of circularity to it – being the kind of person…

  • Lying with statistics

    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. So old it’s basically a cliché. And this is a big part of the problem.…