A 'kinder' Britain? New survey data reveals shifting attitudes towards benefit claimants
The latest round of the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS), recently published by NatCen, has revealed that the proportion of people who believe that most people claiming unemployment benefit are ‘fiddling’ (claiming fraudulently) is at its lowest level since the survey question was first asked in 1986. This sudden drop – from 35% in 2014 to 22% in 2016 – suggests a dramatic shift in public attitudes towards benefit claimants in the UK. But the cause is difficult to trace.
The result of welfare reform?
Some might take this as evidence that the welfare reforms introduced by the UK Coalition Government in 2012 are working, by ensuring that those who claim benefits really do need them. These reforms introduced the new system of Universal Credit to replace a range of different benefits, and increased the number of conditions which potential claimants have to meet to be eligible for it. In order to qualify for Universal Credit due to unemployment, potential claimants now have to provide sufficient evidence that they have been searching for work and have applied to vacancies. Those claiming long-term unemployment support are often forced to join some form of mandatory Work Programme to continue qualifying for benefits. Failure to meet these conditions can lead to financial sanctions (Wright and Stewart, 2016). Advocates of welfare conditionality may try to claim this shift in public opinion as evidence of the success of increased welfare conditionality: by making benefits harder to claim, one could argue that benefit fraud is reduced, ensuring that welfare spending is targeted on those who truly need it.
The Corbyn effect?
However, recent evidence suggests that public attitudes may be driven not by specific policy reforms so much as political discourse. O’Grady (2017) has examined speeches made in the House of Commons on welfare, from the 1980s through to 2015, and found that shifts in the way politicians speak about welfare, and about the deservingness of claimants, tend to occur before changes in public opinion. The effect of the Labour Party changing its rhetoric on welfare, as in 1997 when Tony Blair embraced a rhetoric about ‘rights and responsibilities’ as part of an initial shift towards welfare conditionality, was particularly significant in shaping public attitudes about benefits. If we believe this explanation, then we might link the softening of public attitudes about benefit claimants to the ‘Corbyn effect’, and Labour’s leftwards shift under Corbyn’s leadership since 2015.
How much can one question tell us?
Survey findings have their limitations. The decline in the proportion of people agreeing with a particular statement about perceived level of benefit fraud does not give us a comprehensive understanding of public attitudes towards welfare. This shift in attitudes may be driven by a wider trend of growing public disenchantment with the policy of austerity, which the BSAS survey data also found.
The relationship between public attitudes, political discourse and policy design is complex. In addition, the media and its (often negative) representations of benefit claimants play an important role in shaping public opinion. Few people will directly read or listen to speeches made by politicians in the House of Commons, but the Daily Mail website averages almost 15 million visits daily (Newsworks, 2016), and the controversial documentary series Benefits Street drew more ratings than any other Channel 4 show in broadcast in 2013 (The Guardian, 2014). The shift in public attitudes revealed by the BSAS data may already be reflected in changing representations of benefit claimants in the media, with recent coverage in many news sources of administrative problems in the roll-out of Universal Credit and the devastating consequences for some claimants.
Conclusion
Public perceptions that 22% of unemployment benefits are claimed fraudulently is still very high, and well above official estimates. The Office for National Statistics calculated that in 2016 only 2% of total benefit expenditure was overpaid, and some of this was due to administrative error, not just fraudulent claims. This is especially problematic due to the negative impact that such public perceptions have on benefit claimants themselves. Baumberg (2016) reports that 34% of benefit claimants report that they have felt stigmatised, either personally or through the judgements of others, for claiming benefits, with over a quarter admitting that this stigma actually makes them less likely to claim the benefit to which they are entitled. And the BSAS results show that the public are still more likely to judge people harshly for making fraudulent benefit claims than for tax avoidance.
NatCen published the most recent BSAS results under the title ‘A kind-hearted but not soft-hearted country’. The ambiguity of this title seems accurate. Public perceptions towards welfare claimants may be softening, but the feeling of stigmatisation felt by many claimants is still a concern, especially if it deters needy people from claiming the financial support to which they are entitled.
References
Baumberg, B. (2016). ‘The stigma of claiming benefits: a quantitative study’. Journal of Social Policy, 45(2), pp. 181-199.
British Social Attitudes Survey, (2017). 34th Report. [online]. Available at: http://natcen.ac.uk/our-research/research/british-social-attitudes/
Collier, H. (2014). ‘Channel 4’s Benefit Street Claims 4.3 million viewers’. The Guardian. [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/07/tvratings-channel4
O’Grady, T. (2017). How politicians created, rather than reacted to, negative public opinion on benefits. [Blog] LSE British Politics and Policy. Available at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/public-opinion-towards-welfare/
Newsworks (2016). Daily Mail Circulation Figures. [online]. Available at: http://www.newsworks.org.uk/Daily-Mail
Office for National Statistics, (2016). Fraud and Error in the Benefit System. [online]. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fraud-and-error-in-the-benefit-system-financial-year-201516-estimates.
Wright, S., and Stewart, A. (2016). ‘First Wave Findings: Jobseekers’, ESRC Welfare Conditionality Project. [online]. Available at: http://www.welfareconditionality.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WelCond-findings-jobseekers-May16.pdf.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect any editorial policy.
About the Author
Holly Metcalf is a graduate student reading for the MSc in Comparative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. She has a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.