Hartley Dean - Dependency Culture

The explosion of a myth

Hartley Dean
and
Peter Taylor-Gooby

First published 1992 by Harvester Wheatsheaf

Published 2013

by Routledge

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1992 Hartley Dean and Peter Taylor-Gooby

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ISBN 13: 978-0-7450-1226-1 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Dean, Hartley
Dependency culture: The explosion of a myth.
I. Title II. Taylor-Gooby, Peter
361.6
ISBN 0-7450-1225-6
0-7450-1226-4 (pbk)

The Victorian Poor Law made no bones about the fact that its primary objective was to punish poor people who asked for state help, so that potential workers only became a charge on the state when they were driven to the workhouse by absolute destitution. The idea that the main object of social security is to regulate the lives of poor people rather than to relieve their poverty fell into disfavour in the post-war heyday of the welfare state. More recently it has returned, as mass unemployment increases the pressure on welfare budgets and the weakness of the British economy calls into question our ability to maintain social spending.

This book arose out of three related concerns. We wished first of all to develop a systematic critique of victim-blaming terms like dependency culture and underclass. Secondly, we were anxious to explore questions of dependency and discipline in relation to the functioning of the British social security system and the relevance of recent social security reforms to current social trends. Thirdly, we hoped to outline an alternative approach to welfare dependency, an approach which would situate the role of state welfare in relation to a broader appreciation of human interdependency.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the debates which have surrounded the use of terms like dependency culture; it advances new arguments concerning the relationship between social security reform and the effects of social change; and it con tributes new theoretical insights to current concerns with dependency, human need and citizenship. It will be of value to students and researchers in the fields of social policy, sociology and related academic disciplines, and also to professionals and practitioners in such fields as social work and welfare rights. The work is firmly grounded in and reports in some detail the findings of a major piece of empirical research undertaken by the authors with the assistance of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council under grant ref. R 00023 1776.

The authors would like to express their sincere appreciation to the Economic and Social Research Council for its generous support. Our thanks are also due to the following agencies for their co-operation in that research: Bellenden Neighbourhood Advice Centre; Canterbury Citizens Advice Bureau; Canterbury Probation Service; The Cyrenians; Isle of Sheppey Citizens Advice Bureau; Department of Social Security; Melting Pot; Southwark Citizens Advice Bureau; Southwark Law Project; Streatham Citizens Advice Bureau. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to the eighty-five social security claimants without whose assistance the research would not have been possible.

We also wish to thank the Open University Press for their kind permission to reproduce in , and we are extremely grateful to them for providing the data. Finally, we should like to extend our appreciation to Clare Grist, our editor at Harvester Wheatsheaf, for the support and attention which she has given to this project.

The views expressed herein are none the less entirely those of the authors, who of course accept full responsibility for any errors of fact, omission or interpretation.

Hartley Dean

Peter Taylor-Gooby

Social welfare is about the regulation of need, about the classification of individual needs into categories and the allocation of different levels of resources to different kinds of need. This book is concerned with social security claimants of working age. Since the inception of state policies dealing with poor people at the end of the feudal era, government has been concerned to ensure that welfare does not deter those who might enter paid employment from doing so. This principle underlay the punitive treatment of sturdy beggars in sixteenth-century Britain, the eighteenth-century Speenhamland wage-subsidy system, the nineteenth-century Poor Law with its principles of less eligibility and denial of citizenship rights to those in receipt of state aid, and the work test associated with twentieth-century social security benefits. It formed a cornerstone of Beveridges regime of national insurance unemployment benefit with means-tested back-up for those without insurance entitlement. The correlative of the States undertaking to ensure adequate benefit for unavoidable interruption of earnings... is enforcement of the citizens obligation to seek and accept all reasonable opportunities of work (Beveridge 1942: 58). The principle remained an important part of policy, but received little attention during the three decades of welfare state expansion after the Second World War. More recently, radical changes in policy have intensified the surveillance of claimants and brought the issue of work incentives to the top of the welfare agenda.