Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to examine welfare-to-work ‘ethics’ in the UK in the context of the current policy regime of the ‘Big Society’ and the ways that faith-based organisations (FBOs) challenge those ethics towards more progressive conceptions of social justice. In this way the chapter contributes to the volume at large by showing from a broadly defined governmentality perspective how, in certain instances, FBOs work in and with government policy in order to simultaneously subvert those regimes to tackle social injustices in European cities.

Since the Coalition government in the UK came to power in May 2010, David Cameron has embarked on the most radical overhaul of the welfare state since its postwar establishment. The new austerity measures prompted by the financial crisis of 2008-09 have taken as their prime target the public sector, resulting in large-scale redundancies and unemployment (Coote, 2011), while helping legitimatise US-style workfare approaches to unemployment that further restricts eligibility to welfare entitlements and withdraws Jobseeker's Allowance for those who decline a job offer (Helm et al, 2010; DWP, 2011a). On the backdrop of this culture of austerity sails Cameron's plan for a Big Society that claims to remove the bureaucracies of big government and give people the power to control their public services. Faith-based groups are said to play an integral role if the Big Society is to be a success, both as community anchors and representatives, and as service providers (Stunell, 2010; Warsi, 2011).

This revalorisation of faith groups by politicians has led some commentators to view faith-based welfare efforts as willing or unwilling servants of neoliberalism, whose collusion in the logics of the Big Society and workfare functions to discipline the poor and legitimise political-economic restructuring (see Peck and Tickell, 2002; Goode, 2006; Lyon-Callo, 2008; Trudeau and Veronis, 2009). Yet little is known about how FBOs have responded to the Big Society and the arrival of ‘pure’ workfare policies in the UK. The details of these policy changes are still developing and thus it is too early to analyse how such programmes have shaped the practices of faith-based and voluntary organisations. However, much can be learned about the role FBOs play in implementing workfare and the Big Society by examining how FBOs delivered contractual welfare-to-work programmes under the New Labour government.