Introduction

Universal Credit (UC), which was introduced in 2013 by the UK Conservative–Liberal coalition government, replaced a number of UK means-tested working-age benefits and the tax credits system with a single monthly benefit payment (DWP, 2010a). In principle, it initially received cross-party political support as a benefit reform designed to provide claimants with a smoother transition and enhanced financial incentives into paid work (DWP, 2010b; Kennedy, 2011).

UC benefit was perceived to offer a simplified benefit system to challenge particular forms of welfare ‘dependency’. This chapter considers the ways in which UC has been shaped by the neoliberal turn in welfare states (Humpage, 2014) and the subsequent rise in political and public expectations that recipients should be held personally responsible for, and expected to overcome, their vulnerable circumstances. It further explores the ways in which UC policies aimed at protecting those in vulnerable positions act to ease, circumvent or exacerbate lived experiences of vulnerability.

The first part provides a brief outline of how the key elements within UC reflect recent political enthusiasm for policy strategies that intend to foster individual responsibility and financial independence among benefit claimants. It describes how UC attempts to account for the needs, capabilities and circumstances of UC recipients through various ‘easements’ and in-built additional support measures. These discussions are then critiqued through an exploration of how successive British governments have co-opted long-standing public and political attitudes towards the protection of ‘the vulnerable’, to justify the extension of behavioural conditionality to increasing numbers of UC recipients. It demonstrates that traditional ideas of vulnerability have been abandoned in UC, and explores how this enables ‘easements’ and additional forms of support provided to vulnerable UC recipients to increasingly assume a temporary and highly conditional nature.

The second part draws on data generated in semi-structured interviews with 18 UC recipients, to explore how these forms of additional support in UC currently operate in practice. This section illustrates how UC policy impacts upon the lived experiences of vulnerability in complex and often counterintuitive ways. It builds on earlier discussions, to examine how shifts in behavioural conditionality in UC can act to mediate, circumvent and exacerbate lived experiences of vulnerability.