Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Part 1 Setting the scene
- Part 2 Benefits for unemployed people
- Part 3 Benefits for disabled people
- Part 4 Benefits for children and families
- Part 5 Benefits for retirement
- Part 6 Towards a welfare class?
- References and further reading
- Index
6 - Unemployment institutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Part 1 Setting the scene
- Part 2 Benefits for unemployed people
- Part 3 Benefits for disabled people
- Part 4 Benefits for children and families
- Part 5 Benefits for retirement
- Part 6 Towards a welfare class?
- References and further reading
- Index
Summary
Summary
Labour market and social security policies changed radically between 1971 and 1999, in ways that were often explicitly designed to influence the size of the unemployed caseload. Small-scale training and work experience schemes introduced in the 1970s were massively expanded in the 1980s, to provide surrogate employment and reduce the claimant count. For a period, some unemployed claimants were financially encouraged to leave the labour market.
Resources devoted to training were then reduced, while new measures to tighten the eligibility conditions for benefit helped to support the emphasis on flexible job search while also reducing expenditure and claimant numbers. In 1996, with the introduction of Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA), benefit receipt was made conditional on signing and following an agreement. This strategy is now complemented by the Labour government's commitment to offer quality training and work experience, obligatory for some groups, through New Deal welfare to work programmes. These policies appear to have reduced claimant unemployment in the context of a growing economy.
A radical shift in the ratio of means-tested to insurance-based support for unemployed claimants occurred as a result of policy changes and lengthening unemployment. This process was also fuelled by policies to increase rents for tenants in social housing, thereby increasing the Housing Benefit (HB) caseload.
Increased means testing focused policy attention on work incentives which, together with evidence of low pay, led to the introduction of in-work benefits for families in order, to adopt the rhetoric of the current government, ‘to make work pay’.
Labour market and social security policies, and the institutions to design and implement them, altered radically between 1971 and 1999. The process of change was inevitably shaped by a combination of factors in the policy domains – with new perceptions, policy goals and policy models – as well as developments in the labour market, discussed in Chapter 4. An understanding of these changes is important to any assessment of the impact of policy on the numbers of unemployed claimants. For a blow by blow account, the reader is directed to Clasen (1994); here a brief sketch has to suffice.
Government job creation and training
A Conservative government was in power in the early 1970s. Unemployment was still low although, at the time, half a million unemployed seemed high.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Making of a Welfare Class?Benefit Receipt in Britain, pp. 77 - 92Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2000