Introduction

In the first extract, taken from the Foreword to the 2006 Green Paper on welfare reform in the UK, John Hutton, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, sets out the government's general approach to welfare provision. On the one hand, he suggests that the welfare state should continue to provide support for vulnerable and needy groups within society. On the other, Hutton argues that the welfare system should play a role in bringing excluded groups into the labour market, strengthening Britain's position within the increasingly competitive global economy. In the first part of this chapter I want to discuss the development of New Labour's reforms of the welfare state since it came to power in 1997, highlighting the main elements of these reforms and positioning them within a broader historical context. This provides the introduction to the main part of the chapter, which examines New Labour's approach to poverty and welfare in rural areas.

As is apparent from the second extract above, little research or analysis has been undertaken on the rural impacts of New Labour's welfare policies. While government has claimed that its welfare policies are aimed at disadvantaged groups in all parts of the country and that it is aware of the distinctive dimensions of poverty in rural areas, there exists little evidence of the impacts of welfare reform in rural (and urban) spaces. This evidence gap, together with the government's initial prioritisation of urban forms of poverty and social exclusion, has led to claims that New Labour's anti-poverty and welfare agendas have been insensitive towards the rural dimensions of disadvantage (see CRC, 2006b).