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To fully understand the effects of COVID-19 on the benefits system, we need to go beyond official poverty statistics currently used by the government, argues Daniel Edmiston. He explains how doing so reveals an increasing depth of poverty, as well as considerable changes in those most affected by it.

The balance between private and public sectors in welfare activity in the UK has been documented by Burchardt (1997) and Smithies (2005) for three time periods; 1979/1980, 1995/1996 and 1999/2000. The existing evidence suggested that a welfare mix has previously been in existence but that the balance had been shifting. This paper explores this phenomenon by updating the existing evidence with a snapshot of the welfare mix in 2007/2008 across five different welfare sectors: Education, Health, Housing, Income Maintenance and Social Security and Personal Social Services. The paper systematically explores who finances, controls and delivers services in each of these five welfare sectors. Over the 29 year period, there has been a gradual increase in the proportion of welfare activity that is privately financed, controlled and delivered, and a gradual decrease in the proportion of welfare activity that is publicly financed, controlled and delivered. The most significant change is the proportion of services that are contracted-out, and the majority of this change generally occurred prior to 1995/96; since then changes have been much more slight and nuanced. Interestingly, the most significant growth in total welfare activity as a proportion of GDP occurred between 1979 and 1996, and Pure Private activity only accounted for part of this.

COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of 'COVID exceptionalism' - with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.

Local state and third sector actors routinely provide support to help people navigate their right to social security and mediate their chequered relationship to it. COVID-19 has not only underlined the significance of these actors in the claims-making process, but also just how vulnerable those working within ‘local ecosystems of support’ are to external shocks and their own internal pressures. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with organisations providing support to benefit claimants and those financially struggling during COVID-19, this paper examines the increasingly situated nature of the claims-making process across four local areas in the United Kingdom. We do so to consider what bearing ‘local ecosystems of support’ have on income adequacy, access and universality across social security systems. Our analysis demonstrates how local state and third sector actors risk amplifying inequalities that at best disadvantage, and at worst altogether exclude, particular social groups from adequate (financial) assistance. Rather than conceiving of social security as a unitary collection of social transfers, we argue that its operation needs to be understood as much more fragmented and contingent. Practitioners exhibit considerable professional autonomy and moral agency in their discretionary practice, arbitrating between competing organisational priorities, local disinvestment, and changing community needs. Our findings offer broader lessons for understanding the contemporary governance of social security across welfare states seeking to responsibilise low-income households through the modernisation of public services, localism, and welfare reforms.

Debates about the withdrawal of crisis social security measures have focused on the financial implications for benefit claimants. Attention is also needed on what this means for welfare support services, explain David Robertshaw and Daniel Edmiston.

The unique challenges that COVID-19 presents have meant a ‘pause’ in overt work-related requirements. Despite this, and the dire job prospects facing many, the majority of the new COVID-19 cohort of benefit claimants who do not have a job are actively looking for work, find Daniel Edmiston, Ben Baumberg Geiger, Lisa Scullion, Jo Ingold and Kate Summers. This questions many of the assumptions that underpin our increasingly conditional social security system and should encourage policymakers to rethink what income and employment support might look like as we move beyond this pandemic.

The UK social security system performs an important role as a creditor and debt collector for many benefit claimants, with more affected by deductions than formal welfare conditionality or sanctions. Deductions, then, are central to understanding low-income life in the UK. With that in mind, this paper draws on a mixed-methods project to explore the policy rationale, administration and effects of benefit deductions at a particular moment of crisis. Through new analysis of statistical releases, I evidence increasing indebtedness and an Inverse Care Law, whereby UK social security performs worst for those who need it most. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the height of the cost-of-living crisis, I also evidence how deductions affect the lives and trajectories of low-income claimants over time. The analysis offered details how deductions weaponize debt, often in ways that financialise benefit claimants and their entitlements that prove counter-productive to the stated policy objectives of deductions: worsening the poverty-debt trap and pushing people (further) away from the labour market.