Introduction

With clear links to this collection's exploration of the possible emergence of a ‘new behaviourism’, this chapter considers the coalition government's welfare-to-work strategy and explores the valorisation of work in which much of the policy agenda and related discourse are rooted. Welfare-to-work measures encompass a wide range of policies intended to encourage, enable and even compel benefit claimants to seek paid employment. In most recent years, welfare-to-work policies have centred on efforts to ensure that claimants are taking all reasonable steps to return to work, with a notable increase in the use of both incentives and sanctions to promote working behaviour. Indeed, activation measures that utilise welfare conditionality (attaching behavioural conditions to benefit receipt) have been employed with increasing vigour in the UK since Margaret Thatcher's social security reforms in the mid-1980s, and are today in evidence across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development region (Gilbert and Besharov, 2011). Within Britain, a new welfare settlement operates across the political spectrum, which sees all three main parties in broad agreement about the ‘problem’ of ‘welfare dependency’, the policy prescription (benefit conditions and tough sanctions for non-compliance) as well as the hoped-for outcome: higher rates of employment (Deacon and Patrick, 2011).

Given its reliance on attaching behavioural conditions to benefit receipt, the UK welfare-to-work policy project is inevitably focused on seeking to engineer behavioural change. Indeed, ‘welfare-to-work policies … [bring] issues of motivation, choice and behavioural change to the forefront of policy design and public debate’ (Wright, 2012, p 310). Underlying policy pronouncements are clear – and often explicit – moral judgements about which behaviours should be encouraged and promoted (paid work) and which should be discouraged and changed (claiming out-of-work benefits). While politicians often treat this moralising as non-contentious, it is important to critically engage with the arguments underlying welfare-to-work policy and rhetoric. Therefore, this chapter provides a critical analysis of the coalition government's welfare-to-work policies, outlining relevant policy developments before highlighting shortcomings with the approach taken. It is argued that a policy agenda rooted in simplistic and stigmatising binary distinctions between those exhibiting the behaviour the government wishes to promote (workers), and those who apparently still need reforming (‘welfare dependants’), is unlikely to succeed.