Introduction

From the mid-1980s onwards, the UK social security system has become increasingly residual in nature, with the language of contracts pervading most areas of welfare, as evidenced by the creation of Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) in 1995/96. By the mid-1990s, a crossparty consensus had emerged concerning the need to move away from a passive welfare system based on entitlement to unemployment benefits towards an active welfare model based on responsibilities, encapsulated in the notion of the moral obligations of citizenship. There has been a marked shift away from an approach based upon the duty of the state to support its citizens towards one concerned with the enforcement of a citizen's obligation to participate in the labour market (Harris, 2010). Under the new welfare contractualism (White, 2000; Freedland and King, 2003; Griggs and Bennett, 2009), social rights can be understood as consisting of rights to reasonable access to benefits, rather than unconditional rights to welfare benefits as such. This new welfare contractualism has become a strong area of bipartisan consensus, not least because New Labour under Tony Blair had promoted a ‘work-first’ approach based on the active monitoring of claimants. Work over welfare (Haskins, 2006), or how to enable the non-working poor to enter or re-enter the world of paid employment, has been at the heart of welfare reform changes over the past three decades. Here, we can identify two different views of the causes and cures for welfare dependency of the issue, which gave rise to different sets of policy prescriptions in the 1980s and 1990s:

• • Behavioural deficiencies – economic inactivity, underemployment and long-term unemployment (all different phenomena in labour market terms) are the result of a lack of work ethic and/discipline on the part of the non-working poor. From this perspective, entry-level jobs are available and welfare claimants need a combination of hassle and help to take them up. The issue of unemployment is explained in terms of behavioural deficiencies. The portrayal of the non-working poor as lacking the drive and motivation to take up available jobs means that there is an emphasis on churning people into low-paid jobs or maintaining them in a perpetual state of jobreadiness (Peck, 2001, p 12).