Social security and unemployment

Most commentators on social security provision agree that the protection provided by state benefits serves a number of different purposes. These include the relief or prevention of poverty, the maintenance of income in periods of labour market absence, life course investment to support retirement and the provision of extra resources to support child care or disability costs (see McKay and Rowlingson 1999, Ditch 1999). Within the UK these different purposes have also resulted in the development of different forms of protection, subject to different rules and administrative procedures. Taken as a whole, social security is complex, confusing and contradictory, as the experience of many of the respondents in this research testifies, and we cannot hope to explore all of this complexity here. However, the study was concerned primarily with men's experiences of unemployment or labour market detachment; and the way in which the social security system responds to these issues has a particular history and incorporates a number of key elements of current policy, which are explored in more detail in this chapter.

Current benefit policies on unemployment can be traced back to the nineteenth century and to the Poor Law, the legacy of which remains to some extent still with us over a century and a half later. The concern of the nineteenth-century Poor Law was with pauperism rather than poverty, with the individuals and families who could not provide for themselves.