Power/lessness and social security

The contemporary neoliberal state is deeply implicated in the exercise of power (Foucault, Reference Foucault1977; Garland, Reference Garland1996; Leon & Shdaimah, Reference Leon and Shdaimah2012; Rose, Reference Rose, Barry, Osborne and Rose1996; Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2009), but how this plays out in the context of social policies within the UK context has received relatively little attention (Harrison & Sanders, Reference Harrison, Sanders, Harrison and Sanders2014; Jones & Novak, Reference Jones and Novak2001). When power is foregrounded, it is often in analyses of how elites deploy their influence (Hacker & Pierson, Reference Hacker and Pierson2010; Reeves & Friedman, Reference Reeves and Friedman2024; Thelen, Reference Thelen2014). What is often neglected is how those subject to these disciplinary forces experience them on a day-to-day basis (Leon & Shdaimah, Reference Leon and Shdaimah2012; Parsell & Clarke, Reference Parsell and Clarke2019). Two major analyses of power and the contemporary neoliberal state appear in the work of Foucault (1977; Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1978) (see also Lemke, Reference Lemke2001; Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2009). Foucault’s reading of the market and the state under neoliberalism fundamentally shapes his conception of state power. For Foucault and scholars influenced by his approach, the state does not define and monitor market freedom; rather, the market is itself the organising principle underlying the state and society. In this way, the social domain is encoded as an instantiation of the logic of the economic domain, bringing cost-benefit calculations and market criteria into decision-making processes that operate within the household and family. More broadly, this logic recasts liberty as the entrepreneurial and competitive behaviour of economically rational individuals (Reeves & Loopstra, Reference Reeves and Loopstra2017). Here, neoliberal forms of government – or governmentality – feature not only direct intervention but also indirect techniques for leading and controlling individuals, who self-regulate according to state-designed norms, producing internal motivations for conformity (Reference Foucault1977; Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1978). The strategy of rendering subjects and households ‘responsible’ entails localising and individualising responsibility for social risks, such as poverty, transforming social risks into a problem of self-care. Under neoliberalism, as the choice of any particular action is construed as the expression of free will, the consequences of the action are borne by the subject alone. The withdrawal of the welfare state leads less to the state losing powers of control and can instead be read as a reorganisation of government techniques, shifting the regulatory competence of the state onto ‘responsible’ and ‘rational’ individuals (Lemke, Reference Lemke2001, pp. 201–202). Seen through this lens, the benefit cap is an example of an indirect technique for leading and controlling individuals without at the same time being responsible for them, and it is a specifically neoliberal policy tool because its framing is one of choice: economically rational individuals can, if they wish, analyse the housing market and move to cheaper properties. Under this premise, whether they choose to move or not is, at least in part, an expression of their free will.

Where Foucault’s analysis emphasises disciplinary intervention, Wacquant’s (Reference Wacquant2009, Reference Wacquant2010) conception of state power centres on a punitive approach. Wacquant draws attention to the expansion and exultation of the penal sector from the mid-1970s and the colonisation of the welfare sector by the panoptic and punitive logic characteristic of penal bureaucracy. These political and social changes are, Wacquant argues, a ruling-class response aiming to ‘redefine the perimeter and missions of Leviathan’ (Reference Wacquant2010) with a view to establishing a new economic regime based on capital hypermobility and labour flexibility and controlling the social consequences of the insecurity generated by neoliberalism (Koch & Reeves, Reference Koch and Reeves2021). The contemporary neoliberal state thus manifests as a ‘centaur state’, featuring a ‘liberal head mounted on an authoritarian body’ (Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2009, p. 43). Wacquant’s work is especially important in fleshing out the inequalities in how neoliberalism is enacted across contemporary regimes; drawing a strong contrast between the punitive, authoritarian (and often heavily criminalised) approach meted out to those facing poverty and the much more ameliorative and liberal treatment of both businesses and those higher up the socio-economic spectrum.

These conceptual frames are pertinent to policies like the benefit cap, which routinely suggest a need for affected individuals to change their behaviours (Millar & Bennett, Reference Millar and Bennett2017). Here, cutting benefits is not just about making savings but rather about changing the financial repercussions of making what are presented as the wrong choices: not working (or working enough), or living in expensive housing. The benefit cap here is a form of governmentality: a manifestation of the state’s attempts to remake decision-making processes about where and how people live. With its emphasis on choice, alongside its markedly punitive implications and authoritarian characteristics, the benefit cap can be seen as a distinctly neoliberal (as opposed to a liberal) policy. Is the benefit cap in part a question of power: who holds power – the individual, the state or, in fact, the market – and how is power exercised when the welfare state withdraws? Before exploring these themes further, we summarise the benefit cap and its evolution over time.

The benefit cap

The UK’s benefit cap was announced in the October 2010 Spending Review and rolled out gradually during 2013. It sets a maximum amount that a working-age family can receive in state support, including housing benefit, if no one in the household is working or if total earnings are low (less than the equivalent of 16 hours per week at the UK’s minimum wage).

The stated aims of the policy were to increase incentives to work, to introduce greater fairness between those on out-of-work benefits and those in employment, and to make financial savings and reduce welfare dependency (Kennedy et al., Reference Kennedy, Wilson, Apostolova and Keen2016). In keeping with the intention that ‘workless households will no longer receive more in benefits than the average working family receives in pay,’ the cap was initially set in line with median earnings after tax and national insurance contributions for working households (DWP, 2012a). This gave a total of £500 per week for a family or £26,000 per year, with a lower cap of £350 per week set for a single person (ibid). The level of the cap was reduced to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere in November 2016, breaking the link between the cap and average earnings (Kennedy et al., Reference Kennedy, Wilson, Apostolova and Keen2016). From 2016 to 2023, the cap remained fixed in nominal terms, which meant its real term value reduced year-on-year. In April 2023, the cap was increased in line with inflation for the first time since its introduction, reaching £25,323 in London and £22,020 elsewhere. The cap does not apply equally across the UK, with devolved governments in both Northern Ireland and Scotland using their powers to mitigate the cap so that no one in these nations is affected by it. This means that while the benefit cap is a UK Government policy, its implementation and the salience of the experiences outlined in this article are especially relevant for England and Wales. They do, though, have much wider national and international relevance to those interested in the relationship between state power and individual choice.

The cap affects all state support, including housing costs. In the UK, private housing costs are set by market forces in the absence of state regulation such as rent controls. A comparatively unregulated housing market has seen rents rising rapidly, driven by a steep decline in the availability of affordable housing (ONS, 2025). This leaves those facing high rents especially vulnerable to the benefit cap.

In addition, those already at greater risk of poverty are more likely to face the benefit cap.

The vast majority of capped households – 82% in August 2025 – have children, with larger families inevitably disproportionately affected (DWP, 2025). Almost seven in ten (68 per cent) of all capped households are single-parent households. Most have young children: 59 per cent of capped single parents have a child under five and 27 per cent a child under two (DWP, 2025). While households in receipt of disability benefits are exempt from the cap, there is no exemption for households not otherwise expected to work under work-related conditionality rules, for example, lone parents with a very young child. The cap, therefore, adds an additional element of conditionality for those whose level of need brings them within the reach of the cap.

Behavioural change was proposed as a response to being capped in the government’s impact assessment of the policy:

References to claimants having ‘options to consider’ imply that it is within the power of people subject to the policy to either escape the cap entirely or make up for the shortfall in income. All evidence generated to date shows that the government’s main option put forward for escaping the cap – and the key behaviour change it is trying to achieve – of moving into paid work is not proving effective (Griggs et al., Reference Griggs, Jones and Piggot2023; Reeves et al., Reference Reeves, Fransham, Patrick, Reader and Stewart2024). The net effect of lowering the cap in 2016 had almost no impact on employment rates, with most people remaining subject to the cap month-to-month (Reeves et al., Reference Reeves, Fransham, Patrick, Reader and Stewart2024).

While policymakers have repeatedly emphasised the work incentive aspect of the cap, promoting moves to cheaper housing was also a key ambition from the start. A government-commissioned IPSOS Mori survey was reported as showing ‘strong public support for the benefit cap policy’, with two-thirds of respondents agreeing that households should be expected to move to a cheaper property (DWP, 2014). It is this aspect of the cap which we want to interrogate, but first we briefly set out the methods used in this research.

Methods: walking alongside capped families

This article reports on findings from a four-year mixed-methods study examining the impact of the benefit cap and two-child limit on families with three or more children. This major programme combined quasi-experimental quantitative methods with qualitative longitudinal research to explore how the policy ambitions for both policies mapped onto their impact, looking at outcomes including poverty, employment, maternal mental health and fertility decision making (see Patrick et al., Reference Patrick2023). This article shares evidence from the qualitative longitudinal component, which featured four waves of interviews with families affected by either or both policies. Forty-five families took part in the study, twenty-five of whom were affected by the benefit cap. The following table sets out the demographic characteristics of these twenty-five families.

Interviews took place in London and Yorkshire, with recruitment supported by letters sent out to potential participants on our behalf by local authorities. A purposive approach to sampling ensured we captured a wide range of circumstances. The first wave of interviews took place between April and November 2021, the second wave between January and July 2022, the third wave between September 2022 and January 2023 and the fourth wave between November 2023 and January 2024. The collision of the first wave interviews with the Covid-19 pandemic meant that all had to be conducted by phone. For subsequent interviews, we gave participants the option of face-to-face or telephone. All interviews were anonymised, and participants were given aliases (many chosen by participants themselves). Data has been coded thematically, with an interrogation of the data both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, as well as exploring the interaction between the two. The research received ethical approval by the lead institution’s ethics committee and was underpinned by an ethics of care and reciprocity. We actively signposted participants to additional support where appropriate and sent notecards and updates during key points in the study. All participants received a voucher as a thank you for taking part, and they were also kept informed about the research and given opportunities to take part in its dissemination (for further information on the methodology, see Patrick et al., Reference Patrick2023).

Significantly, housing was not a key focus from the outset but emerged as important during our thematic analysis. In the subsequent analysis, we home in on experiences of housing over time, centring the experiences of three families. These families have been selected because their experiences illuminate key themes identified as common across the sample. Most of the capped families we spoke to were struggling with inadequate and insecure housing and were being charged high rents for substandard accommodation.

Capped and trapped? Experiences of the benefit cap over time

The impossibility of moving to a cheaper accommodation to escape the benefit cap was ubiquitous among the whole sample. During the fieldwork, not a single participant escaped the cap by moving. Living in inadequate housing, whether in terms of poor quality, overcrowding or both, was also prevalent. Only seven of the participants described their housing as adequate for their families. Consistently, and across our sample, parents spoke of the financial hardship caused by the benefit cap to their family and the harm this did to themselves, their children and their mental health.

Looking across the sample, most of our participants stayed in their accommodation across the duration of our fieldwork, spanning a total of almost three years. Of the six families that did move during this period, some were occasioned by eviction notices, others were out of choice. However, most of the families interviewed were trying to move. For many, this was motivated by an aspiration to either find cheaper or more suitable accommodation, or very often, both. Efforts to move from private rented accommodation to social housing proved impossible for all but one of the participants. Many had no hope of moving due to extremely long waiting lists for social housing. There was very little variation in the experiences of the sample by location, although participants living in London were more likely to report overcrowding. We now explore the housing journeys of three parents in our sample, turning first to Lucy.

Discussion: the lived experience of powerlessness

The austerity reforms of the Conservative-led Governments between 2010 and 2024 deployed state control to change the behaviour of people in receipt of social security benefits, resulting in further imbalances as to who in society is subject to state intrusion and social control (Harrison & Sanders, Reference Harrison, Sanders, Harrison and Sanders2014). Commenting on the US, but with equal relevance to the UK, Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2009) has argued that within neoliberal regimes, it is the poorest whose behaviour is routinely subject to state intervention, much of which is punitive in its nature. We witness this in the UK, where policies including a rapid escalation and intensification of work-related welfare conditionality, alongside changes to benefits including the two-child limit and benefit cap, disproportionately hit the poorest, and are justified with arguments about the importance of supporting families [read families in poverty] to do the right thing (Patrick et al., Reference Patrick2023; Wright, Reference Wright2023). Significantly, the shape and contours of what that ‘right thing’ looks like are dictated from above, but then presented as commonsense and widely circulated in both political and media narratives (Garrett, Reference Garrett2015; Jensen & Tyler, Reference Jensen and Tyler2015).

In 2025, the UK Government announced the removal of the two-child limit, the sister policy to the benefit cap, as part of its ten-year Child Poverty Strategy (HM Government, 2025). By contrast, the benefit cap remains in place. This makes this paper especially timely, given that it explores how the benefit cap is experienced, and how this departs from the underpinning logic so often used to defend it (see also Fransham et al., Reference Frasnsham, Andersen, Patrick, Reeves and Stewart2024). Our paper uncovers the lived experience of the benefit cap, and in the accounts of Lucy, Bushra and Kalima, we see how state power shows up in their lives. These narratives, generated across time and place, illustrate the ways in which decisions made in the halls of Westminster are experienced in the less grandiose setting of the living room and the kitchen table. We reveal how efforts to foster ‘rational’ decision making and ‘better choices’ are felt by those directly affected. These everyday accounts demonstrate how the imposition of these economic logics knowingly ascribes parents like Lucy, Bushra and Kalima with a power they simply do not have. The government may want families subject to the benefit cap to enter work or to move to cheaper housing, but these choices seem far removed from the realities faced by these families. Instead, we witness a muscular state, shifting responsibility for social risks into the domain for which the individual is responsible and punishing people from failing to initiate changes which are simply not possible for them to make, often due to broader market constraints and structural conditions (see Patrick & Jensen, Reference Patrick and Jensen2025).

Lived realities of powerlessness and significantly constrained choice within the housing market for households on a low income means that the benefit cap serves only to reduce options further, while leaving affected families in extreme hardship. The parents we spoke to routinely said it was impossible to find cheaper properties where they lived. This corresponds with quantitative analysis of housing rental data from across the UK, which found that in most regions there were not enough affordable properties available to allow even one in ten capped recipients to move, and in many areas there were no affordable properties at all (see Fransham et al., Reference Frasnsham, Andersen, Patrick, Reeves and Stewart2024). The exercise of state power to change behaviour in line with market principles in a context in which there are no alternatives is ultimately – and we would argue inevitably – punitive rather than enabling (Koch & Reeves, Reference Koch and Reeves2021). As we have seen in the data, a landlord can simply evict a tenant if they complain about the quality of their housing, and tenants are almost entirely powerless against rises in the rent they are expected to pay, rises which push them further into the benefit cap and leave them with even less income to try and get by. There is the prospect of a small but significant change here, however, with the UK Government’s 2025 Renter Rights Act making ‘no-fault evictions’ unlawful from May 2026 (Reed, Reference Reed2025). Notably, this legislation is a reminder of the power the state does hold to intervene in housing markets when and if it so chooses, a power which it chooses to exercise only very rarely.

Lucy, Bushra and Kalima were all living in sub-standard housing, facing daily problems caused by dangerous mould, rodent infestations and inadequate and outdated heating systems. There is clear and robust evidence of housing as a social determinant of health (see Bentley et al., 2025), and it is well-rehearsed that poor health negatively impacts employment outcomes (Pinna Pintor et al., Reference Pinna Pintor, Fumagalli and Suhrcke2024). Ironically, then, capped households are very often living in housing that will harm both their health and their employment prospects, and yet are being advised by the government to enter paid employment, or work more hours, to escape the cap. This logic is flawed and callous, with the operation of the cap shifting blame onto capped individuals while simultaneously obscuring the power (and, arguably, responsibility) the state holds both to protect people from poverty and to ensure they have access to adequate housing.

In terms of state power, it is not only the national government that exerts control over individual lives. There is a complex intersect with devolved and localised decision-making processes which can variously act to either deepen the constraint faced by capped families, or – in some cases – provide some partial amelioration (Safety Nets, 2025). Significant here are the varying ways in which local authorities have utilised Discretionary Housing Payments to make up the shortfall caused by the benefit cap, although this is often made conditional on various behaviour changes or provided only on a short-term basis (Hays & Dobson, Reference Hays and Hobson2024). Both the Northern Ireland Assembly and Scottish Government fully mitigate the benefit cap, and this creates a differential policy landscape for families in poverty, which would merit further analysis and exploration (Safety Nets, 2025).

The local is also important with regards to the economic context which highly differentiated and heavily localised housing markets create, especially as regards housing affordability and the level of income lost in different areas because of the cap (Fransham et al., Reference Frasnsham, Andersen, Patrick, Reeves and Stewart2024). Official government statistics show the disproportionate risk that those living in more expensive housing markets face of being capped; this risk is much higher in local authorities in London and the south-east of England (DWP, 2025). Although there is some stock of lower-cost housing in high-cost localised housing markets, this is at a level insufficient for all households to escape the cap, contradicting what is routinely suggested by those who defend the policy. Analysis of private housing rental data by Fransham et al. (Reference Frasnsham, Andersen, Patrick, Reeves and Stewart2024) found that even if all capped families were to move to the cheapest available properties in their local housing market area, 44 per cent would still have incomes below that required to meet their basic needs for heating, food and clothing.

We would propose that recent UK Governments have, perhaps deliberately, presented a policy frame which completely ignores the realities of being subject to the benefit cap. The frame used by governments in their attempts to defend the benefit cap intentionally misrepresents the differential power held by the state, private rental market and individual claimant in ways that further broaden ideological objectives of withdrawing ‘welfare’ while suggesting that being capped is a result of failings by individual claimants, rather than with wider socioeconomic systems.

Looking at the benefit cap through a lens of power/lessness elucidates the organisation of state powers of regulation and control under contemporary neoliberalism, while also reminding us of the choices states can make with the power bestowed on them, choices that will shape the lives of their citizens (Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2009). With the UK’s benefit cap, we see a state which has been willing to use its power to further commodify housing and labour, and which has subjected those who experience the cap to extreme poverty and hardship while seeking to transfer responsibility for these outcomes onto the individual (see Patrick et al., Reference Patrick2023). The fact that this has been done within a rubric of encouraging people to make the right ‘choices’ feels especially malign, and it is remarkable that this has remained effective, insofar as garnering continued public support (Chakelian, Reference Chakelian2021). It also shows the broader successes of the state in wielding power over how narratives around ‘welfare’ and individual responsibility are presented and understood by ordinary citizens; the dominance of individualism and the circulation of a ‘commonsense’ that crowds out the space for alternative, more solidaristic understandings to emerge (see Dean, Reference Dean2010; Jensen & Tyler, Reference Jensen and Tyler2015).

In sum, then, our empirical evidence undermines a central message used by governments to justify the benefit cap: namely, the suggestion that capped households are choosing to live in expensive housing at state expense. The situation that capped households face should be framed in terms of structural constraints rather than ‘active’ choices. Doing so helps pull out the contradictions in the way the benefit cap is discussed and presented to the public. But, we must also mitigate against the risk that this then gives the structural constraints a passive character. Instead, we would suggest that the focus should be upon the differential exercise of power by particular actors. First, the operation of power by the state in the imposition of policies that are known to cause harm; the replacement of needs-based entitlements with inadequate support; and the deceptive and false framing of policies and the lives of those they will affect. Second, the operation of market power by landlords who push up rents, do not uphold basic housing standards, and, to date, have been able to threaten and carry out evictions. Third, the relative powerlessness of capped tenants, who can, in some circumstances, manage to realise what is often only partial positive changes, but only with huge perseverance and luck on their side, and drawing heavily on what is a very constrained agency (Wright, Reference Wright2023). Contrary to the popular political narrative, individuals in poverty are routinely relatively powerless to change their situations and instead experience state-imposed (arguably state-designed) hardship. The collision of a lived reality of relative powerlessness with a policy presentation of choices is both deliberate and problematic, and should be widely and routinely challenged, along with the very existence and continuation of the cap itself.

Table 1.

Demographic characteristics of our sample (N = 25)

Table 1. Long description

The table titled Demographic characteristics of 25 families presents data on the number of participants categorized by different characteristics. It includes rows for the number of children, relationship status, gender, location, and ethnicity. The number of children ranges from 3 to 8, with the highest number of participants having 4 children (10 participants) and the lowest having 7 or 8 children (1 participant each). Relationship status shows 21 single participants and 4 partnered participants. Gender distribution includes 22 females and 3 males. Location data indicates 11 participants from Yorkshire and 14 from London. Ethnicity categories include Arabic (1 participant), Bangladeshi (3 participants), Black African (6 participants), Black Caribbean (1 participant), Pakistani (1 participant), and White (13 participants).