‘Change’ was the leitmotif of both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat campaigns in the general election of May 2010. The Conservatives urged the electorate to ‘vote for change’ and to sign up to a ‘contract for change’ (Conservative Party, 2010e), while the Liberal Democrats promised ‘change that works for you’ (Liberal Democrats, 2010). In the field of welfare reform, however, the opposition parties offered not change, but more of the same. As Lister and Bennett have noted, the Conservatives’ Work Programme, which was to become a central feature of the Coalition agreement between the two parties, did not ‘break out of the policy paradigm established by Labour’, but rather took it ‘further and faster in what has become a process of policy leapfrog’ (2010, p 102).

Television viewers were presented with the rhetorical equivalent of this policy leapfrog during the third of the prime ministerial debates. In this, Gordon Brown declared, ‘No life on the dole. That's my policy. We’ve got to get people off unemployment benefit and they’re going to be forced to work if they’ve been on benefit for a period of time.’ For his part, David Cameron promised that the Conservatives would ‘do everything we can to help’ people willing to accept work or training but that those who refused ‘should lose [their] entitlement to benefits for up to three years’. In direct response, Nick Clegg claimed that ‘we actually all agree with that. We agree that benefits should be conditioned [sic], we all agree that benefits shouldn't be just dished out for free if people refuse to take up work’ (BBC News, 2010a).

The ‘Sturm und Drang’ of electioneering is not, of course, conducive to a measured debate about the details of policy. Nor does this level of agreement offer any guarantee that the measures in question will have the effects envisaged. On the contrary, it makes it even more important that they be subject to independent scrutiny and analysis.

There are, then, three questions that need to be addressed in this chapter. First, what are the central features of the welfare-to-work programmes that were developed by New Labour and will now be expanded and intensified by the Coalition government? Second, what explains the apparent consensus around these programmes?

Chapter One discusses some of the ways in which Britain's welfare regime differs from that of the United States. These differences are important, but they have not prevented what Robert Walker (1998) has termed the “Americanisation” of the British welfare debate. Indeed there is now an extensive literature on the impact of American ideas upon New Labour thinking on welfare reform, especially its welfare-to-work programmes (Theodore and Peck, 1998; White, 1998; King and Wickham-Jones, 1999). More than anything else, this Americanisation has served to heighten New Labour's preoccupation with the problem of welfare dependency. It has meant that the British debate is less dominated by economic considerations than it would otherwise have been and more concerned with issues of individual responsibility and personal behaviour. In this way the American influence has enhanced and sustained a moralism that the New Labour government shares with its Conservative predecessors, but which distinguishes it from previous Labour governments – and indeed from social democratic governments in continental Europe (Deacon, 2000).

It follows from this that there are now important commonalities between the British and American approaches to welfare reform. They have both been formulated in response to conservative critiques of welfare, and both seek to reach an accommodation with aspects of those critiques. In consequence, the central features of welfare reform in both countries have been an emphasis upon the obligations rather than the rights of welfare claimants, the introduction of work requirements, and the attempt to ‘make work pay’. Both approaches have been influenced strongly by the evidence of so-called dynamic analyses of welfare and incomes, and both have sought to address popular anxieties about welfare. Most importantly, the two approaches share a common perception of the purpose of welfare reform, and draw upon and articulate similar understandings of human nature and of the relationship between welfare and human behaviour (Deacon, 2002). It is these similarities that make it reasonable to talk of policy transfer between the two countries, despite the different institutional and cultural contexts within which those policies operate.

There is, however, one significant difference between the objectives of welfare reform in Britain and the US. This is the commitment that New Labour has made to the immediate reduction and eventual elimination of child poverty.

This note discusses how rights and responsibilities may be balanced in the context of the three themes which have been central to New Labour’s approach to date.

The idea of a ‘Third Way’ which encompasses and reconciles policies and approaches previously regarded as antagonistic (Blair, 1998). In the case of welfare this involves a recognition that there is a need for both a broader redistribution of income and for policies which are focused upon and demand more of the long-term poor. The work of Robert Walker, John Hills and others on ‘the dynamics of poverty’ has fundamentally changed our understanding of the nature of poverty and deprivation. Their analysis of longitudinal data has demonstrated that it is not a problem of poverty but of different forms of poverties which have different causes and require different policies. In particular they have identified the trajectories through which people move in and out of poverty and the events and personal characteristics which make them more likely to experience poverty (Hills, 1998; Walker and Park, 1998). Tackling these will require a greater honesty and candour about the role of behaviour in social pathology than was shown in academic and political debates for much of the post-war years. At the same time it is important to heed Philip Selznick’s warning of the dangers of a ‘selective concern’ with ‘personal virtues, personal morality’ and consequent neglect of communal responsibilities. As he emphasises, “personal responsibility is most likely to flourish when there is genuine opportunity to participate in communal life. These conditions require substantial investment by the community and its institutions” (Selznick, 1998, p 62).

The idea of social exclusion as a dynamic process. The recognition that poverty is not a static condition and that the poor are not homogeneous does not in itself resolve arguments over causation. It would be only something of a caricature to distinguish between an ‘Old Labour’ view of the poor as excluded by external structures and processes and a New Right view of the poor as excluded by their behaviour and culture. Effective policies cannot be based upon either of these simple models.

Welfare is central to any discussion of the role of the state. On the most narrow of definitions it represents over half of public expenditure, while social security alone accounts for more than one third. This means that social policy is at the forefront of debates about what are appropriate and sustainable levels of public spending, borrowing and taxation. In recent years, however, the argument as to what should constitute the boundaries of the state has been given a new focus and a new intensity by the emergence of the related concepts of behavioural dependency and the underclass.

The point at issue here is the extent to which state benefits and services may exacerbate the very problems they are supposed to alleviate. The payment of more generous unemployment benefits inevitably reduces the pressures upon those who receive them to seek work or to accept whatever jobs are available. Similarly, the provision of improved access to housing and enhanced income support for one parent families must make the position of particularly the young single mother less onerous than in earlier years. There is now widespread concern that such changes have made dependency upon the state a more attractive and a more practicable alternative to self-reliance. It is also argued that any lessening of the stigma which was formerly suffered by those in receipt of welfare must lead to a corresponding reduction in the social status of those who continue to support themselves by their own efforts. The result, in the words of a former Secretary of State for Social Services, is the growth of a ‘dependency culture’ in which ‘people act in bizarre ways because they are responding to perverse incentives’.