It’s poverty, not worklessness

an article by Jonathan Bradshaw, Oleksandr Movshuk and Gwyther Rees (Social Policy Research Unit, University of York, UK) published in Poverty Issue 158 (Autumn 2018)

For the last 20 years there has been a mantra among the UK political classes that work is the best solution to poverty. It was the background to the welfare-to-work New Deal programmes in the 2000s. Since 2010, it has been reinforced with more benefit conditionality and punitive sanctions and it has been used to justify many of the austerity measures: the freezing of working-age benefits, the benefit cap, the two-child policy, cuts to employment and support allowance, the bedroom tax and rent limits in housing benefit. And perhaps it reached its apotheosis (or nadir) in the 2017 Department for Work and Pensions paper Improving Lives: helping workless families. The authors unpick the data to reveal that all these work-related measures have instead contributed to undermining living standards and increasing poverty, and have distracted us from the bigger problem of in-work poverty.

Hazel’s comment
There was I, sitting in the British Library, reading this article and becoming more and more incensed. I must find a copy of the whole article somewhere but when I am angry I cannot do a sensible search!
One cup of tea later and I found it.

Full text (PDF 4pp)

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