The ‘Criminalization’ of Social Security Law: Towards a Punitive Welfare State?
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
| Author | Philip M. Larkin |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2007.00394.x |
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 34, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2007
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 295±320
The `Criminalization' of Social Security Law:
Towards a Punitive Welfare State?
Philip M. Larkin*
The aim of this article is to place certain recent legislative reforms in
the field of social security within the context of the overall development
of the welfare state, and examine to what extent a certain trend is
discernable: namely, whether eligibility for various welfare benefits is
becoming so contingent on socially acceptable behaviour as to make
the welfare system less a means for the relief of poverty, its ostensible
sole purpose, and more akin to an instrument of education, even
punishment, for those who have recourse to social security benefits.
INTRODUCTION
Social security legislation sits at a somewhat strange juncture in the overall
scheme of British law. On the one hand, welfare law is frequently posited by
legislators themselves as a benign entity, which has as its objectives the
efficiency of social security provision and administration,
1
the achievement
of greater economic equality in society for families and individuals,
2
or to
enable those disadvantaged in the labour market to re-enter the world of
295
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9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*School of Law, 28 University Square, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast
BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland
p.m.larkin@qub.ac.uk
The author would like to thank Professor Nick Wikeley from the School of Law,
University of Southampton, and Professors Brice Dickson and John Morison from the
School of Law at Queen's University Belfast, as well as the anonymous independent
referees in this journal for their invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of
this paper.
1Aswith the Social Security Act 1998, which represented the first major legislative
reform to the social security system by the Labour Government of 1997±2001.
2 One example of this being the Tax Credits Act 2002, hailed by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer as `A tax and benefit system that puts families first in the modern world',
recognizing `the very real pressures parents face right up the income scale.' See G.
Brown, 383 H.C. Debs., cols. 586±7 (17 April 2002).
work, as with the recent Welfare Reform Bill.
3
In relation to the upcoming
operation of the latter, the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
has stated that lone parents should not be apprehensive about schemes
designed to help them back into the labour market, and that such persons
`should never be at the receiving end of the noisy propaganda of rightwing
politicians.'
4
Perhaps such pre-enactment political rhetoric is understand-
able, as it is in the interests of legislators to ensure that Acts of Parliament,
particularly in fiscally sensitive areas such as social security law, receive as
wide an acceptance as possible from the taxpaying (and often apolitical)
voting public. What is also unsurprising about New Labour rhetoric on
welfare reform is the desire on the part of a theoretically social democratic
government to show a clear distance between its legislative policies on
welfare, poverty, and citizenship, and those of the pre-1997 `New Right'
administrations. In essence, the attitude of these ideologically driven Con-
servative governments during the 1980s and 1990s towards the notion of a
universal welfare state was one of almost undisguised hostility: as one
commentator has noted, the first Thatcher government was able to launch an
anti-welfare campaign:
. . . by tapping into deep seated resentment of `something for nothing' welfare
beneficiaries, to especial effect when it could be suggested that those in receipt
of the state's generosity were largely `outsiders'.
5
It was due to this combination of determined political will and a societal
environment conducive to reform that the Thatcher and Major governments
of the 1980s and 1990s were able to cut back drastically on non-means-tested
contributory benefits, which were deemed to be badly targeted and carried
no obligation on the recipient to find their own route out of poverty through
gaining paid employment by active participation in the labour market.
6
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3 Government plans in relation to Incapacity Benefit appear to involve the creation of
schemes designed both to encourage and coerce those in receipt of the benefit in
question back into the labour market. `For those less finely tuned to New-Labour
Speak, that translates roughly as a mixture of carrots and sticks to get the work-shy
off benefits' (Economist, 28 January 2006). This positive angle of welfare reform in
this area is also accentuated in the Department for Work and Pension's Green Paper
on the Welfare Reform Bill: DWP, A New Deal For Welfare: Empowering People
to Work (Cm. 6859; 2006) ch. 3, p. 13.
4J.Hutton MP in the Guardian,30January 2007.
5C.Pierson, `Social Policy' in The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain,eds. D.
Marquand and A. Seldon (1996) at 154.
6 The period in question saw a raft of legislative measures which retrenched all forms
of social insurance based benefits, including the Social Security Acts 1988 and
1989, measures which in practice undermined the basis of national insurance based
unemployment benefit. These measures were followed in the 1990s by the Social
Security (Incapacity for Work) Act 1994, and the Jobseekers Act 1995, which
further reduced the significance of social insurance in the United Kingdom social
security system.
ß2007 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2007 Cardiff University Law School
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