The shape of social security policy, at least since Margaret Thatcher’s Government, has been dominated by a top-down approach. The Labour Government has the opportunity to do things differently by first listening and understanding the challenges the recipients of social security face, argues Ruth Patrick. 

Much has changed since Thatcher’s Britain, but much has also stayed the same. Domestically, throughout my lifetime it has been commonplace to hear politicians promise to reform social security – routinely recast and denigrated as “welfare” – with objectives to cut expenditure and move people on out-of-work benefits into work. Most recently, the 2010-2024 Conservative led administrations embarked on a major programme of welfare retrenchment. This was accompanied, and in some senses enacted, through a parallel process of benefit “simplification” with the introduction of a new working-age benefit, Universal Credit. And now we have Labour in power, who have thus far promised to root out welfare fraud, and get Britain working again.

First introduced in 2013, the rollout of Universal Credit has been dogged by delays in implementation and design issues such as the five week wait for a first payment, the online-first approach, and the implementation of in-work conditionality. Remarkably, the approach to evaluating this new benefit centred on what the Department for Work and Pensions described as a “test and learn” approach: experimenting with key elements of the benefit on individuals, and then seeking to learn lessons from how these tests went.

Testing a key social security benefit on claimants – often vulnerable people – is at best misguided, and at worst cruel.

The “test and learn” approach was emphasised in policy documents and evaluations, and was built into the benefit’s implementations; for example, with small-scale pilots from 2014 in key areas before the wider rollout of the benefit. But testing a key social security benefit on claimants – often vulnerable people – is at best misguided, and at worst cruel.

What was missing from this approach, and what Labour can and must do differently is to actually listen to claimants; to take on board their own needs, preferences and experiences; and to better understand the fabric of their everyday lives. If The Conservatives had ditched “test and learn” in favour of a “listen and learn” approach the Universal Credit story might have been rather different. Rather than a default to monthly payments – for example – policymakers would have understood the importance of having regular injections of cash support when on a very low income, and would have better foreseen the massive problems with leaving people without support for five weeks (it was originally six). Policymakers could have better realised how rolling conditionality into in-work support would impede rather than support in-work progression; and the risks of making the whole payment to one person in the household.

We now have a new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Liz Kendall, and there is a a chance to do things differently. Early signs on this have been mixed, but we have had promising to try and make sure that claimants are treated with dignity and respect. With the new Child Poverty Strategy in development, the Ministerial taskforce have said that they will tour the four nations, listening to parents in poverty across the UK.

It is time for a new approach to social security, one which works with this expertise, and uses it to build a policymaking apparatus that is better capable to meet the needs of us all.

Labour can and must move from a “test and learn” to a “listen and learn” approach on social security; something which will directly lead to better policymaking, and creates the opportunity to incorporate the expertise that comes from lived experiences of social security and poverty in the policymaking process. An early test of whether Labour is willing to actually listen will come when Ministers update on proposals from the last government to replace essential support with the costs of disability with vouchers. The Conservatives’ consultation on this led to a mass of responses from disabled people who worried that their own expertise in how best to manage the additional costs of their impairments was being ignored, and the flagged that being provided with vouchers rather than cash is stigmatising, and comes with an implicit message that disabled people cannot be trusted to manage the support to which they are entitled responsibly.

Labour should listen to people in receipt of social security and learn from what they have to say.

It is time for a new approach to social security, one which works with the expertise of experience, and uses it to build a policymaking apparatus that is better capable to meet the needs of us all. Labour should listen to people in receipt of social security and learn from what they have to say. This is a simple thing to do – and it doesn’t even need to come with an immediate cost to the Exchequer. But it would signal a massive shift in how things have been done in the UK, and so would be quietly radical. We all know how empowering being listened to can be.

As a child of Thatcher, I have only known governments who tell us how things should be on social security. The time for that to change is now. Labour, listen, learn, and then do things differently. It can and must be done.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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