620377

research-article2015
CSP0010.1177/0261018315620377Critical Social PolicyPantazis

Critical
Social
Policy

Article

Policies and discourses of poverty

during a time of recession and
austerity

Christina Pantazis
University of Bristol, England

Abstract
This article introduces this themed issue which challenges government
policies and discourses using evidence from the UK 2012 Poverty and
Social Exclusion Study. Policies and discourses prioritising the role of
individual deficiencies and highlighting the structural problems of the
welfare state in poverty causation are nothing new. However, they re-
emerged vigorously in the UK following the 2007–8 global financial crisis
and ensuing economic recession. The articles forming this themed issue
seek to challenge in different ways this prevailing discourse. This intro-
ductory article draws upon Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to
be’ (‘WPR’) approach to examine the ways in which poverty was prob-
lematised by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government
(2010–15). It argues that this problematisation silenced structural pro-
cesses associated with the government’s commitment to neo-liberalism,
resulting in devastating, socially harmful consequences.

Key words
poverty, recession austerity, social harm

Corresponding author:
Christina Pantazis, School for Policy Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, University of Bristol,
8 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TZ, England.
Email: c.pantazis@bristol.ac.uk

Critical Social Policy 2016, Vol. 36(1): 3–20

© The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0261018315620377 csp.sagepub.com
4 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 36(1)

Background

The 2007–8 global financial crisis plunged the UK into the deepest recession
since the 1950s, whose effects are still being felt eight years on. Growing lev-
els of unemployment, particularly among the low-skilled and least educated,
as well as the young, combined with a deterioration in the level of out-of-
work benefits (Muriel and Sibjeta, 2009), and wage freezes or cuts for those in
employment, saw falling living standards for large sections of the population.
Despite the recession bringing ‘the role of market failure and the business
cycle in shaping economic demand, unemployment and poverty very much
to the fore’ (Wiggan, 2012: 392), it was paradoxical that the Conservative–
Liberal Democrat Coalition government, which came to power in May 2010,
prioritised individual explanations for poverty.
The Coalition government drew upon well-trodden discourses, framed in
terms of the ‘Broken Society’, focusing upon individual motivations, behav-
iour and pathology, and familiar critiques of the welfare state and depen-
dency. On the one hand, government rhetoric sought to portray individuals,
including those previously regarded as ‘deserving’ of social security support
as ‘shirkers’ (in contrast to ‘strivers’), ‘lazy’ (in contrast to ‘hard-working’),
and ‘profligate’ (in contrast to ‘provident’), and responsible, in different ways,
for bringing poverty on themselves and their families. On the other hand,
the structural deficiencies of the benefits system were highlighted as encour-
aging dependency and, ultimately, leading to poverty. Reminiscent of the
scroungerphobia period of the late 1970s (Golding and Middleton, 1982),
such representations were replicated in the media, with often sensational sto-
ries about benefit claimants cheating the system (Briant et al., 2011; Disabil-
ity Rights UK, 2012).
The government’s rhetoric sat oddly with its commitment to tackling
relative poverty, yet such narratives played a crucial role in the framing of
debates about the need for welfare reform. Within a few weeks of the Conser-
vative Party forming a coalition with its junior Liberal Democrat Party part-
ners, it secured an agreement on major policies and outlined its commitment
to ‘sweeping reform of welfare’ (HM Government, 2010a: 7), made possible
because both party leaders (David Cameron for the Conservatives and Nick
Clegg for the Liberal Democrats) had a similar perspective on state interven-
tion. Thus, argues Hayton (2014), the Coalition was a ‘tale of two liberalisms’
with both parties sharing a neo-liberal perspective on both the economy and
the state. Together with the ‘ideological re-working’ of the financial crisis as
a fiscal crisis (Clarke and Newman, 2012) the welfare state became subject to
severe austerity cuts, taking the UK ‘in a new direction, rolling back the state
to a level of intervention, below that in the United States’ (Taylor-Gooby and
Stoker, 2011: 14). Subsequent research revealed that these cuts were borne
predominantly by the poorest groups and communities (see Hastings et al.,
Pantazis 5

2015), and especially by women who form a higher proportion of the public
sector workforce and who, additionally, make more use of public services and
rely more heavily on social security benefits (Women’s Budget Group, 2010;
Fawcett Society, 2012).
This article introduces this themed issue challenging government poli-
cies and discourses using the UK 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion Study. It
aims to provide evidence from the largest and most robust study on people’s
living standards during the recession to challenge the policies and rhetoric
that have prioritised individualised explanations, and foreclosed discussion
of broader structural processes calling into question the UK’s entrenchment
in neo-liberalism. This article uses Bacchi’s (2009, 2012) ‘what is the prob-
lem represented to be’ (‘WPR’) approach to policy analysis: firstly, to review
critical key policy themes, and specific policies intended to address poverty;
secondly, to identify key assumptions in discourses about the causes of pov-
erty underpinning policy; and thirdly, to assess the socially harmful impacts
of this policy framing. The article ends with details of the UK 2012 Poverty
and Social Exclusion Study and introduces the six articles.

Approach and method

Bacchi’s (2009, 2012) WPR approach seeks to unravel the characterisation

of ‘problems’ that become the object of government policy. At its core is the
endeavour to excavate the ‘implicit’ representations of what is considered to
be the ‘problem’ requiring policy intervention. It differs from conventional
policy analyses by facilitating a move away from seeing ‘problems’ to think-
ing about the characterisation of those problems. As such it identifies govern-
ment policy not as an effort to solve ‘problems’, but instead government as
involved in the production of ‘problems’ (Bacchi, 2012: 22). It is linked to a
broader theoretical agenda that focuses upon understanding how governance
takes place, providing insights into how particular representations of prob-
lems affect wider society in terms of how people are governed. Critics might
argue that such a focus on ‘representation’ can lose sight of the very troubling
lives that some individuals or social groups lead. However, this is to misun-
derstand Bacchi’s approach; indeed one of its benefits is to allow for a critical
appraisal of the ways in which government policies and the representations
of particular problems, in specific contexts, impact on people’s lived realities.
Bacchi identifies six questions that facilitate the uncovering of this rep-
resentation: (i) ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ in policy or propos-
als; (ii) what presuppositions or assumptions underpin the representation of
the ‘problem’?; (iii) how has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?;
(iv) what is left unproblematic in this ‘problem’ of representation?; (v) what
effects are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?; (vi) how/where
6 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 36(1)

has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and

defended? And how can it be questioned, disrupted and replaced? Whilst the
first question is the starting point of the analysis and is focused on identifying
what the government is attempting to change, the remaining questions seek to
understand the rationales and assumptions supporting the policies, potential
silences, and the effects that are likely to accompany the changes.
In employing Bacchi’s framework, the article makes use of discourse anal-
ysis to examine the speeches made by key architects of welfare policy in the
Coalition government. It analyses speeches delivered, during the period 2006
to 2015, by Conservative politicians Iain Duncan Smith (Secretary of State for
Work and Pensions), David Cameron (Prime Minister) and George Osborne
(Chancellor of the Exchequer) in terms of key terms such as poverty, welfare,
benefits, dependency and work in order to identify ‘problem’ representations
and their implicit assumptions. Other aspects of Bacchi’s framework (ques-
tions three to six) also informed the analysis to a lesser degree. The next sec-
tion of the article unpacks the ‘problem’ representations in relation to welfare
policies under the Coalition government.

‘Problem’ representations

The Coalition government promised to make sweeping changes to the wel-

fare state not seen since the post-war reforms inspired by William Beveridge.
Three ‘problem’ representations in recent policies are identified as key: work-
lessness; ‘more eligibility’; and insufficient nudge. A common theme emerges
throughout this discussion; namely parallels with dominant nineteenth cen-
tury characterisations of poverty and welfare, and their links to the nineteenth
century Poor Law legislation.

Worklessness
Worklessness was identified as an endemic problem by the Coalition govern-
ment and responsible for growing levels of poverty (DWP, 2010). In its State of
the Nation Report: Poverty, Worklessness and Welfare Dependency in the UK, it drew
attention to the growing number of claimants of out-of-work benefits and their
duration on benefits (HM Government, 2010b). Worklessness – the failure to
engage in paid work in the labour market – was regarded as symptomatic
of welfare dependency. Whilst Levitas (2005) has previously drawn attention
to the implicit gendered nature of the concept for ignoring the unpaid work
undertaken by carers (mostly women looking after children or older relatives)
and their consequent dependency on their (usually male) partners, the subjects
of Coalition government policy were instead long-term claimants of Jobseek-
er’s Allowance, lone parents and disabled people – people ‘at the very margins
of our society, left behind for too long’ (Duncan Smith, 2014a).
Pantazis 7

The promotion of paid work as a central means to tackle poverty became

a key policy plank under the Coalition government with the introduction of
its flagship Work Programme, launched in June 2011. The Work Programme
can be seen as a further extension of previous activation policies including the
Labour government’s New Deal programmes, reflecting the enduring influence
of neo-liberalism on employment policies (Newman, 2011). However it should
be noted that the link between ‘work activity’ and welfare was first embedded
in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act which abolished outdoor relief to able-
bodied paupers and, in its place, restricted relief to those entering the work-
house (Jones and Novak, 1999). From there paupers received shelter and food,
in exchange for hard and repetitive work, and were subject to intense regulation.
Today’s claimants under the Work Programme are mandated to engage
in ‘work-related activity’ – activity that ‘makes it more likely that the person
will obtain or remain in work or be able to do so’ (CPAG, 2011). It involves
actively searching for paid work, attending interviews with advisors, apply-
ing for jobs, and accepting all reasonable job offers, whilst it can also include
‘work trials’ lasting up to 30 days. In warning that ‘that lifestyle choice is
going to come to an end’ (George Osborne cited in The Guardian, 2010) and
that it was putting ‘the final nail in the coffin for the old “something for noth-
ing” culture’ (Duncan Smith, 2014b), punitive sanctions, involving the with-
drawal of benefit (‘three months for the first time, six months for the second
and three years for the third’ (Duncan Smith, 2014b)), were introduced for
benefit claimants failing to abide by these conditions. The government stood
by this commitment: between May 2010 and December 2014 there were
3,544,642 Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance
sanctions; roughly 500,000 more than the total number of sanctions made
over the previous decade (DWP, 2015a).1
The ratcheting up of conditionality, with accompanying penalties, was
clearly intended to reinforce the message that work claimants were consid-
ered workshy (Dunn, 2013). The Coalition assumed that jobs existed if only
people could be bothered to actively look for them – even in the midst of a
recession – which contrasted with the previous Labour government’s attempt
to take a more active state response to reduce unemployment by introducing
the Future Jobs Fund. Yet, Newman (2011) writes that deindustrialisation,
residential sorting and discrimination all impact on whether people are able
to take up work. This may go some way towards explaining that, despite an
investment of £5 billion on the flagship Work Programme, 90% of Employ-
ment and Support Allowance claimants had failed to secure paid work (Public
Accounts Committee, 2014).

More eligibility
Although the principle of ‘less eligibility’ was established in social security
policy following the 1834 Poor Law legislation (Jones and Novak, 1999), it
8 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 36(1)

was re-invoked as a central plank of the Coalition government’s welfare reforms.

The nineteenth century legislation ensured that the condition of the ‘able-bod-
ied pauper’ on relief was less ‘eligible’ – in terms of being less desirable – than
the condition of the poorest labourer. ‘Less eligibility’ suggested that the pauper
should gain less relief than a labourer received from their derisory wages, but
also ensured that the receipt of relief (through the workhouse) was itself stigma-
tised in order to make paid work the more attractive option. The belief in the
erosion of the principle of less eligibility, and its replacement with ‘more eligi-
bility’, was a significant policy pre-occupation for the Coalition government. In
his Hugo Young Lecture, where Cameron (2009) set out his views to fix Britain
as a broken society, the problems with ‘more eligibility’ were explained:

when you are paid more not to work than to work, when you are better off leaving
your children than nurturing them, when our welfare system tells young girls
that having children before finding the security of work and a loving relationship
means a home and cash now, whereas doing the opposite means a long wait for a
home and less cash later … is it any wonder our society is broken?

‘More eligibility’ was frequently questioned on the grounds of fairness. For

example, Osborne (2012) stated: ‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift
worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up
at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life of bene-
fits?’ In this representation fairness is understood in relation to the deserving,
hard-working taxpayer, who is juxtaposed to the undeserving welfare benefit
recipient. This is some distance away from the idea of fairness that is about the
welfare state’s ability to meet people’s needs with dignity and respect.
Significant changes were made to ensure that the welfare state once again
reflected the Victorian-inspired sentiments embedded in the principle of ‘less
eligibility’. The Welfare Reform Act 2012 included an annual benefit cap of
£26,000 per family (to reflect the size of average earnings) reducing the over-
all income of families, a cap on Housing Benefit restricting where people can
live, a limit to the contributory version of Employment and Support Allowance
restricting financial support to just one year for those with chronic health con-
ditions, and a cut to Housing Benefit for ‘under-occupying’ tenants (so-called
‘bedroom tax’) requiring people to relocate to smaller accommodation or make
up the financial shortfall in order to carry on living in their homes. According to
Duncan Smith (2014b) as a result of these changes ‘families on benefits face the
same choices about where they live and what they can afford as everyone else’.

Insufficient nudge
The failure of the social security system to provide appropriate economic sig-
nals to claimants featured prominently in characterisations of the welfare state
Pantazis 9

by the Coalition government. Underpinning such a characterisation is the

idea, which began to flourish in the late eighteenth century with the birth of
Adam Smith’s economic liberalism, of the economically rational individual
who seeks material self-gain. In the nineteenth century these debates chimed
with common concerns among the ruling classes and elite about the generos-
ity of outdoor relief and child allowances and their supposed encouragement
of idleness and large families.
Under the Coalition similar ‘problem representations’ prevailed about the
failure of the welfare state to ensure that it remained economically worthwhile
for individuals to take up paid work than receive social security benefits.
Influenced by contemporary theories of nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008)
which stress the importance of ‘choice architecture’, the deliberate attempt to
shape the context in which people make their choices, the social security sys-
tem was presented as providing weak nudges for benefit claimants to change
their behaviour and actively seek paid work.
The Coalition government’s flagship Universal Credit introduced by the
Welfare Reform Act 2012 was the key mechanism by which claimants could
learn to ‘make better choices’. Introduced in the North West of England
in 2013, Universal Credit was intended by government to have been rolled
out nationally during 2015. Although Universal Credit, which replaced six
means-tested benefits and tax credits for working adults with one single
benefit, is chiefly intended to simplify the confusion of benefits which had
been introduced in a piecemeal fashion over years, other stated goals include
improving work incentives. According to Duncan Smith (2014b): ‘Universal
Credit … [ensures] that at each and every hour, work always pays. Already, as
we roll it out, the behavioural effect of this reform is striking, with those on
Universal Credit spending twice as long looking for work, better understand-
ing their requirements, and working harder to meet them.’ Whilst Universal
Credit seeks to provide higher incentives for individuals to take up paid work,
it leaves untouched the problems of job supply and low wages associated with
Britain’s economy which serve to constrain people’s choices.

Discourses of poverty

This next part of the article seeks to uncover the ‘assumptions’, the ‘taken-
for-granted’ ideas, and the ‘deep-seated cultural values’ (Bacchi, 2009: 5)
that underpin the representation of ‘problems’ discussed above. Two promi-
nent discourses used by the Coalition government to explain the existence of
poverty are discussed: first, an individualising discourse that highlights the
role of personal deficits; and, second, a structural discourse that focuses on
social security deficits. As with the previous discussion, such discourses of
poverty are reminiscent of ideas popularised in the nineteenth century, which
10 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 36(1)

also reappeared at points in the twentieth century, particularly during the

Thatcher period of the 1980s and early 1990s, which coincided with the UK’s
shift away from collectivism to individualism.

Poverty, personal deficits and personal

transformation (or simply underclass behavioural
explanations?)
An individualising discourse centred on personal failures, problems and
pathology was prominent among the speeches made by Duncan Smith and
Cameron especially. References to ‘life change’ and ‘transformation’ appeared
several times in the speeches of Duncan Smith, perhaps as a reflection of his
Catholic faith. According to him ‘“[r]eform” … is in reality about transfor-
mation and life change. Improving people’s lives through the choices they
make. A journey from dependence to independence’ (Duncan Smith, 2014c).
In this context, independence entails ending ‘that vicious circle – be it crime,
addiction, debt’ to reduce people’s dependence on the state (Duncan Smith,
2014b).
Ideas about personal recovery were intimately linked to his notion of ‘social
recovery’ (Duncan Smith, 2014b), drawing heavily on two reports (Breakdown
Britain, 2006 and Breakthrough Britain, 2007) produced by the Centre for
Social Justice which Duncan Smith set up in 2004, and which had identified
five pathways into poverty: family breakdown, educational failure, personal
debt, addiction and worklessness. Together the two reports became central to
the Coalition government’s understanding of the drivers of poverty, as well as
forming the analysis of ‘Broken Britain’ which appeared in Conservative Party
documents and statements. As Cameron (2006) explained: ‘because for most
people, material poverty is a consequence of … family breakdown, drug and
alcohol addiction, unemployment, poor education’. Whilst these are known
correlates with (rather than causes of) poverty, other potential factors such as
low pay, discrimination and lack of affordable or available childcare did not
feature in his assessment of ‘Broken Britain’.
Lister and Bennett’s (2010: 92) critical appraisal of the Conservative Par-
ty’s transformation as progressive champions of the poor suggests that ‘over-
all the Broken Britain/society narrative [of Cameron’s Conservative Party]
represents a behavioural and cultural analysis which attributes the under-
lying causes of poverty to the failings of individuals rather than to socio-
economic factors’. It is a perspective that is part and parcel of neo-liberal
economics, where poverty and unemployment are reconstituted as forms of
‘personal failure and poor social behaviour’ as argued by Wiggan (2012: 394).
Thus, alongside Duncan Smith’s usage of the benign terms of ‘life change’
and ‘transformation’, he also readily invokes the terminology of underclass
popularised by Charles Murray in the 1990s who claimed to have identified
Pantazis 11

the presence of an underclass, as a differentiated poor group, with a distinct

set of cultural values concerning worklessness, illegitimacy and criminality
(see Murray, 1990). For example, Duncan Smith (2011) remarked that ‘too
many British people were on benefits living unproductive lives … A grow-
ing underclass was establishing itself, shut away, dysfunctional and too often
violent.’ Despite their popularity with politicians, there is a long line of aca-
demic research that has discredited underclass and related culture of poverty
explanations; this includes research by Shildrick et al. (2012) that found no
evidence for the transmission of inter-generational worklessness typified in
such perspectives.

Poverty, welfare state deficits and re-imagining the

state
Alongside discourses that individualise the causes of poverty, sits a structural
discourse that focuses not on the structural causes related to the economy such
as low pay or under-employment or social factors associated with employer
discrimination, but instead on the structural deficiencies of the social secu-
rity system. Thus, according to Duncan Smith (2014b) ‘the dispossession we
were seeing [is] the product of a dysfunctional welfare system that made life
difficult for people at every turn’. ‘Welfare dysfunctionality’ was expressed
by Duncan Smith (2011) in terms of ‘nurturing’ worklessness by providing
insufficient economic nudges, and encouraging abuse by long-term sickness
claimants who sought to avoid work. At the forefront of this discourse was
a concern about the spiralling costs of working-age benefits. As Cameron
(2012) stated: ‘it’s in the third component of welfare – working-age benefits
– that the really big arguments for the future lie. Partly because this accounts
for a huge amount of money – around £84 billion a year.’ What Cameron
neglected to mention was the growing amount spent on public pensions;
whereas working-age benefits as a proportion of public spending declined
from 7.76% in 1997 to 7.38% in 2010, spending on pensions rose from
5.96% to 7.76%.2 What this suggests is that within the current discourse
of ‘welfare dysfunctionality’, the pre-occupation lies with the undeserving
working-age poor – including now the sick ‘non-abled’ poor – rather than
with other categories of people, such as pensioners, who for now continue to
be seen as deserving.
Furthermore, the Coalition’s discourse critiquing the welfare state sat
within a broader narrative about the enlarged role of government in pov-
erty alleviation. Rather than it being a vehicle for tackling poverty, Cameron
(2009) alleged that the role of government:

has reached a point where it is now inhibiting, not advancing the progressive
aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general well-being
12 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 36(1)

… Indeed there is a worrying paradox that because of its effect on personal and
social responsibility, the recent growth of the state has promoted not social
solidarity, but selfishness and individualism.

Being cautious to create distance from Thatcherism’s assault on the state and
her claim that there is ‘no such thing as society’ (Thatcher, 1987), Cameron
(2009) explained that this was not simply a matter of rolling back, but a re-
configuration of how the state should respond to other actors. In setting out
his agenda for the Big Society to mend the Broken Society, Cameron (2009)
stated: ‘this means a new role for the state: actively helping to create the big
society; directly agitating for, catalysing and galvanising social renewal …
In the fight against poverty, inequality, social breakdown and injustice I do
want to move from state action to social action.’
Yet, as Hayton (2014: 8) remarks, Cameron’s Big Society agenda only
exists as a coherent set of ideas to the extent that it implies a retreat of the
state from social provision, for ‘it suggests that the state must be “rolled back”
to create the conditions for society to be rolled forward’. Thus, the re-making
of society for Cameron, where other actors (such as charities and the voluntary
sector) take over from state services, by definition requires the state to roll
back from social provision. This, of course, is a position that sits comfortably
with ‘a textbook model of a liberal market economy with a residual state,
something that has been resisted even in the heyday of Thatcherism’ (Grim-
shaw and Rubery, 2012: 107). Thus, in this respect the Coalition government
went much further than Thatcher ever did to ‘roll back’ and fragment the
social state.

Socially harmful policies and discourses

One of the values of Bacchi’s (2009) framework is the recognition of the

importance of understanding the effects of ‘problem’ representations in terms
of who benefits and who is harmed. Her approach draws attention to three
types of effects: discursive effects; subjectification effects; and lived effects,
which together with zemiological perspectives developed by Hillyard et al.
(2004) and Pemberton (2015), can help illuminate the social harms that these
representations can have.
The specific ways poverty and welfare interventions were problematised
by the Coalition government, and the deep-seated assumptions behind their
representations, sought to re-position the liberal market economy as the main
mechanism for meeting individual and collective well-being. The discursive
effects of this problem representation were firstly to present the market as a
panacea to poverty, and secondly to shift attention away from the (in)adequacies
of the benefits system in meeting people’s needs. This representation belies
Pantazis 13

the harsh reality that the market is the root cause of poverty for many, in terms
of not only the problem of in-work poverty, but also under-employment and
job insecurity (Shildrick et al., 2012). Thus, over the period of the Coalition
government in-work poverty grew, outstripping the numbers not in work by
2012/13 (MacInnes et al., 2014), whilst the numbers on zero hours contracts
rose from 168,000 in 2010 to 697,000 by December 2014 (ONS, 2015).
Moreover, the discursive representation of ‘worklessness’, even as the economy
experienced a double-dip recession, foreclosed policy options regarding job
creation, improving access to good quality and affordable childcare and tack-
ling employer discrimination. Although it is not possible to assess the actual
effects of these silences in policy, Bacchi’s approach helps ensure that they are
highlighted. The discursive impacts of social security payments as allegedly
over-generous, as a result of the erosion of the principle of less eligibility,
ignores evidence calling into question the adequacy of benefits to meet con-
temporary expectations of decent standards of living. The Minimum Income
Standard study shows that the income from benefits for families with children
is just a mere 57% of the income deemed as necessary by the population at
large to avoid poverty (Hirsch, 2015).
Bacchi’s (2009) subjectification effects describe the ways in which people
make sense of who they are, and how they relate to others, in the context
of policies and the discourses underpinning them. Drawing upon Foucault’s
‘dividing practices’, is the recognition that problem representations often
have the effect of creating divisions between different population groups
which can have useful governmental purposes such as encouraging forms of
behaviour deemed to be desirable. The use of binaries in the Coalition govern-
ment’s rhetoric between, on the one hand, deserving hard-working taxpayers
who ‘want to get on’ and, on the other, the undeserving ‘shirkers’ who want
‘something for nothing’ can be seen in this light. In the process of creating a
‘them’ and ‘us’ approach, the long-standing demarcations between the deserv-
ing poor (e.g. older people, lone parents, people with disabilities) and the
undeserving poor have been diminishing as lone parents and people with dis-
abilities find themselves increasingly joining the ranks of less eligible, unde-
serving, able-bodied working-age men.
Bacchi sees these subjectification effects potentially influencing not only
the subjects of policy (such as benefit recipients) and how they see themselves,
but also how they are seen by others and wider society. This description chimes
with Lister’s (2004) discussion about the ‘Othering’ of poverty and people liv-
ing in poverty and is supported by a number of studies (Shildrick and Mac-
Donald, 2013; Pemberton et al., this issue). Shildrick and MacDonald (2013),
for example, found people trapped in ‘the low pay-no job cycle’ wanting to
disclaim their poverty, despite experiencing real hardship, in order to create
distance from the perceived ‘Other’ and to avoid the shame and stigma that
went hand-in-hand with living in poverty. However, the ways in which
14 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 36(1)

subjectification effects have been played out in the wider society are less clear-
cut. Thus, despite the longer-term decline in support for welfare found in the
British Social Attitudes survey, data relating to the Coalition government period
suggests a slightly higher proportion of the public believes cutting welfare
benefits would damage too many people’s lives (46% in 2014 compared to
42% in 2010) (Taylor-Gooby and Taylor, 2015). Over this period support for
benefits for people with disabilities (a group singled out by the Coalition gov-
ernment’s policies) actually rose from 53% to 60%, not decreasing as might
have been expected. On the other hand, the proportion of the public agreeing
that ‘most unemployed people could really get a job if they wanted one’ rose
from 54% to 59% (Taylor-Gooby and Taylor, 2015). The inconsistency in
the data would at least suggest that the impact of the government’s rhetoric
on public opinion has been muted, perhaps as a result of more people having
direct or indirect experience of the welfare changes introduced.
So what has been the material impact of the ‘problem’ representations dis-
cussed? The Coalition government claimed to have improved living standards
since it came into power in 2010 (Osborne, 2015a), yet the evidence demon-
strates that poverty increased during this period, but particularly since April
2013 when the main changes to social security came into effect. De Agostini
et al. (2015: 5) say that in terms of income distribution ‘the poorest groups
[lost] most as a proportion of their incomes’, whilst Aldridge et al. (2015)
estimate that in just two years (from 2013/14 to 2014/15) the increase in the
numbers of people in poverty was as high as 800,000. Some policies have been
particularly socially harmful, not only in terms of causing poverty, but also
for undermining social relations. For example, nearly 60,000 households have
had their benefits capped (DWP, 2015b). The government’s own research
revealed that capped claimants were struggling to afford basic necessities,
with many forced to skip meals and become further indebted (DWP, 2014).
Providing evidence of the potential ‘social cleansing’ effect of the policy, an
investigation by the Independent (2015) identified that over the previous three
years councils had moved roughly 500 families out of London every week as a
result of welfare reform and soaring rents.
In the remaining six articles, forming the themed issue, the scale, nature
and distributional impact of poverty during the Coalition years are discussed
further using the findings from the UK 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion
Study.

The UK 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE)

Study

The 2012-PSE study is the largest and most authoritative study on living stan-
dards and poverty in the UK (poverty.ac.uk). Funded by the Economic and Social
Pantazis 15

Research Council,3 the study involves several components, including a national

household survey to capture people’s views on living standards and the neces-
sities of life (the Necessities of Life survey) a national survey involving interviews
with all adults in the household about their living conditions and environment
(the Living Standards survey), and four complementary qualitative projects on
perceptions of poverty and exclusion, life events and experiences, family support
and reciprocity, and community engagement. The study builds upon decades of
survey poverty research including Townsend’s (1979) 1968–69 Poverty in the UK
study, which pioneered the relative deprivation theory of poverty and defined
poverty as having insufficient resources to participate in customary behaviour,
as well as the consensual approach developed by Mack and Lansley in the 1983
and 1990 Breadline Britain surveys. These surveys built on Townsend’s work, but
also departed in significant ways, by incorporating lay perspectives in the capture
of customary behaviour; thus, consensual studies seek to identify people falling
below what the public agrees is a minimum standard of living (Mack and Lansley,
1985; Gordon and Pantazis, 1997). In 1999, with social exclusion more promi-
nent on political and policy agendas, a new Poverty and Social Exclusion survey
was undertaken incorporating these approaches, but expanding in other ways to
include dimensions of social exclusion (Pantazis et al., 2006). The UK 2012-PSE
is the latest and most comprehensive of these studies, providing evidence on UK
people’s living conditions, circumstances and experiences during the recession
and as the Coalition government’s policies began to take effect.
Using the main poverty measure from the 2012-PSE Living Standards
survey (hereafter 2012 PSE survey), 22% of the UK adult population was liv-
ing in poverty in 2012, meaning they experienced multiple deprivation and
had a low income, whilst a further 10% were vulnerable to poverty, meaning
they were not yet multiply deprived but had a low income and so were at
risk of falling into poverty in the longer term (Gordon, 2014). Significantly,
the number of people identified as falling below minimum living standards
doubled since 1983, with more children in 2012 leading impoverished and
restricted lives compared to their peers in 1999 (Gordon, 2014).
In this themed issue each of the articles provides evidence from the 2012-
PSE study which challenges the contemporary individualising discourses on
poverty that are driving policy and dominating wider societal debate. Simon
Pemberton and his colleagues give a voice to people experiencing the harsh reali-
ties of living in poverty. Drawing upon the qualitative project, Life on a Low
Income in Austere Times, they reveal how informants made sense of behavioural
explanations in terms of understanding their own trajectories in and out of pov-
erty and how they negotiated and resisted prevalent societal stigmatising and
disrespectful perceptions. The articles by Gill Main and Jonathan Bradshaw and
by Esther Dermott and Marco Pomati draw upon 2012 PSE survey evidence to
examine contemporary debates about child and family poverty. Main and Bradshaw
confront Coalition government and current Conservative government thinking
16 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 36(1)

about the measurement of poverty. They reveal the distance between rhetoric
on family poverty and the experience of hardship by children and their parents;
they demonstrate the continuing protective role that parents play, through sac-
rificing their own needs, in order to ensure that their children do not go with-
out. Dermott and Pomati’s article addresses the discourses surrounding lone
parents, and specifically lone mothers, and uses survey evidence to challenge
ideas about inadequate parenting and mis-management of financial resources.
Nick Bailey’s article, using PSE survey data, challenges the government’s mis-
guided binary divide in political rhetoric between ‘hard-working families’ and
‘welfare scroungers’, and the policy emphasis on supply-side measures to solve
‘worklessness’. He presents evidence showing that paid work is not a panacea to
poverty; for too many, their work is characterised by low pay and the experience
of social exclusion (rather than inclusion). Mike Tomlinson’s article, based on
the PSE survey, takes issue with the construction of ‘dependency’ in relation to
Northern Ireland and argues that the long-term impact of the Northern Irish
conflict on poverty, paid work and mental health, particularly in terms of the
distribution effects on different religious communities, has been overlooked.
The final article, by Gabi Kent, examines how a community project in North-
ern Ireland, involving digital storytelling, enabled local Catholic and Protestant
communities to engage with each other to challenge the dominant ‘poverty–
shame nexus’ in public and political discourses.
Such accounts are of critical importance as the Conservative government,
elected to power in May 2015, continues with the policy trajectory of the
previous Coalition government, with Osborne’s (2015b) announcement to
reduce social security spending by another £12 billion and involving further
lowering the welfare cap and reducing working and child tax credits for work-
ing families. The indications are that the overall effect of tax, tax credit and
benefit changes will have a regressive impact with the poorest losing out yet
again (Elming et al., 2015).

Funding
This research received funding from Economic and Social Research Council
Grant RES-060-25-0052.

Notes
1. Author’s own calculations based on Tables 1.1 and 2.1 (DWP, 2015b). Data
for Jobseeker’s Allowance sanctions applies to the period from April 2000 to
December 2014. Data for Employment and Support Allowance sanctions applies
to the period from October 2008 to December 2014.
2. ukpublicspending.co.uk, ‘Social Protection’ [http://www.ukpublicspend-
ing.co.uk/spending_chart_1900_2016UKp_XXc1li111tcn_40t00t_Social_
Protection#copypaste].
3. Economic and Social Research Council Grant RES-060-25-0052.
Pantazis 17

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Author biography
Christina Pantazis is a Reader in and a member of the Centre for the Study of Poverty and
Social Exclusion, in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. She was one of
the co-researchers on the UK 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion Study (www.poverty.ac.uk).
Previous publications include (with D. Gordon and R. Levitas) Poverty and Social Exclusion in
Britain: The Millennium Survey (Policy Press, 2006) and (with D. Gordon) Breadline Britain in
the 1990s (Ashgate, 1997).