Social Security Policy and Vindictiveness

This paper uses the work of Jock Young (2002, 2003) on the emergence of vindictiveness in late modern society to examine two recent developments – the withdrawal, in certain circumstances, of Housing Benefit from those people evicted for \'anti-social\' behaviour and the proposed introduction of a Treatment Allowance for \'problem drug users\' – in social security policy. The paper argues that while since the development of collective responses to poverty there has been concern with the behaviour of individuals in relation to paid work, we are entering a new period of social security policy where it is the general behaviour of individuals that increasingly defines access to social security benefits, rather than their financial needs.Behavior; Drug Use; Housing Benefit; Poor Law; Poverty; Resentment; Social Security; Treatment Allowance; Vindictiveness

Social Protest in 2011: Material and Cultural Aspects of Economic Inequalities

The wave of social protest that swept across England in August 2011 has predominantly been explained by political elites through appeals to various approaches that have in common individualistic frameworks of reference. Issues related to the material condition of society are either little analysed or, among the political elite, ruled out as an explanation of it. However, it is clear from both the historical literature on social protest and the contemporary literature on relationships between crime and inequality that explanations ignoring inequalities, particularly economic inequalities, are problematic.Austerity; Crisis; Culture; Exclusion; Inclusion; Injustice; Social Protest

Employment and support allowance, the ‘summer budget’ and less eligible disabled people

In the first UK budget by a Conservative Government for 18 years, £13 billion per annum savings in social security spending by 2020/21 were announced. Of these, 4.9% (£640 million per annum, and up to £900 million in the years after 2020) is to come from the withdrawal from April 2017 of the work-related component of the Employment and Support Allowance. This means that new claimants will be worse off by £29.05 per week (2015/16 figures) than would have been the case had the measure not been introduced. This brief commentary critically analyses this development as the extension of an ideological assault upon the out-of-work benefits for disabled people which has been gathering momentum for about a decade in the hope of forcing such people into competing for wage work in the open market

Understanding material assistance in the Children and Young Persons Act 1963:Idealism and classical liberalism in England and Wales

Drawing upon data held at the UK’s National Archives, this article focuses upon the introduction of Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963, which allowed local authorities in England and Wales to offer material assistance to families in order to prevent children being received into care or to facilitate their return from care to their families. To understand this development, the article frames its analysis in debates about the nature of the intellectual basis of post-WWII social welfare policy in Britain. Locating Section 1 support in idealist thought, the article argues that it should be understood as continuing classical liberal concerns with responsibility, self-sufficiency, and independence and constraining the size and scope of the state

Certainty as a Provocation: The Design and Analysis of 2 Quant-Qual Tool Dyads for a Qualified Self Technology Project

This paper takes its starting point in recognising that the Quantified Self Movement can go beyond its existing purely quantitative nature and develop a second degree of meaning, so that the individual achieves self knowledge through human insights. We designed a research methodology to explore an individuals current and past relationship with ‘Activity Levels’ and ‘Balance Health’ using two Quant-Qual dyads. For the first Dyad, quantitative data was gathered about the number of steps taken by participants, and compared to the Qual Tool of Energy Diaries. For the second Dyad, quantitative data about postural sway was gathered through an application and qualitative data about the perceptions of balance was gathered through a personal diary. Quantitative data provided grounds for sensitising the participants to the idea of ‘Balance Health’ and ‘Activity Levels’ and the Qual tools revealed the lack of an actionable vocabulary on the one hand for Balance Health and rich narratives for activity levels on the other. Therefore, there exists an opportunity for research through design, to understand an individuals perception of their activity and to compare this existing self knowledge (or the lack of) to factual quantitative data in-order to design Qualified Self technology devices

Explaining the abolition of the wage stop in the UK

Before the introduction of the household benefit cap in the UK in 2013 the previous mechanism there limited the income of social assistance recipients was the wage stop, operating for four decades between 1935 and 1975. Similar to the benefit cap, the wage stop reflected and reproduced concerns with incentivising unemployed people to labour. This raises questions about why the wage stop was abolished in the mid-1970s when worries about unemployment continued, particularly its intersections with out-of-work benefits. It is widely argued that the abolition of the wage stop was a consequence of lobbying by the Child Poverty Action Group. Drawing upon records held at the UK’s National Archives, this article argues that this is an over-simplified explanation that, first, ignores concerns with the wage stop that pre-dated the Child Poverty Action Group’s criticism of it, including concerns within the assistance boards with its administration. And, second, while by the mid-1970s there was (albeit ambiguous) concern with the impacts of the wage stop, there was a shift in approach that emphasised the supplementation of low wages with social security benefits, rather than forcing social assistance below the assessed needs of households, as being a preferable means of ensuring the incentive to take wage-labour

The Household Benefit Cap:understanding the restriction of benefit income in Britain

Britain’s Household Benefit Cap restricts the amount of benefit income unemployed households can receive. In this article, it is examined using material held at the UK’s National Archives recording debates about a proposal to introduce a similar policy – a benefit limit – in the first Thatcher Conservative government elected in 1979. It was rejected, but the Household Benefit Cap was introduced three decades later. The article locates debates about, and the practice of restricting benefit income, in perennial social security concerns with the financial incentive to do waged work. The article argues that while there are material differences that help explain the different policy outcomes in 1980 and 2010, they can primarily be explained by changing ideas about the roles of social security policy, including the development of the ‘incentive paradigm’ concerned with manipulating behaviour; a loss of concern with the hardship that would come with the introduction of a benefit restriction and a view that institutions other than the state are better placed to address poverty and buttress work incentives

Application of STORMTOOLS Coastal Environmental Risk Index (CERI) to Inform State and Local Planning and Decision Making along the Southern RI Shoreline

STORMTOOLS coastal environmental risk index (CERI) was applied to communities located along the southern coast of Rhode Island (RI) to determine the risk to structures located in the flood plain. CERI uses estimates of the base flood elevation (BFE), explicitly including the effects of sea level rise (SLR); details on the structure types, from the E911 emergency data base/parcel data, and associated first floor elevation (FFE); and damage curves from the US Army Corp of Engineers North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study (NACCS) to determine the damages to structures for the study area. Surge levels and associated offshore waves used to determine BFEs were obtained from the NACCS hydrodynamic and wave model predictions. The impacts of sea level rise and coastal erosion on flooding were modeled using XBeach and STWAVE and validated by observations at selected locations along the coastline. CERI estimated the structural damage to each structure in the coastal flood plain for 100 yr flooding with SLR ranging from 0 to 10 ft. The number of structures at risk was estimated to increase approximate linearly from 3700 for no SLR to about 8000 for 10 ft SLR, with about equal percentages for each of the four coastal communities (Narragansett, South Kingstown, Charlestown, and Westerly, Rhode Island (RI)). The majority of the structures in the flood plain are single/story residences without (41%) and with (46%) basements (total 87%; structures with basements are the most vulnerable). Less vulnerable are structures elevated on piles with 8.8% of the total. The remaining are commercial structures principally located either in the Port of Galilee and or Watch Hill. The analysis showed that about 20% of the structures in the 100 yr flood plain are estimated to be damaged at 50% or greater. This increases to 55% of structures as SLR rises to 5 ft. At higher SLR values the percent damaged at 50% or greater slowly declines to 45% at 10 ft SLR. This behavior is a result of the number of homes below MSL increasing dramatically as SLR values moves higher than 5 ft and thus being removed from the structures damaged pool. Generalized CERI risk maps have developed to allow the managers to determine the broad risk of siting structures at any location in their communities. CERI has recently become available as a mobile phone App, facilitating the ability of state and local decision makers and the public to determine the risk of locating a selected building type at any location in their communities