The fall of anti-welfare attitudes

Recent research based on data looking at British attitudes to welfare suggests policy-makers may be out of step with public opinion in this area. Kate Summers, Ben Baumberg Geiger, Robert de Vries, and Tom O’Grady explain what has happened to public attitudes to welfare over the past 15 years, and why

Despite the suspension of conditionality, benefit claimants are already looking for work

The unique challenges that COVID-19 presents have meant a ‘pause’ in overt work-related requirements. Despite this, and the dire job prospects facing many, the majority of the new COVID-19 cohort of benefit claimants who do not have a job are actively looking for work, find Daniel Edmiston, Ben Baumberg Geiger, Lisa Scullion, Jo Ingold and Kate Summers. This questions many of the assumptions that underpin our increasingly conditional social security system and should encourage policymakers to rethink what income and employment support might look like as we move beyond this pandemic

Claiming But Connected to Work

This report presents the first findings from the Welfare at a (Social) Distance project, a major national research project investigating the benefits system during the COVID-19 pandemic, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19. It draws upon a new survey of 2,364 new Universal Credit (UC)/Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA) claimants (carried out between 25th May and 3rd June) to look at how far benefit claimants are connected to the world of work, helping to better understand the emerging picture from recent UK labour market statistics

Anti-welfare attitudes. The rise and fall of anti-welfare attitudes across four decades: politics, pensioners and poverty

Over the past four decades, there have been two periods of dramatic change in our attitudes to welfare; negative attitudes increased in the late 1990s and 2000s, while attitudes have softened since 2010. While the first period of change is well understood, being largely driven by changes in the views of Labour Party voters, this chapter focuses on the second period of change. How have attitudes to welfare changed over the past decade and can a softening of attitudes be attributed to politicians, the media, changing perceptions of poverty or to changes in Britain’s demographic make-up

Weeds in the treated field - a realistic scenario for pollinator risk assessment?

In July 2013 the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) released its final guidance on the risk assessment of plant protection products (PPPs) to bees1. One objective of the guidance was to produce a simple and cost effective first tier risk assessment scheme to ensure that the appropriate level of protection is achieved. However, recent impact analyses have indicated that the first tier of this risk assessment does not act effectively as a screen for compounds of low risk to bees. For example substances showing no toxicity to bees often fail the tier 1 risk assessment based on a worst-case exposure to flowering weeds inside the treated field. If realistic farming practices (e.g. tillage and herbicide applications) are considered, weeds are not usually prevalent in arable fields. It is therefore suggested that the scenarios in the guidance could be considered overly conservative and in some instances unrealistic. The EFSA guidance states that if <10% of the area of use is flowering weeds then the exposure route is not relevant in the 90th %ile case, and thus does not need to be considered. However, despite this, the option to generate data or refine assessments based on available data is questioned as no guidance for the assessment of the abundance of weeds is available. As part of an industry-led initiative we present and discuss the use of empirical evidence (i.e. occurrence and growth stage of weeds in control plots from herbicide efficacy field trials conducted for regulatory submission) to illustrate that the scenarios in the guidance document could be modified using currently available data to create a more effective tier 1 risk assessment and still ensure that the appropriate level of protection is achieved. We have demonstrated here that less than 2% of all weeds recorded in arable crop trials (represented here by wheat, oilseed rape, sugar beet, sunflower, potatoes, maize, peas and beans) are at a flowering growth stage; therefore in arable crops the flowering weeds scenario is not applicable for the 90th %ile exposure. For permanent crop trials (represented here by orchards and vines) 37% of weeds were recorded at a flowering growth stage. When the attractiveness and density data are considered, the percentage of attractive, flowering weeds which cover >10% of the ground area is only 12.3%, indicating that for permanent crops further investigation may be required as to whether this scenario is relevant

At the edge of the safety net: Unsuccessful benefits claims at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic

There has been much scrutiny of the British benefits system during COVID-19, and most experts agree that the benefits system has performed well, even if historic weaknesses remain. Yet little attention has been paid to those who start a claim that is ultimately not successful. This report focuses on these ‘unsuccessful claimants’, using new YouGov survey data and interview evidence funded by the Health Foundation

Hunger and the welfare state: Food insecurity among benefit claimants in the UK

In this report, we look at the extent of food insecurity among different types of claimants

Welfare attitudes in a crisis: How COVID exceptionalism undermined greater solidarity

COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of 'COVID exceptionalism'-with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall

Solidarity in a crisis? Trends in attitudes to benefits during COVID-19

In this report, we look at whether COVID-19 transformed welfare attitudes - and what this means for polic