Political discourse and gendered welfare reform: a case study of the UK coalition government

In the UK, as in many other countries, welfare reform in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has had a detrimental effect on gender equality. Between 2010 and 2015 the UK Coalition government initiated far-reaching cuts to public spending, as well as an increase in welfare conditionality. These reforms have hit women harder than men as they are more likely to rely on welfare benefits and services due to unpaid care responsibilities. Many have suggested that the way in which issues are represented by policymakers can limit what can be conceived as appropriate policy solutions. In line with this, Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach is used in this article to interrogate the way in which welfare was problematised by the UK Coalition government. Findings suggest that the Coalition’s represented reform as necessary to make work pay, with ‘work’ promoted as paid work and unpaid care work (predominantly undertaken by women) ignored. It also highlights the ways in which the Coalition’s promotion of paid work silenced the necessity and value of care, allowing for the implementation of welfare reforms which have disproportionately disadvantaged women and exacerbated gender inequality

Becoming visible Focus on lone fathers

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The future for lone parent families Report of Gingerbread's conference 28 March 2000

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One parent families and childcare

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Obstacles to employment report

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'A wise head on young shoulders' The experiences of young lone parents in Northern Ireland

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Out of reach Accommodating the housing needs of lone parents

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Just me and the kids A manual for lone parents

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Support for all in the UK Work Programme? Differential payments, same old problem...

The UK has been a high profile policy innovator in welfare-to-work provision that has led in the Coalition government's Work Programme to a fully outsourced, ‘black box’ model with payments based overwhelmingly on job outcome results. A perennial fear in such programmes is providers’ incentives to ‘cream’ and ‘park’ claimants and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have sought to mitigate such provider behaviours through Work Programme design, particularly via the use of claimant groups and differential pricing. In this paper we draw on a qualitative study of providers in the programme, alongside quantitative analysis of published performance data to explore evidence around creaming and parking. The combination of the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that creaming and parking are widespread and systematically embedded within the Work Programme and we argue that they are driven by a combination of intense cost-pressures and extremely ambitious performance targets, alongside overly diverse claimant groups and inadequately calibrated differentiated payment levels