Arising from our December 2023 launch event at the School of Law, Ulster University, we are making some of the most pertinent moments of the day available.
This first post includes contributions from Professor Madeleine Leonard (Queens University, Belfast) and Helen Barnard (The Trussell Trust UK).
Professor Leonard opened proceedings and underlined the importance of cross-border/comparative research on this issue, while Barnard examined what social security/welfare is for, the current issues with the UK system and how to potentially address the same.
To make these more accessible, and to facilitate the potential use of these for research/teaching purposes, there are both videos with optional close captions and written transcripts.
1. Professor Madeleine Leonard – The Need for an All Island Social Security Network
These networks, and this ‘All Island’ focus is absolutely crucial given the challenges faced by the welfare state in both parts of Ireland. The cost of the pandemic, the ongoing cost of living crisis comes on top of a crisis in care and ageing. You could add immigration housing.
It comes on top of the economic consequences of Brexit, and it comes on top of the climate crisis. And indeed, it seems there’s a perfect storm brewing whereby all these various issues are coalescing.
The welfare state in both parts of Ireland is facing a toxic cocktail of welfare problems, which make these shared conversations increasingly vital.
And one of the core purposes of today is to get these conversations on shared welfare concerns going. Some conversations are already taking place, but there needs to be more opportunities to reflect on social welfare issues on an all island basis.
2. Helen Barnard – What is Social Security for
Brilliant to see you all. So I thought it’d be useful to actually start this by thinking about what exactly is the social security system supposed to do? What are the functions it should be performing? And we can then test it to see if it’s fulfilling those. And for the UK social security system, there are basically three core functions which it should be fulfilling, which it was created by Beveridge and the social reformers to do.
So the first function is about income replacement. So essentially, the system recognises that not everybody in society is going to be able to generate enough income to get by from the market, from either inheriting or earning money. So it recognises that there will be some people who can’t work at all, either temporarily or permanently.
There’ll be other people who can work but are between jobs. And there will be life events that create income shocks, which we know people can’t immediately make up for with earnings, whether that’s divorce or illness or other events. So we have income replacement benefits, whether that’s the old ones, income support, ESA and so on, and most of universal credit is about the income replacement.
Obviously, in kind of recent 10-15 years, the system has evolved to recognise that actually, even when you are working, you can’t necessarily work enough hours or in a good enough job to create enough income. So it’s kind of tagged on an extra bit of in-work benefits, but that is still really, it is income replacement. It is recognising that your earnings are not enough on their own to get you to a decent position.
So that’s the first thing. Second thing the system is invented to do is to tackle additional costs. So what it recognises is that consumer markets don’t create affordable costs for everybody.
So many people will face costs they can’t meet just from their earnings. So two workers may be earning the same amount if one of them is supporting a partner in children and the other one isn’t. It’s not reasonable for the employer to pay differently.
But as a society, we recognise the person supporting more people is going to have additional costs. So we put in additional cost benefits like child benefit or the child element of universal credit. We also recognise that being disabled brings additional costs and doesn’t bring the income to cover them.
So we have the additional cost benefits for people with disabilities. And we recognise that some parts of the market are fundamentally quite broken, particularly the housing market. And for many people on low incomes, the housing market doesn’t deliver affordable costs.
So we’ve invented housing benefit in its various different forms. So that’s the second thing. The third thing the system is there to do is essentially recognise that as a species, we are terrible at planning for the future.
So even when we know something’s going to happen, like we will retire one day, we are very, very bad as individuals about saving up and recognising what we’ll need. The system also recognises that for most future expenses, we do actually leave it to individuals through savings or the market through insurance. But there are certain big future expenses, which we have recognised the market is not going to cover.
So private insurance is just going to be prohibitively expensive for many people, particularly those who need it most. And as a government, essentially, the government has recognised that it is not feasible to simply abandon large groups of people to severe hardship when they either retire or have a baby. Those are the two big life events.
So essentially, what we’ve done is create social security, which is like an enormous whip round where we all put in some money to support someone who’s facing it now in the hopes that when we face this thing, there will be a pot of money that will be a whip round for us. So those are the three things that the system is invented to do.
3. Helen Barnard – Why is the Social Security System Failing to Protect Us
So what is it about the social security system that is creating this situation? And there are four key things that are going wrong.
The first is it’s not particularly easy to access benefits, especially disability benefits. I think if there’s people here who do frontline advice and community group work, you will know that you spent an immense amount of time sitting, filling in forms. And I know for our food banks, personal independence payments, those PIP forms are some of the top things that we do. And it’s the same for citizens advice. It’s the same for mind. Trying to get people access to disability benefits is hard. It takes a long time. You often have to appeal. So we see a lot of people who are essentially coming to us because they’re in that waiting period fighting for those benefits.
Second thing is delays. Even when you’ve got the application in, we’ve obviously got a universal credit built in at least a five week delay. It can be longer. And again, that is a key driver of people facing hunger and people getting into debt, which then carries on affecting them.
Third thing is even when you get your benefits and they’ve come in, the level is so low that it doesn’t now cover the cost of essentials. So when you talk to our food banks, maybe 10 years ago, if you got people good financial inclusion advice, if you got them debt advice, if you got them access to the right benefits, many people would basically be OK. What we find now is that even when you do all of that, they are still in negative budget because that gap between what you need and what you get has just grown so large.
Finally, even those adequate benefits for many, many people are reduced even further. So when we look at the people who come to our food banks, 62% of them who are on universal credit aren’t even getting the full amount. And particularly strikingly, one of the biggest factors that is debt deductions, most of which are to pay back the government. So you have a government that is supposed to be fulfilling the purpose of protecting us, but is actually reclaiming its own debt in a way that drives people into hunger and hardship and more debt.
4. Helen Barnard – How Do We Solve This
I was asked to talk about the state of the UK social security system. The state is not good. It is not fulfilling the purposes it is supposed to, it is not protecting us from harm, it is not ‘achieving justice’. It is not preventing the damage to society, which comes when you allow people to be forced to live in destitution in this way.
So we’ve been thinking a lot about how do we change this. And I think there are two fundamental building blocks of how we get a step change.
The first one is building public support. So it’s one of these things that in order to get governments to move, and in particular in order to get change that lasts, that is not going to be undone by a future government, we need to build real public support for the system. So I’ve talked to one person and they were saying their ambition is people should be as proud of social security as they are of the NHS. We should think of it in the same way. It is the same expression of our commitment to each other. And we actually do have quite a good basis to build on. So the majority of the public are really worried about poverty. They are worried about homelessness. They’re worried about food bank use. They do think the government should do more. And when we’ve been taking our Essentials Guarantee campaign out, again, there is majority public support among every voter group, which I’ve never seen for a social security policy in it ever. So I think we have a basis, but we’ve got to build on that.
Second thing is we have got to get cross-party backing. I think of it for us, as we have to have a big tent approach. We have to build consensus to avoid that yo-yo effect of you persuade one government to do something good and then the government changes and it gets undone. We need to have a bedrock of support so no matter what happens politically, there are some basics that everyone agrees on. In order to achieve these two things, one of the things that we’ve been finding is that if you go in through talking about you know, at a starting point, let’s protect everyone from destitution and severe poverty. That seems to be the best way in to get both that broad public support and cross-party backing.
And I know quite a lot of campaigners are quite queasy about this because it doesn’t feel ambitious enough. Actually, I think if you look at the state of the current system, this is incredibly ambitious. If we could achieve this, it would be transformative for the country. And it does seem to be what the public and politicians connect with best. The second thing though is I think we need to think about what are the top concerns for the country and actually the two things that always come through are the state of public services and the economy and cost of living. I think we need to do a better job at making visible the fact that unless we solve destitution and we get social security working, we are going to continue to pile pressure on our public services and hold back our economy. And those are the two lines of arguments that we think are probably most fruitful at the moment to get that support.
And the last couple of things. So I think one thing’s having been in this kind of game for quite a long time. What we tend to do is we spend a lot of time campaigning on very specific tweaks or improvements to the system. And we do that because they’re necessary. But I think that the thing that we have never really… tried to do in a serious way that I think as a sector we are moving towards much more is to actually try and establish the principle with the public, with politicians, that social security should at the very least protect us from destitution. If we can achieve that, kind of bake in that principle to how people think about this system, that gives the basis for every one of those tweaks and improvements that we want to see. It also gives us the best defence. against these things being undone again when we do achieve them. And the other thing is the infrastructure.
So many of you will have come across the campaign that we in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are running with 110 organisations now, which is campaigning to have put into legislation the principle that universal credit and other benefits should at least cover the cost of essentials and that there should be an independent body which assesses what that means in practice. Now, those aren’t silver bullets. If we achieve those, it won’t magically make all this disappear. But I do think if we can achieve that, it gives us the basis to build a system that actually fulfils those core functions and lives up to the principles. And again, it gives us a strong defence against those things being undone by future governments, because you would have to argue that you don’t think universal credit should cover the cost of essentials. And so far, I haven’t found anybody who actually is willing to go out and argue that. So that’s where we kind of come to is that we need to get the principles and the infrastructure in place and then use those to build on over the next 10 years or whatever it is.
All-Island Social Security Network 