'Get Britain Working', and the challenge of welfare messaging

How a positive message sounded like a threat

Yesterday the Government unveiled the ‘Get Britain Working’ White Paper, a series of reforms that directly builds on their manifesto commitments to increase the employment rate to 80%.

While most of the actual policies in the White Paper were welcomed by researchers, activists and commentators (as I’ll explore below), there was a lingering sense of unease among many about some of the headlines around it - “Young people who refuse to work to lose benefits - minister” on the BBC, or the Daily Mail’s front page “Starmer declares war on benefits Britain”.

In this piece, I want to look at the White Paper, and use it to reflect on the challenges of positive messaging around welfare in the UK.

So what was in the White Paper?

The headlines from the White Paper aren’t a surprise, because they follow their Manifesto commitments - ‘a new combined jobs and careers service’, ‘new local plans for work health and skills’ support, and ‘a youth guarantee’. But they’re still welcome. The White Paper adds (a little) detail on each of these:

• Jobs and careers service: the new combined service will be a merger between Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service. There’s lots of excellent words here (‘inclusive’, ‘personalised’), including the aim to “remove any stigma that can be associated with going to a Jobcentre” (§171), possibly by rebranding Jobcentre Plus (§165). But this is going to be hard work, and take time & money - the White Paper just talks about £55m to launch a pathfinder in early 2025, so further investment is going to be needed, and it’s not going to happen overnight.

• Youth guarantee: this is a guarantee for 18-21 year olds that they can access education, training, or help to find a job or apprenticeship. Pretty much everyone likes the idea behind this. But the commitment itself is slower and more partial than you might hope (see §119); as the Resolution Foundation said, “the White Paper contains funding [£45m] for 8 ‘trailblazers’ to design and test programmes. But it feels like a stretch to call this a ‘guarantee’” (commentators in FEweek broadly felt the same). There’s also been calls from people like Stephen Evans to extend this to 22-24 year olds.

• New local plans: this is where the chunkiest investment is going - £115m next year to help kickstart joined-up local provision, plus £125m next year for 8 ‘trailblazers’ to see how to better ‘increase levels of engagement’ among inactive people. This support includes 140,000 people on IPS by 2028/29 (but presumably this is ≈40k/pa?), and 100,000 people/pa on a new ‘Connect to Work’ supported employment programme.

One welcome surprise,¹ though, is a focus on the role of employers. The White Paper announced “an independent review into the role of UK employers in promoting healthy and inclusive workplaces”, focused on increasing retention/recruitment of ill & disabled people, as well as early interventions and health-promoting workplaces. On Times Radio, Ali McGovern agreed that the focus is to ‘change work, not change people’. I have a slight concern that the review will be chaired by someone too pro-business to consider really serious incentives for change (§86 says “this review will be led by someone with strong business experience”), and also it’s a bit detached from the Spring Green Paper on social security and health (the employer review is due to report in the summer). But still: it’s really positive that this has such a prominent place in the White Paper.

While the broad agenda looks positive, the White Paper has the same issue that official strategies often have - it includes lots of small/medium-sized initiatives, but they probably don’t add up to the radical change that the Government is committed to.² As the IFS and others have said, £240m (as committed in the October budget) is not insignificant, but it’s small compared to the scale of the problem; the Resolution Foundation bluntly said that “the contents of the white paper alone will certainly not get us to an 80% employment rate.” There will be more in the DWP Green Paper on health & disability in the Spring, but this probably requires legislation, and might take several years for the reforms to actually roll out.

Still - the general consensus (and my view) is that the White Paper is a good first step. It’s focused on providing more (and more attractive) support, and ensuring that the jobs and opportunities are there for people to take up. It needs to be built on, but it’s the sort of thing that many people hoped that the Government would be saying at this stage.

Good meat, bad smell

Yet while the meat of the reforms was broadly welcomed, there were concerns about the smell of them. Or to use a less tortured analogy: some of the newspaper coverage was pretty hostile to claimants, as I showed above, and this concerned Frances Ryan, Helen Barnard, Tom Pollard, Anna Dent, Anthony Painter, and many others in my Bluesky feed.

Put simply: I think this isn’t Labour’s fault, and instead shows the power of dominant media frames.

Let’s take two examples of this. Firstly, the Mail on Sunday’s headline “Starmer declares war on benefits Britain” actually comes from this comment piece that Starmer wrote for them. If you read this in full, it’s actually really positive in tone. Really early on, it says ‘right now, the system is failing people’, before explicitly laying into Mel Stride (the former Tory Work and Pensions Secretary, and now Shadow Chancellor) who ‘picked fights instead of governing’. Starmer then says, “There’s another way. Treating people with dignity and respect.” Similarly, in the main press release from the DWP, Starmer says, “Our reforms put an end to the culture of blaming and shaming people who for too long haven’t been getting the support they need to get back to work.” This is great stuff: it’s the Prime Minister making an effort to talk about benefits in a different, more positive way to readers of the Mail.

It’s only near the end of the piece that Starmer says in passing the things that became the Mail headline. He says, “we will get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society. And don’t get me wrong – we will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters. There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals.” But that’s it. It’s not the main thrust of the piece at all. Nevertheless, the Mail managed to turn this into a hostile front page headline, while describing his comments as ‘his most hardline comments yet’. And it’s this headline which then led to a slew of other stories like, “Keir Starmer doubles down on benefits crackdown as he promises ‘zero tolerance’ on cheats” or “Keir Starmer's pledge on benefits 'deepens stigma' and leads to 'fear and shame”. The main point of Starmer’s piece is entirely lost in this secondhand reporting.

A second example: you can see exactly the same process at work in the BBC’s reporting of the DWP Secretary of State Liz Kendall’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg. If you watch the interview, you’ll see Kendall doing a great job of talking about how the system fails people (rather than blaming claimants), including a robust defence that “The last government said that people were too bluesy to work, I mean I don't know who they were speaking to. There is a genuine problem with mental health in this country”. It’s only when Kuenssberg directly asks, “but if young people will not take up those offers, will they face sanctions if they say no?” that Kendall says:

Yes. And the reason this is so important is, we will transform those opportunities for young people, we will put in place a Youth Guarantee, so that everyone has a chance to be earning or learning. But in return for those new opportunities, young people will have a new responsibility to take them up, and let me tell you why. Because if you lack basic skills in today's world, that is brutal… And you know what? The young people I meet are desperate for a chance - they're desperate for a chance to get skills, they're desperate for a chance to earn and work. We'll fulfill our responsibilities and make that side of the bargain.

Again, Liz Kendall here is trying quickly to defuse the question, and change the focus to something else - young people’s desire for support, and the need for the Youth Guarantee. Kuenssberg then asks a second direct question about whether there are people who ‘can work who won’t work’, and Kendall does exactly the same thing again - defuse the question (say ‘yes’ rather than get in an argument about it), and then move on (say that these people are ‘in the minority’, and then emphasise how much young people want more support).

Honestly, it’s exasperating both that Kuenssberg hammered Liz Kendall about it as her first main (and repeated) line of questioning, and that BBC News then ran a headline from the interview saying, “Young people who refuse to work to lose benefits - minister”. This wasn’t the main message from the interview at all. But people see the headline, and assume that this is the framing the Government wanted. As Helen Barnard nicely put it, “Dear media… Stop asking ‘where’s the stick’. We’ve had YEARS of stick.”

Are Labour blameless here?

I don’t want to suggest Labour are completely blameless here - there’s still bits of a more punitive narrative that come through from time to time. The White Paper talks about “maintain[ing] conditionality requirements” and emphasising that “sanctions have an important place in our social security system” (§174), though to be honest on some level most commentators would agree with this.

More worryingly, though, the White Paper hints at imposing more conditionality on ill or disabled young people.³ Liz Kendall’s Telegraph article mentioned that “there should be no option of a life on benefits for young people” (a phrase she also used earlier this year), which became the headline of the piece. [Added 12:35: The White Paper also emphasise ‘mutual obligations’ high-up in the exec summary, suggesting that the support is conditional on for something in return.⁴ And it’s quite possible that some of the SpAds or press officers emphasised all this informally]. Finally, Keir Starmer’s autumn conference speech said that “if we want to maintain support for the welfare state, then we will legislate to stop benefit fraud”, accompanied by a DWP press release about a fraud, error & debt bill.

That said, I think it’s important to recognise that the main messages they’ve been giving in the last week have overwhelmingly been positive - it’s just not fair to say that they’ve been trying to pander to a hostile media. Perhaps most clearly of all, they explicitly say they want to move away from ‘box ticking’ (§145) conditionality, so that “checking work-related requirements will move from the foreground to the background of the customer-work coach relationship” (§175; see also §146). The proof of the pudding is in the eating - but this is at least the right recipe.

How to get out positive messages on welfare

The basic problem is that it’s hard to escape the established framing of welfare, where nearly every journalist’s first instinct is to ask about fraud and undeserving claims. As I discussed in a paper over a decade ago (free version here), there’s three rough approaches to trying to escape from this.

Firstly, you can pander to the existing discourse, and try to do good policies within this. I don’t think there’s much mileage in this, for reasons I explain in that piece.

Secondly, you can talk across the established discourse - you try to pretend that it’s not there, and instead present a different way of talking and thinking about welfare. I think this is mostly what Labour have been trying this week; there’s been the odd sentence to try to nullify the old discourse, but mostly they’ve just presented things differently. This has been partially successful; you can see this alternative way of thinking in stories in the i, BBC and Sky. And Declan Gaffney’s amazing media analyses in our 2012 report show that many newspaper stories are based on government actions/releases, showing that there’s some power to set the agenda. But it has its limits, as the examples above show.

Third, you can try to change policies in ways that change conversations (‘sequencing’, as Bonoli & Palier term it). The trouble with our existing system is that it allocates benefits based on people’s deservingness in one sense or another; so the default conversation is about deservingness (Christian Albrekt Larsen wrote an excellent book on this). To break out of this, we can do a reform that nudges the conversation in a different direction, which opens the space to do more radical reforms, which in turns pushes the conversation further. But these kinds of reforms - better basic rates of benefits rather than disability-related additions, and more broadly, a more contributory system - aren’t really on the table at the moment.

As it stands, we’re therefore testing how far it’s possible to get by the Government talking differently, without deeper institutional support. There’s some fertile ground for this in public attitudes, which are relatively positive by historical standards, but this can be over-stated (as I explain here), and there’s many political entrepreneurs trying to make hay out of the politics of division, particularly in a time of constrained public finances. I very much hope that the misrepresentation of Labour’s largely positive narrative this week is a hangover from the last decade or so, and that gradually a different narrative takes root - but today this is just a hope, not a prediction.

1. It’s worth adding that the White Paper also talks about what the NHS can do (focusing reducing waiting lists in high-inactivity areas, a bit more investment in Talking Therapies). And it’s great to see them saying that they will “establish a panel to consult disabled people about the reforms set out in the White Paper”, though that’s only meaningful if they actually listen and respond.

2. It’s worth adding a further criticism, which is that the White Paper doesn’t talk much 55-64 year olds, but we’re not going to get to an 80% employment rate without supporting them too (h/t Emily Andrews).

3. They say they want to “explore a new approach to benefit rules for young people” (§10), and later explain this means maybe changing benefit rules around the Youth Guarantee to tackle the problem that “the current design of benefit rules either places people in conditionality groups with requirements focused on job search and work-related activity or in a part of the system with no expectations for participation of any kind” (§128) - i.e. moving towards fewer completely exemptions from conditionality.

4. Thanks to my amazing colleague and sometime co-blogger Rob de Vries for pointing out that I need to flag this too.