The politics of welfare in an election year
Anti-welfare attitudes are at historic lows - so what's going on?
This is a post which I wrote for the Fairness Foundation’s blog that came out earlier today - if you haven’t seen their work before, do check them out!
There’s a strange contradiction at the heart of welfare policy at the moment. Anti-welfare attitudes have fallen to record lows, with the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) report showing fewer people believing that benefit claimants are undeserving than on record. Yet the Conservatives spent part of the Autumn statement pushing harsh welfare policies, while Labour have been relatively quiet in challenging this, or putting forward any concrete alternatives. In this post – based on a recent Academy of Social Sciences event where I spoke alongside Sir John Curtice (you can watch it via the link) – I try to explain this, and consider what might happen to welfare policy after the 2024 election.
The mixed demands for more welfare
Put simply, while anti-welfare attitudes have fallen to record lows, the political demand for more welfare spending is more muted than this sounds.
Firstly, general attitudes are only softly pro-welfare. While the public now generally believes that claimants are mostly deserving, the desire for more welfare spending (if it leads to higher taxes) is more limited – it’s still more positive than 2007-9, and more people want more spending than want less. But this isn’t reaching the outright majorities in favour of more welfare spending from 1987-95.
Welfare is also just not a priority issue for most people – 25-30% of people said that welfare was one of the most important issues facing the country in 2012-16, but it’s fallen since then, and only 10% say this now. While there’s some support for more spending, it’s far from universal, and it’s not clear that it’s enough of a priority to strongly affect voting behaviour.
Secondly, welfare attitudes are more complex than ‘pro’ or ‘anti’. It’s clear that a full-frontal attack on welfare can be politically damaging – the Conservative party mutinied when Liz Truss tried to cut benefits in real terms, and the Autumn Statement 2023 uprating in line with inflation was overwhelmingly popular even among Conservative voters. (Jeremy Hunt played this cleverly: because he trailed the prospect of further cuts, his decision to uprate benefits with inflation seemed generous, even though benefit levels are still wildly inadequate…)
But some benefit recipients and some policies are more strongly supported than others – and the Tories’ recent attacks reflect this. One target has been long-term unemployed claimants, who were threatened with further conditionality in the 2023 Autumn Statement. Not only is conditionality often popular, but unemployed claimants are generally less supported than others (see Table 1 of this), particularly long-term claimants. The policy itself is likely to affect tiny numbers of claimants (even if it’s ever fully rolled-out, which isn’t clear), and is better thought of as political positioning rather than a policy with any deeper ambition.
The other current target is disability benefit claimants. This might seem surprising, as researchers have long argued that disabled people are seen as more ‘deserving’ than other claimants. Yet as I’ve shown elsewhere, there’s enormous differences in the level of public support for claims from different people with different health problems and disabilities; 21st century welfare politics is often a battle to frame the subjects of reform as people who are ‘not really disabled’.
At the moment, the Tories are framing the focus of reform as people with anxiety and depression (as are the Tory-linked media, including one of the most stupid headlines I have ever seen in print). People with anxiety or depression are less strongly supported by the public than many other disability benefit claimants. What’s more, there’s a growing consensus among think tanks, journalists and so on that there’s a genuine problem here – a consensus that misunderstands what is happening around health, work and benefits (for reasons I’m gradually explaining on my Inequalities substack), but nevertheless, there’s relatively little political risk in focusing cuts on this group.
So it in fact makes perfect political sense for the Tories to raise benefits in line with inflation, but to target negative rhetoric on less popular groups to attempt to drive a political wedge with Labour. Still, this hasn’t done them much good – even Conservative voters think that the government is doing a bad job on welfare policy.
What will happen if Labour win the 2024 election?
So where does this leave Labour? It’s clear that before the election, Labour are going to say very little about welfare – they don’t want to make any spending promises or leave any lines of attack open, so they will just make vague noises about a less hostile system. It is equally clear that the Tories will attack even this, with Conservative Secretary of State Mel Stride repeatedly saying that their loose commitment to end punitive sanctions comes “at a cost of £2 billion, and [will] water down the requirements for claimants to move into jobs when offered them.”
But if they win the election, Labour face tricky choices. Yes, there are popular things they can easily say about effective employment support and improving health. But when it comes to spending, they will be under intense pressure from within and outside the party to raise the level of benefits, yet this faces both a split public and a difficult fiscal position. They will also be under internal pressure to reverse some of the harsher Conservative policies that create child poverty – the two-child limit and the benefits cap – even though these are strongly supported by the public.
To get out of this apparent bind, we need to note three things.
Firstly, effective policymaking is about leadership, not about following single-issue polling – political parties simply aren’t judged by adding together the public’s perception on single issues. As Sam Freedman has put it, “Use polling to understand what people think and why, but with the goal of figuring out how to persuade and lead, not just to follow. If you do you’ll fail, and you’ll get the blame.” Moreover, there has never been a ‘golden age’ of support for welfare, even for Beveridge – leadership is needed.
Secondly, there is fertile ground for those seeking to lead the public to support an ambitious overhaul of welfare. As I said above, anti-welfare attitudes have fallen, and there is increased support for more spending – but more than that, Labour and Tory voters alike think that the current system works badly (as YouGov polls show).
Finally, there is an intellectual case that we do need a system that is built differently – one that is trusted so that people feel able to take risks, rather than hunkering down in the face of a hostile, senseless bureaucracy; which involves completely changing the way the state interacts with claimants. (I’ll be returning to flesh out this vision as the year progresses).
In other words, rather than simply offering a more generous system (or worse, not tackling inadequacy at all), Labour could offer a completely reformed system, which provides adequacy and washes away terrible policies like the two-child limit, but embedded in a wider narrative about fixing everything that is wrong with the current system. Public attitudes don’t demand this, but they are in a place that allows for it. Labour will be a tricky position on welfare if they win the election, and having the political courage to offer leadership would enable them to get out of it – as well as offering the vision of a social security system that genuinely provides both security and a springboard towards work, unlike the system we have today.