'Poor citizens’: social welfare and the encouragement of work

The British social security system is at a conditionality precipice, where the post-war aim of developing a centralised system to provide some semblance of economic security has become secondary to ensuring the unemployed claimant is coerced to securing complete independence from the state through termination of a social security claim. Those claimants who are furthest from the labour market are at the mercy of frontline work coaches who have been provided with extensive discretion to determine the fate of those who demonstrate any level of resistance to the terms of the highly punitive 21st-century welfare contract. Despite rhetorical assurances, that individual circumstances will be provided with due consideration in drawing up the ‘claimant commitment,’ research has shown that structural barriers to formal labour market engagement are habitually conceived as personal obstructions that are the responsibility of the individual to manage.