From social security to individual responsibility: sanctions, conditionality and Punitiveness in the Welfare Reform Bill 2009 (Part One)

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Notes

^2. For analysis of this in the context of divorce, see Reece (2003).

^3. Conditionality, as the Government uses the term in the current reforms, was introduced in 1996 with the Jobseekers Allowance regime, which required a level of engagement with job seeking in return for benefits (see DWP 2008c). See also, Powell (2000).

^4. It is worth noting that the White Paper (DWP 2008b) uses the term ‘customer’ no fewer than 112 times to refer to benefit claimants.

^5. This is the subject of Part Two of this article. For an interesting analysis of this in the Swedish context, see Blomqvist (2004).

^1. This article is based on a collaborative response to the consultation paper ‘No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility’ by the AHRC Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (see Barker et al. 2009). We would like to thank our co-contributors to that response: Kate Bedford, Helen Carr, Emily Grabham, and Jenny Smith. We would also like to thank Brenna Bhandar, Davina Cooper, Peggy Ducoulombier, Ruth Fletcher, Ben Hunter, Julie McCandless and Helen Beckett Wilson for valuable contributions and insights.

^6. The Bill also contains further provisions that are outside the scope of this note. These would: introduce personal budgets to give disabled people more control over the public services they receive (Part Two); no longer count child maintenance payments as income for the purposes of benefit claims and introduce extra powers to enforce child maintenance by taking away a non-resident parent's passport (Part Three); require parents to jointly register the birth of a child and force mothers to disclose the identity of the father except in limited circumstances (Part Four). For a critique of Part Four, see Sheldon (2009).

^7. ‘Food insecurity’ refers to a situation where ‘families do not have a consistent supply of all the food they need for a healthy diet’ (Berg 2007, p. 48).