Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy is an edited collection published as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Work and Welfare in Europe series of books. It brings together contributions from analysts from several academic disciplines (geography, social policy, sociology, occupational medicine and public health).The book has 13 chapters that aim to explore whether recent changes in UK disability benefits, which have sought to ‘establish a more “active” disability benefit regime; restrict eligibility; extend means-testing; limit payment levels; and introduce active labour market programmes’, are ‘fit for purpose’ (1). To do this the chapters take a critical approach to those policies, and develop comparative analyses within the United Kingdom (e.g. geographies of disability benefit receipt), internationally (with contributions on disability benefit regimes in Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden) and historically (a chapter on work disability from the 1880s to the 1940s).
The focus of Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy is set out by Lindsay and Houston in the introduction; that there is ‘crisis’, as defined by the social and economic consequences of having a large number of people receiving them, of disability benefits in the United Kingdom and that this can be explained with reference to three inter-connected factors:
Labour market processes – job losses and work intensification have in particular acted to limit the opportunities for paid work for people with poor health.
Employability – the educational qualifications and skills of people receiving disability benefits disadvantages them compared with other potential employees.
Health problems – the health of people receiving disability benefits helps limit their prospects of returning to paid work.
Broadly speaking, the contributions agree with, and help enlighten, this triad of explanations for the number of disability benefit recipients in the United Kingdom and their increase in number from the 1970s. This means that the widely used criticism that edited collections often lack coherence is not applicable to Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy. The book is very well focused upon the intersection of these explanations of disability benefit receipt.
The approach taken in the book is essentially one rooted in social administration. The contributors provide a solid empirical basis, which, with the exception of part of Chapter 5, is quantitative in nature. It suggests that the attempts to reduce the number of people receiving disability benefits in the United Kingdom are based upon a misunderstanding of the reasons why people claim such benefits and, therefore, are unlikely, without causing great economic and emotional harm, to be successful in their aim. The policies introduced by successive UK governments to reduce disability benefit receipt, premised upon financial incentives and mandatory work activation, are, given the evidence in the book, rightly condemned in the concluding chapter as tackling ‘the immediate symptoms of the problem that manifest themselves on the individual but do nothing to address the underlying causes, which are systemic and structural in origin’ (235).
The strengths of Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy lie in its empirical focus. The book provides a mass of data with which the UK government’s approach to reducing the number of disability benefit recipients can be critically engaged with. It also demonstrates how things can be done differently by examining the experiences of other countries and the locating of the current political concerns with disability benefits within an historical understanding of such issues (Chapter 8). The latter is important as there are too few historical analyses relating to disability benefits. Furthermore, the spatial analyses (Chapters 2, 7 and 8) make clear that the changes to disability benefits in the United Kingdom will have repercussions beyond the individual; for example, at the regional level. While the changes will undoubtedly ‘impoverish vast numbers of households, and cause untold distress in countless more’ (152), they will, by their nature, also ‘hit the weakest local economies … hardest’ (147).
The sharp focus in this book upon the triad of explanations noted above, however, is also likely to raise some important issues for the readers of Disability and Society. Most notably, and beyond the general call for greater levels of employment through what is described in Chapter 8 as ‘national economic renewal’ and ‘priority for regional local economic development’ (150; original emphasis), the book’s conceptualisation of barriers to paid work seem to be limited to supply-side problems with individuals. It might, of course, be argued that tighter labour markets would leave little option but for employers to hire disabled people. However, even if the idea, accepted in several of the book’s chapters, that a million people receiving disability benefits are ‘hidden unemployed’ and would be helped into work by a return to full employment, this would mean that still about a million and half would not be employed. How might their lack of paid work be explained? The disability studies response would be to focus upon the disabling aspects of the institutions and practices of labour markets. However, there is little discussion of the disabling barriers that people face in accessing work in Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy.
It is not the case that such issues are completely absent in the book. There is some recognition – through, for example, reference to the practices of some employers and to the role of the media in problematising disabled claimants – of such issues, but they are not explored in any great depth because, ultimately, the focus is upon macro-economic issues (the need for more employment opportunities) and supply-side features of disability benefit claimants (their education and skills, and their health conditions).
In many senses, the reason for this is the book’s primary focus upon the evidential base; if ‘policy makers … are to get to grips with the disability benefits crisis then they need to appreciate the nature of the problem; and then assess the evidence on what might work … in terms of policy solutions’ (3). This focus means there is little room for the discussion of more abstract issues, but issues that are nevertheless pertinent to the book’s empirical focus. How, for example, are ‘disability’ and ‘ill health’ conceptualised? And how do they relate to each other? What contribution can disciplines outside those included in the book make to the debate about disability benefits? Is there intellectual space for disability studies within debates about, and understandings of, the ‘reform’ of disability benefits?
Nevertheless, Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy is a very useful empirical contribution to understanding the drivers of disability benefit claims, even if these are, at best, ignored and, at worst, denied by UK governments. I will be ordering a copy for the library at Lancaster University to help students understand some of the problems with disability benefit policy in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Lancaster University, UK
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© 2014, Chris Grover
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.919174