Further fraying of the welfare safety net

Abstract

By 2015, relative child poverty rates after housing costs were around two and a half times as high as in the mid-1980s, and about 40% of the children in poverty lived in ‘working’ families. Conditions for receipt of assistance have been tightened, making it increasingly difficult to access an adequate amount and producing vicious poverty traps. This erosion of state support has been framed since 2012 in the rhetoric of ‘social investment’. The result has been increasing hardship and rising inequality. The further fraying of the safety net can be described as deliberate, methodical, and part of a wider plan to reduce state spending, particularly on social welfare, and to create a climate in which welfare recipients are viewed negatively, as the creators of their own misfortune.