Professor Ruth Patrick:

I am probably just reinforcing what has already been said. In regard to the first question, about the constant means testing, in its way that relates to the last point about the activation but also about the behavioural cultural discourse that was rolled out at the same time. When we look to recent history, and longer history in the UK, there is actually this kind of presentation of social security or welfare being described as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Often there is this idea that we want to get away from welfare dependency, that we want to move people into paid work and the idea that these are different things entirely. We often have UK politicians talking about people in work and people on welfare as two distinct groups when, of course, and as with universal credit, they are very often one and the same thing. Those actually relate in terms of the design and implementation of universal credit and that constant means test. There was a kind of presentation of disaster, to use their language, trying to wean people off welfare to make sure they were not getting things they do not need or were not entitled to. To echo what Professor Millar and Ms Bennett said, this discourse reached its zenith at about the same time as universal credit was being rolled out.

One of the things we have not touched on, which perhaps is not directly relevant to what this committee is looking at, is related to the stigma of social security receipt and the extent to which, or whether, the stigma of social security receipt may impede take up and how it impacts on people's experiences of the benefit. I was too early in my academic career to be either strongly pro- or anti-universal credit when it was being rolled out but what was really interesting about it was the possibility that it might reduce the stigma of claiming social welfare receipt precisely because it was a benefit that people received both in and out of work. I was hopeful that would be something that would happen with universal credit but what has happened instead is that some of the stigma has been extended to people in low-paid work because it has been married with conditionality as well. It is right to pay attention to the surrounding discourses and the extent to which we increasingly see social security represented as a problem rather than part of a possible solution.