Our research team made a series of presentations to this year's Social Policy Association conference 7-9 July. Here are the slides and brief descriptions from the sessions.
Lessons on entitlement and adequacy in the UK social security system
Dr Dan Edmiston, University of Leeds
This presentation considers questions of entitlement and adequacy in the UK social security system and what impact this has on the rate and profile of poverty. Synthesising the findings from across our project so far, the presentation provides a detailed picture of the changing financial security of those seeking public assistance to develop an understanding of how the benefits system currently works in practice - in particular, how basic needs are often traded off against one another by certain claimants and their wider networks over time.
Was the furlough scheme part of "the benefits system"?
Dr David Robertshaw, University of Leeds
Having supported over 11 million jobs within its first year, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) or ‘furlough’ has been one of the most prominent and expensive national policy responses to COVID-19 in the UK. But to what extent has furlough been understood as distinct from the wider social security system? And how do attitudes towards CJRS relate to perceptions of the wider social security system and claimant experiences of stigma?
Covid exceptionalism? Attitudes towards claiming working age benefits during the pandemic
Dr Kate Summers, London School of Economics
The pandemic has been viewed as a key moment for policy change – the idea seeming to be that the unprecedented conditions of the pandemic set the scene/create the space for unprecedented types and scale of change. But should the pandemic be considered as a hiatus in terms of social security policymaking, or as a watershed moment? By looking at the accounts of claimants themselves we can begin to understand what it felt like to be a claimant during the pandemic.
For more detail on our research findings, see our publications pa