Relinquishing Rights? The Impact of Activation on Citizenship for Lone Parents in the UK

Abstract

Despite high levels of lone parents with low labour market participation rates and a common experience of poverty, the UK has, until recently, lagged behind other European countries in applying work-related conditions to lone parents receiving benefits. Traditionally, the UK’s ‘liberal’ model of social insurance (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Gallie and Paugam, 2000a) largely overlooked the situation of social assistance claimants with primary caring responsibilities. This can be understood in the light of a legacy of conservative non-interventionist approaches to family policy and a related lack of investment in a comprehensive formal childcare infrastructure, which, combined with low wages for part-time work, created very significant barriers to paid employment. Since the late 1990s, however, this picture has changed dramatically. For more than a decade, social security in the UK has been fundamentally reformed in order to reinforce a vision of social citizenship in which the primary legitimate societal contribution is conceived of in narrow individual economic terms as active engagement in paid employment. There has been an explicit reformulation of rights and responsibilities, which assumes ‘work is the best form of welfare’ (DWP, 2008). Reforms to systems of income maintenance (1997–2010) were guided by the goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020.