Conclusions

Attitudes to benefits

There has been a widely-reported hardening in public attitudes to the benefits system in the past two decades. More recently, though, there are good reasons to have expected public attitudes to benefit claiming to have changed. If people’s views respond like a thermostat, reacting to how much they think is being spent on benefits, we might expect to see an increased proportion in favour of raising benefits spending following recent reductions in spending. There have also been rises in levels of social need in Britain – rising unemployment, benefits cuts and sanctioning – and also cost of living pressures even for those who are working. It is hard to predict whether this might lead to more support for the benefits system (both through rising self-interest and rising perceptions of genuine need), or to less support (through increased resentment of benefit claimants). 

However, despite all these changes, the first part of this chapter shows that attitudes have actually changed relatively little in the past few years. There are occasional signs of attitudes softening:[20] fewer believe that “large numbers of people these days falsely claim benefits” and levels of support for spending more on welfare benefits for the poor are now at their highest since the economic downturn in 2008 (although there is no rise in support for spending when we look at benefits for specific groups, and there is even a drop in support for spending on benefits for retired people). Furthermore, one attitude that was thought in last year’s report to be softening has since gone in the reverse direction, about whether unemployment benefits are too low and cause hardship versus disincentivisingly high. Overall, changes in attitudes since 2009 are relatively few, and much smaller in scale than the far-reaching shifts over the fifteen years that preceded them. This seems to confirm that the longer-term changes in attitudes were neither simply reactions to a period of economic growth (which has now ended) nor to perceived increases in the generosity of the benefits system under the Labour government of the time (which has now been replaced). 

However, it is crucial to stress that considerable support for the benefits system remains – a fact that is often lost when the longer-term trends are reported. Over 60 per cent of the British public believes that there is quite a lot of real poverty in Britain and that poverty has been increasing over the past ten years (both of which have risen since the question was last asked). People do not believe that benefits on their own are particularly generous; few people believe that unemployment benefits provide more than enough to live on, and when people are told the actual level of unemployment benefits, most people think they do not provide enough to live on. (That said, people also believe that low-paid jobs do not provide enough to live on, which seems to be the reason that a majority still believe that unemployment benefits are too high.) Previous British Social Attitudes reports have shown that majorities of people still believe that the government should be mainly responsible for ensuring people have enough money to live in retirement, if they become unemployed, or if they become disabled (Clery, 2012). Only a minority agree that many social security claimants do not deserve help, or that most unemployment claimants are “fiddling” – despite unemployment claimants being the most unpopular type of claimant in the benefits system – even if most people think that large numbers falsely claim benefits. Elsewhere we have shown that despite widespread concern about benefit fraud, most people do not think that most claimants are ‘false’ or ‘fraudulent’ (Baumberg et al., 2012). Finally, the numbers of people wanting to raise spending on benefits in general, or raise pensioner and single parent benefits are greater than the numbers who want to cut them – and there are outright majorities in favour of more spending on disabled people, carers, and parents working on low incomes. 

This is not to deny that there has been a considerable hardening in attitudes towards claimants, or that many are ambivalent or favour lower spending on unemployment benefits, which are seen as too high compared to low-waged work. Still, an accurate view of public attitudes must be aware of the levels of support for benefits spending that nonetheless remain, which are often overlooked in debates about benefits in Britain.

Attitudes to benefits and cost of living pressures

While concerns about the cost of living are clear in both political debate and in hard economic data, the link between these concerns and people’s attitudes about the benefits system has rarely been explored. The slight recent changes in attitudes that have occurred – and the absence of more far-reaching changes – also raise further questions about the link between cost of living pressures and attitudes about the benefits system. We looked at whether ‘squeezed’ households (working-age households containing a working adult whose main source of income is not benefits, who report struggling financially) have different attitudes to benefit claiming, or whether there are any differences among those who perceive many others as struggling financially. And we report on how the attitudes of this group have changed over time. 

In British Social Attitudes, just under one in five people say their household is struggling financially, a majority say they are not living comfortably, and a majority believe there is quite a lot of poverty in Britain. At the start of the chapter, we presented the fact that a reasonable case could be made that the ‘squeezed middle’ might have either harder or softer attitudes to benefit claiming than their more comfortably off counterparts. Their own financial struggles may make people more supportive of benefit claimants and the benefits system; yet equally plausibly the struggles of these ‘hard-working families’ may make them resentful of benefits spending. In practice, and after taking into account people’s age, gender and class we find that people struggling financially are noticeably more supportive of greater spending on “welfare benefits for the poor”, and they are more likely to think that unemployment benefits are not enough to live on. Likewise, where people in working households perceive that others’ poverty is widespread, they are more supportive than those who think that poverty affects only a minority of claimants and benefits spending.

More people are struggling financially than they have been in the past, and they also perceive others as being in the same plight. Although comparisons over time are made slightly more complex by a slight change of question in 2010, we see an increase in the proportion of working households in financial difficulties from 11 per cent to 17 per cent between 2006 and 2009, and then a rise in the proportion struggling from 14 per cent to 18 per cent between 2010 and 2013. There has also been a rise in the proportion of people perceiving there to be “quite a lot” of poverty, from 58 per cent to 62 per cent between 2009 and 2013, and a very sharp rise over the same period in the perception that poverty has increased in the past ten years, from 47 per cent to 64 per cent. In this sense, people’s experiences and perceptions do seem to have at least partly followed both political debate and the lack of growth in average living standards in the past ten years. 

Finally, this raises the question of whether it has always been the case that those in working households who struggle financially are more supportive of the benefits system, or whether this is affected by the economic cycle. It appears that the answer is ‘yes’: most of the differences we see today are also visible in the year 2000. However, more recently financial strugglers in working households have become more sensitive to the disincentive effects of unemployment benefits, with their views converging a little with those living comfortably. This is not the case when we look at those who perceive there to be little or a lot of poverty in Britain, with the gap in attitudes between these two groups as wide now as it was in 2000.

Final thoughts

The cost of living debates in the past few years have happened alongside occasional signs of a softening of public attitudes to the benefits system, both in terms of the perceived deservingness of claimants and in terms of preferences for spending on “benefits for the poor”. At the same time, those struggling financially also seem to have become more worried about the disincentive effects of unemployment benefits, relative to those living comfortably. However, there is little sign of change in other attitudes (including those around perceived deservingness and spending preferences), and even those trends that exist are relatively slight in comparison to the more far-reaching hardening of attitudes that came in the preceding 10 to 15 years. And despite this hardening, considerable sympathy for the benefits system does remain – which can be seen most clearly of all in the fact that even in 2013, there are greater numbers who want more spending on benefits for disabled people, carers, single parents, pensioners, parents working on low incomes and on benefits in general than the numbers who want less spending.