Introduction

In recent decades, British Social Attitudes has provided much-cited evidence of public attitudes hardening towards the benefits system. Over a period of economic growth from the mid-1990s, the British public has come to view benefit claimants as less deserving and the disincentive effects of the benefits system as greater. Partly as a result, people have become generally less supportive of spending on benefits (e.g. Taylor-Gooby and Martin, 2008; Clery et al., 2013). Last year’s British Social Attitudes report pointed to some signs that attitudes towards benefit claiming might be starting to soften (Pearce and Taylor, 2013). This seems likely to be what has been called a ‘thermostat’ effect (Stuart and Wlezien, 2005; Curtice, 2010): as a room gets warmer or colder we want to turn the heat down or up, even if our ideal temperature is unchanged. When it comes to the benefits system, this would mean that when people think that benefits are being cut – for example, as a result of the coalition government’s reductions in benefits spending – they may be more likely to want an increase in spending on benefits, even if their underlying view about the ideal level of spending is unchanged. As described above there is some evidence for this.[1] Given that spending cuts on benefits are likely to continue – only six per cent of the proposed public spending cuts were implemented by the time of the 2012 British Social Attitudes survey cited in last year’s report (Adam et al., 2012:47) – we might expect this kind of thermostatic trend to carry on.

Yet there is another way in which attitudes can change to reflect the world around them: as levels of social need rise, support for the benefits system may change. We have seen considerable changes in social need in recent years, although this is less to do with rising unemployment than might be imagined. Unemployment among the working-age population rose during the economic downturn, from five per cent in late 2007 to a peak of nine per cent in late 2011, and still high at almost eight per cent in mid-2013. However, the unemployment peak is lower than in recent recessions, and inactivity has also declined, so the overall employment rate is only just below the pre-2007 level.[2] 

Rising social need instead reflects a number of other trends. Increasing numbers of people do not claim unemployment benefits – for example, the take-up of income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance among those who would be eligible fell from 71–84% to 51–60% over the decade from 1997/8, before rising slightly back to 60–67% in 2009–10 (DWP, 2012). Moreover, for those people who are reliant on the benefits and tax credits system, there have been various reductions in spending as a result of policy changes which total over £15 billion for 2013/14 (Downing and Kennedy, 2013:21), alongside a more than doubling in the sanctioning/
disallowance rate for JSA claimants since 2006 (Webster 2014: Figure 2). There is also a debate about whether some food bank networks are right to say that the single largest reason that rising numbers of people come to them is because of difficulties with the benefits system – a claim that has been heavily contested, with little robust evidence by which to adjudicate (Downing and Kennedy, 2013).

The change that has captured the public mood the most, though, is the ‘cost of living’ debate. This debate was partly prompted by rising costs in household essentials: the cost of energy bills rose by more than 60 per cent between the start of the economic crisis in 2008 and 2013, and food, water and transport costs all rose by more than 20 per cent (Adams et al., 2014). Yet rises in costs have not been matched by rising earnings: one reason why unemployment has not risen further is because the downturn was absorbed through lower earnings, following an earlier period in which median earnings stagnated. In combination, all of this means that the average (median) household is six per cent worse off in real terms in 2013/14 than its pre-crisis peak (Adams et al., 2014), and the average working-age household in 2011/12 was no better off than they were fully ten years earlier (Office for National Statistics, 2013). This is a sharp change from the year-on-year improvements in living standards to which we had become accustomed. As a result, a greater proportion of those living in poverty in 2011/12 were in working families rather than in workless ones, unlike in the previous fifteen years (MacInnes et al., 2013:27). 

It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the cost of living has therefore become central to political and media debate. The term ‘the squeezed middle’ was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2011 after being popularised (although not coined) by the Labour leader Ed Miliband; and while the Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg have eschewed the term ‘the squeezed middle’, living standards are a key issue across the political spectrum. For example, the Labour Party is promising to freeze energy prices if elected, and the government is cutting energy bills by reducing environmental obligations on energy companies in 2013. 

There has been little written on the perceptions towards the benefits system of those people struggling with the cost of living within working households (barring brief mentions in Hills, 2001; Bromley, 2003). There are certainly at least two schools of thought about how they might feel. One argument is that if people themselves are struggling then they may be more likely to support the benefits system. There is certainly evidence that self-interest is one influence on people’s attitudes towards benefits (Sundberg, 2014) resulting in economic downturns often being times of raised support for benefits (Clery, 2012). Rising awareness of the financial struggles of other people may also make us see claimants as more ‘deserving’ (van Oorschot, 2000). A second argument, however, is that the financial worries of people in working households will lead to a resentment towards benefit claimants, whose ‘unfair’, undeserving claims are contrasted with the daily struggles of ‘hard-working families’ (Hoggett et al., 2013). While all political parties have talked this way at times, it is most famously captured in George Osborne’s 2012 remark:

Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?[3]

This political stance has been covered in the dramatic rise in press coverage of the benefits system since the start of the recession. While this raised coverage cannot be described simply as being more negative towards benefit claiming than before, there is a definite longer-run trend for benefits to be increasingly described as ‘handouts’ (Baumberg et al., 2012). One possibility, then, is that the attitudes of the ‘squeezed middle’ may follow the winds of these political and media discourses like a ‘weathervane’ (Curtice, 2010), hardening attitudes further. 

In this chapter, we first look at trends in attitudes in the population as a whole to see if cost of living pressures – or policy changes, or rising social need – have led to recent changes in attitudes (as well as putting these in the context of the sweeping longer-term shifts that previous researchers have shown). We then look for evidence as to whether, within the current economic and political context, Britain’s struggling working households are becoming more or less sympathetic to those claiming benefits.