Those of us used to writing on social policy matters are always cautioned against dating our work too quickly. This warning feels especially relevant when revisiting my two previous Transforming Society posts. In the first one, I welcomed the new ‘grown-up’ government and in the second, signalled cautious optimism for the first budget. However, writing today, defending the government’s actions is becoming increasingly untenable. To all intents and purposes, they are a continuation of the welfare cruelty I really hoped we’d see the back of. It is perhaps true that we project onto those with power our own hopes for what can and should change, even when they have stubbornly refused to suggest this is in their plans.
Amnesty International’s report: A damning verdict
In April 2025, Amnesty International published a damning indictment of the UK’s social security system. Its warning is clear: austerity has not gone away; it has just been rebranded. The report, Social Insecurity, identifies the weaknesses that many of us know to be at the heart of our welfare system. Complex and alienating processes that lack transparency. Payments that fall well below the threshold to meet basic sustenance needs. A sanctions regime that exacerbates financial hardship, with minor infractions leading to severe penalties. These findings will surely resonate with those studying, campaigning or working within the modern architecture of welfare.
This is not the first time an international authority on human rights has called the UK’s practices into question. Remember that it was not so long ago that Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, called out the government for remaining ‘determinedly in a state of denial’ over what all other sensible analysts and authorities were pointing out: the fortunes of the least well off are ‘in dramatic decline’.
Labour’s role in conditional welfare
It is not as if Labour is a stranger to building ‘activation-based’ welfare policies – those that prioritise triggering engagement in the labour market. It was under the previous New Labour government that welfare reform and conditionality came to maturity, paving the way for the austerity measures and welfare cuts introduced in the 2000s under the Coalition and then Conservative governments.
What is personally galling is that we have moved so far from the principles enshrined in the foundation of the post-war welfare state – a framework introduced by Labour itself.
The cruel logic of austerity
The approach to reducing the welfare bill and addressing some of the UK’s significant challenges is one built on reductive assumptions. It argues that the way to stimulate productivity and activate greater participation in the labour market is to cut back the levels of funding made available to those who need help.
The inescapable logic of this approach is that if I face increasing destitution, conditions will become so unbearable that I will be triggered into entering the employment market come what may. Yet, this simple equation fails to recognise the complexity of people’s lives, the interconnectedness of longstanding health issues, neighbourhood and town deprivation, the creaking public service infrastructure and the precarity in the labour market. It also puts the entire onus of participation on those whose lives have been shattered from many years of neglect.
Norman Tebbit signalled much the same in his infamous ‘get on your bike’ anecdote.
Tightening the eligibility to enhanced Personal Independence Payments for disabled people and ruling out the ending of the two-child benefit cap are two very strong signals of this. They frame the problem of poverty and exclusion as within the responsibility of those affected.
Beyond Jobcentres: A radical rethink is needed
Labour’s champions will be quick to point to more supportive reforms that mitigate, and some of this argument is hard to refute. Who doesn’t want to see a radical overhaul of our Jobcentres, given that they seem to function only as benefit eligibility checkers? But we need to go beyond tweaks to component parts to a wholesale and radical rethink of what public services are about, and what they are seeking to achieve. Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help lays this bare, showing how dysfunctional and unproductive Jobcentres have become. But they are not alone: the whole architecture of welfare can be criticised for its curious juxtaposition of being both alienating and depersonalised on the one hand, and deeply personal on the other, reinforcing division and stigma throughout its design and delivery.
The most powerful effect of this continued approach is how normalised our cruelty has become. In place of radical solutions to our pressing health, social and economic woes, we continue to attack the dignity of those who need help with our legacy and new media acting in consort. As I wrote in The Kindness Fix, it is now all too easy to strip back support in the name of distrusting those in need. However, there are profound and lasting social, moral and economic costs if we continue to do so.
Alternatives do exist
By coincidence, during the week in which I read the Amnesty International report, I was researching the work of the international NGO GiveDirectly, which featured in my book. The work of GiveDirectly is everything the tenor of proposed welfare reform isn’t. Through an unconditional cash transfers scheme, the charity has demonstrated a massive and sustained impact on beneficiaries. It prioritises dignity and rebalances power, doing away with complex eligibility assessment processes and placing no conditions on what individuals in poverty should spend their money on. Moreover, through a series of randomised control trials and other studies, it is able to demonstrate the economic and social multiplier effects of this intervention showing both the sustainability of positive change and its impact on surrounding communities.
I’m not holding out any hope that the UK government will adopt such radical strategies, but as each year goes by, tweaking and adding to the creaking architecture of the help we give to others is far from the solution we need. To do so with punitive language and a focus again on individual means and responsibility is to set a path for even greater economic and social inequality failure down the road. This government feels as far from that level of thinking as possible, hamstrung by short-term political challenges from the right, and a hostage-to-fortune set of fiscal principles.
Yet, sooner or later, the challenge to think afresh will become more urgent as the world around us continues to change at an unimaginable pace. How we care for each other and prosper together requires us to have the courage to break with the cruelty so evident in these past few decades.
Jason Pandya-Wood is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and an Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Nottingham Malaysia.
The Kindness Fix by Jason Wood is available on Policy Press for £12.99 here.
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