Health and socio-political crises combined during the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit (the UK's exit from the European Union) impacting the housing experiences of migrant essential workers. Major new research funded by the UK Economic and Social Council generated three datasets: an online survey (n = 1,105) and interviews with 40 UK-based Polish essential workers and 10 stakeholders. The sequential exploratory mixed-methods analysis reveals housing precarity as the missing link in understanding systemic resilience during times of ongoing polycrisis. We find housing precarity is not only intersectionally differentiated and compounded for individual migrants but also creates society-wide vulnerabilities that undermine the labour market, economy and society. Essential workers whose financial situation worsened, job changed and/or employment was part-time were disproportionately affected. Youth, especially men with lower education, limited access to social security and insecure immigration status were particularly associated with moving home. Overcrowding was problematic because of housemates and landlords, with shared private rental accommodation exposing essential workers to health risks. Lack of access to green space was the element of housing precarity most clearly connected with worsening mental health. Better housing outcomes in Scotland imply that localised approaches in other countries might support essential work even within broader hostile immigration policy contexts.

The implementation of social security in rich nations involves a move away from 'street-level bureaucracy' towards 'screen-level' interfaces. The UK was at the forefront of innovation with the 'digital first' delivery of Universal Credit (UC) as the main working age benefit for those in and out of work 2019 JRF-funded research included 29 in-depth interviews with 19 Universal Credit claimants , three focus groups with a total of 23 DWP staff and two deliberative workshops (with a total of 16 participants, including stakeholders). Although many claimant interviewees could manage their UC claim digitally, some found it dehumanising and those who lacked digital skills/devices/access were still required to use the digital channel. Supporting digital engagement took a major toll on some claimants' families, friends and local support organisations. Frontline DWP staff used their informal discretion to repair the disjuncture between digital policy expectations and claimant realities. Although UC is presented as a digital system, many non-digital interactions and paper-based processes remain Large new areas of formal street-level discretion coexist with digital elements Understanding digitalisation needs to go beyond the mode of delivery to include the influence of policy conditions (e.g. political priorities, ideology/values and funding) and the character of the policy substance (e.g. punitive or enabling).

This article contributes to emerging debates about how behavioural conditionality within welfare systems influences job quality. Drawing upon analysis of unique data from three waves of qualitative longitudinal interviews with 46 UK social security recipients (133 interviews), we establish that the impact of welfare conditionality is so substantial that it is no longer adequate to discuss job quality without reference to its interconnections to the welfare system. More specifically, we identify how conditionality drives welfare recipients’ experience of four core dimensions of job quality: disempowering and propelling claimants towards inadequate pay, insecurity and poor employment terms, undermining multiple intrinsic characteristics of work and creating what we term a new ‘Work–Life–Welfare balance’. Instead of acting as a neutral arbitrator between jobseekers and employers, the welfare system is exposed as complicit in reinforcing one-sided flexibility through one-sided conditionality, by emphasising intensive job-seeking, while leaving poor-quality work provided by employers unchecked.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the UK's socio-economic dependence on a chronically insecure migrant essential workforce. While risking their lives to offset the devastating effects of the pandemic, many migrant workers found themselves in precarious professional and personal circumstances (e.g. temporary zero-hours contracts, work exploitation, limited access to health and social services). This article explores the health, social, economic, and cultural impacts of the pandemic on migrant essential workers in the UK. It focuses on one of the largest non-British nationalities, the Polish community, who - while employed across a range of roles and sectors - are overrepresented in lower-paid essential jobs. The article discusses variegated and interconnected impacts of the pandemic on these workers. It illustrates how Covid-19 affects them in very uneven and sometimes contrasting ways depending on their individual positionalities. Methodologically, the article draws upon 1105 responses to an online survey, 40 interviews with Polish essential workers in the UK and 10 expert interviews with key stakeholders providing support to migrant workers in the country. It is based on the first major research project investigating lived experiences of migrant essential workers in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council.

This second empirical chapter demonstrates the irreconcilable differences between welfare conditionality and the everyday realities of women’s family lives. It tells the stories of women who experienced crushing forms of conditionality – those who were sanctioned 2–5 times and 6 or more times within the 12-month period leading up to their first research interview. Sarah’s experiences of being sanctioned as a disabled in-work Universal Credit claimant illustrate how conditionality displaces adult kin care. Helen’s story of being sanctioned as a disabled ESA Support Group claimant participating voluntarily in the Work Programme demonstrates some injustices of system design, the challenge of wanting to work while in pain and supporting her brother. Jo fell foul of excessive job-search expectations on Jobseeker’s Allowance. Mira experienced in-work racism that was reinforced by out-of-work sanctions. Mira is part of the cohort of lone parents shifted from Income Support to Jobseeker’s Allowance post-2010, who were hammered by sanctions as soon as they were exposed to job-search requirements. Their sanctions were almost always irrational, unjust and unrelated to work efforts.

Drawing on a wealth of qualitative longitudinal evidence, this book casts light on women's lived experiences of welfare and work. It uncovers the hidden gendered bias of conditional welfare reforms to challenge dominant political discourses, policy design and practice norms.

Moving disabled people ‘off benefits and into work’ has been an explicit aim of work-first welfare reform since 2008, increasingly punitively since 2010. The aim of this article is to demonstrate, for the first time, how Universal Credit (UC) fits with and intensifies that strategy. Empirical data from 28 in-depth interviews with 19 claimants (nine were interviewed twice) and three focus groups with 23 Jobcentre staff show how UC full service applies mainstream job search conditionality to people with mental health problems. Ongoing fear of sanctions, financial hardship, surveillance and social isolation relating to digital design had adverse impacts, including for those without previous mental health problems.

Universal Credit is the UK's globally innovative social security reform that replaces six means tested benefits with one monthly payment for working age claimants - combining social security and tax credit systems. Universal Credit expands welfare conditionality via mandatory job search conditions to enhance 'progression' amongst working claimants by requiring extra working hours or multiple jobs. This exposes low paid workers to tough benefit sanctions for non-compliance, which could remove essential income indefinitely or for fixed periods of up to three years. Our unique contribution is to establish how this new regime is experienced at micro level by in-work claimants over time. We present findings from Qualitative Longitudinal Research (141 interviews with 58 claimants, 2014-17), to demonstrate how UC impacts on in-work recipients and how conditionality produces a new coerced worker-claimant model of social support. We identify a series of welfare conditionality mismatches and conclude that conditionality for in-work claimants is largely counterproductive. This implies a redesign of the UK system and serves as an international warning to potential policy emulators.

This paper explores experiences and impacts of welfare conditionality among people with mental health problems in the UK. Understanding of these experiences and impacts is crucial given the UK Government’s ambition to increase the number of people with mental health problems who enter, return or stay in employment. The paper is based on a secondary analysis of 144 interviews originally conducted as part of the Welfare Conditionality project running between 2013 and 2018. Overall, it establishes that welfare conditionality does not have a positive impact on behavioural change and return to employment for people with mental health problems. Furthermore, it shows that those categorised as unfit for work are excluded from back-to-work support. Finally, it demonstrates that mental health is invalidated within the welfare system, and the pressure and poverty arising from conditionality and sanctions are likely to exacerbate mental health problems.

A defining feature of U.K. welfare reform since 2010 has been the concerted move towards greater compulsion and sanctioning, which has been interpreted by some social policy scholars as punitive and cruel. In this article, we borrow concepts from criminology and sociology to develop new interpretations of welfare conditionality. Based on data from a major Economic and Social Research Council-funded qualitative longitudinal study (2014-2019), we document the suffering that unemployed claimants experienced because of harsh conditionality. We find that punitive welfare conditionality often caused symbolic and material suffering and sometimes had life-threatening effects. We argue that a wide range of suffering induced by welfare conditionality can be understood as 'social abuse', including the demoralisation of the futile job-search treadwheel and the self-administered surveillance of the Universal Jobmatch panopticon. We identify a range of active claimant responses to state perpetrated harm, including acquiescence, adaptation, resistance, and disengagement. We conclude that punitive post-2010 unemployment correction can be seen as a reinvention of failed historic forms of punishment for offenders.

In this article, we suggest that social policy may be on the cusp of a large-scale adoption of the notion of lived experience. However, within social policy and allied disciplines, the growing use of the term 'lived experience' is unaccompanied by discussion of what it may mean or imply. We argue that now is a good time to consider what this term could mean for social policy analysis. The peculiarities of Anglo-centric usage of the broader term 'experience' are explored, before we identify and discuss several roots from which understandings of 'lived experience' as a concept and a research strategy have grown: namely, phenomenology, feminist writing and ethnography. Drawing on multiple historical and contemporary international literatures, we identify a set of dilemmas and propositions around: assumed authenticity, questioning taken-for-grantedness, intercorporeality, embodied subjectivity; political strategies of recognition, risks of essentialising, and immediacy of unique personal experiences versus inscription of discourse. We argue that lived experience can inform sharp critique and offer an innovative window on aspects of the 'shared typical'. Our central intention is to encourage and frame debate over what lived experience could mean theoretically and methodologically within social policy contexts and what the implications may be for its continued use.

Punitive welfare conditionality, combining tough sanctions with minimal self-directed support, is a defining feature of contemporary UK working age social security provision. This approach has been justified by policy makers on the basis that it will increase the numbers in paid employment, and thereby offer savings for the public purse that are also beneficial for individuals who are expected to be healthier and better off financially as a result. In this article, we aggregate two qualitative longitudinal studies (Welfare Conditionality, 2014–17; and Lived Experience, 2011–16) that document lived experiences of claiming benefits and using back-to-work support services. In both studies and over time, we find, contrary to policy expectations, that coercion, including sanctions, was usually experienced as unnecessary and harmful and that poverty was prevalent, both in and out of work, tended to worsen and pushed many close to destitution. Conditionality governed encounters with employment services and, perversely, appeared to impede, rather than support, transitions into employment for participants in both studies. These constitute ‘shared typical’ aspects of lived experiences of welfare conditionality. We propose Combined Study Qualitative Longitudinal Research as a new methodological approach to extend inference beyond the usual study-specific confines of qualitative generalisation.