Welfare-to-work is the root cause of punitive hardships – the threat of sanctions and release of personal information hurt the most vulnerable.

Even though work is an important good and people generally want to work, there are reasons of principle to question conditional systems of benefit. In 1998 Jonathan Wolff questioned whether they are compatible with equality, as they require the most disadvantaged in society to reveal information about their circumstances, while ‘the rich do not have to explain how they got rich’,11 but also because of what he calls ‘shameful revelation’.12 On this analysis, there are things that people do not want to reveal to anyone, including themselves. If someone is unemployed at a time of low unemployment, the failure to be employed is not perceived to be due to external circumstances, but due to lack of talent or aptitude for the jobs that are available. Welfare-to-work schemes in this case require that those who want welfare support to prove to themselves and to state authorities that they have failed to get a job despite the fact that there are few employment opportunities. They have to reveal facts that may be degrading, embarrassing or humiliating, in a manner that makes it impossible to think of themselves as equals in society. ‘This removes any last shred of dignity from those already in a very unfortunate position.’13 Wolff was concerned that egalitarian theories of distributive justice focus on individual responsibility for people’s condition in order to assess what is the fair distribution of resources, and argued that an egalitarian ethos is not only about fairness in distribution of resources, but also about respect.14 Wolff’s argument is an important normative argument involving the compatibility of these schemes with egalitarian values.15 In the UK welfare-to-work schemes and their underlying principles are not a new phenomenon, but have become especially punitive in recent years.16 They represent a shift away from social security as a way to prevent hardship to a way to get people into work, 17 and have been endorsed both by Labour and Conservative governments. The way that they have evolved helps illustrate how over the last two decades there has been a turn towards a particularly strict conditionality system. In 1995 the Jobseekers Act was enacted, which involved the assessment of jobseekers’ behaviour. Labour Governments (1997-2010) endorsed welfare-to-work as a key element of their policy that insisted that the unemployed should access paid work as quickly as possible, otherwise there would be stepped up sanctions, consisting in reduction of their welfare benefits. During this same period conditionality applied to more groups of welfare support claimants than before, including people with disabilities and single parents. In 2002, an agency called Jobcentre Plus was established, which was for all those who claimed benefits and were out of work. Personal advisers were introduced who would support claimants to find work, and a weekly plan (the ‘jobseeker’s agreement’) was put in place for everyone. The advisers would regularly monitor compliance with the agreement and refer claimants who had not met the conditions to the Department for Work and Pensions. Other tasks of the advisers were to issue a ‘jobseeker’s direction’ which gave specific guidance on how to look for a job, to receive training and improve their employability. Advisers also had the power to impose sanctions if the claimants did not meet the conditions imposed. One of the key aims of the regime was to support not only jobseekers, but also those with childcare responsibilities, the ill and disabled, to find work. The Welfare Reform Act 2007 introduced among other things a stricter test for disabled claimants, who were assigned personal advisers and would be sanctioned if they did not take part in the scheme. The Welfare Reform Act 2009 extended conditionality to other groups, such as single parents.