Daniel Edmiston

Indentured: benefit deductions, debt recovery and welfare disciplining

The UK social security system performs an important role as a creditor and debt collector for many benefit claimants, with more affected by deductions than formal welfare conditionality or sanctions. Deductions, then, are central to understanding low-income life in the UK. Daniel will present research which draws on a mixed-methods project to explore the policy rationale, administration and effects of benefit deductions at a particular moment of crisis. New analysis of statistical releases suggests increasing indebtedness and an Inverse Care Law, whereby UK social security performs worst for those who need it most. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the height of the cost-of-living crisis, this research explores how deductions affect the lives and trajectories of low-income claimants over time. The analysis offered details how deductions weaponize debt, often in ways that financialise benefit claimants and their entitlements that prove counter-productive to the stated policy objectives of deductions: worsening the poverty-debt trap and pushing people (further) away from the labour market.

Daniel Edmiston is a British Academy Wolfson Fellow in the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE. He is also Principal Investigator of the WHOCOUNTS project in the Institute of Government and Public Policies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.