WELFARE CITIZENSHP AND ECONOMIC RATIONALITY : SUMMARY OF FINDINGS




A study of 35 social security benefit claimants engaged in benefit fraud, mainly through working while claiming. The research used discursive interviews and focus group methods and was carried out in Luton and London, in 1994 and 1995.

For more details contact:

Dr Hartley Dean, Department of Social Studies, University of Luton, Park Square, Luton, Beds, LU1 3JU, UK; Tel: +1582 734111; Fax: +1582 489358.

Key Points from the Research

1. The research has provided new knowledge about and insights into social security benefit fraud and the beliefs and motivations of those who commit it. In particular, it has provided empirical evidence further to inform debate concerning the existence of alternative or resistance sub-cultures and the ways in which people may respond to or resist the erosion of the social rights of citizenship.

2. The project generated an innovative theoretical model based on the sociological theories of Giddens and others about risk society', which describes how reflexivity and anxiety intersect in the lives of people living at the margins of an increasingly polarised society.

3. The research furnishes a new example of the ways in which computer-aided qualitative discourse analysis (CAQDAS) can be applied in social research.

4. The research shows how social security fraud supports the functioning of the informal and shadow economy and is often pursued with the knowledge of employers because benefits support low wages in marginal sectors of industry.

5. The research also indicates that fraud may be a response to the discovery that it is very difficult to survive on social benefits. This has implications for civic trust in the citizenship offered by the welfare state.

Summary of Research Results

Background

Based within the discipline of social policy, the aim of the project was to study the attitudes and motivations of people engaged in individual benefit fraud. The object was to determine whether benefit fraud could be understood in terms of its economic rationality on the one hand (because it is seen as an effective way for people on low incomes to get extra money) and/or as an unravelling of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship on the other. The study used qualitative methods and relied primarily on interviews with a sample of 35 social security recipients who had made fraudulent claims by concealing personal circumstances affecting their entitlement. The project was not concerned with organised' forms of fraud (such as counterfeiting or systematic multiple identity claims). Contact with respondents, who were drawn mainly from Luton and London, was established through community ;gatekeepers', informal contacts and snowballing'. Data from the interviews were studied using both conventional content coding and computer aided qualitative discourse analysis.

Main Findings

Most respondents were engaged in informal employment and were concealing their earnings from the benefit authorities, although this was often being done with the collusion of low-paying employers. Almost all the respondents cited economic deprivation or hardship as the primary reason for their behaviour. Fraudulent claims were not informed by a sophisticated understanding of the workings of the social security system and only seldom by any degree of systematic planning. The way in which those interviewed understood the rights and responsibilities of citizenship tended to be depleted and ambiguous: most believed they had rights to benefits, but they neither prized such rights nor associated them directly with notions of collective obligation. They generally did not regard their behaviour as inherently dishonest.

For most respondents the anxieties associated with living on a low income outweighed the fear of detection and prosecution for benefit fraud. In spite of the considerable apprehension which some respondents felt, few would easily be deterred from fraudulent claiming. Almost without exception, however, they would readily be dissuaded from doing so if reasonably paid legitimate employment were available to them.

Respondents did not conform to any single type. The women and older people in the sample tended to have a clearer commitment to the ideals of welfare citizenship than did the men and the younger respondents. Only a minority of respondents lacked any sense of scruple about what they did, and for only a few was fraudulent claiming in any sense a self-consciously subversive activity. Most respondents experienced anxiety about claiming benefit fraudulently. For some this was past and parcel of the fatalism with which they engaged with a life of uncertainty. For others (the largest group in the sample), fraudulent claiming was simply a rather poorly calculated act of desperation.

Fraudulent claimants appeared by and large to have expectations about the rewards to which they were entitled, but fears and beliefs which stemmed less from the values of social democratic citizenship than from cultural values about work and consumption; values which require that a certain level of consumption be maintained through work of an acceptable qualitative and quantitative nature. In this, even the more unscrupulous or subversive claimants respondents did not aspire to a fundamentally different set of values. Although some social security claimants may be resisting what they perceive to be an erosion of the social rights of citizenship and to be willing to break the rules of the benefit system, this project found little sign of a culture of resistance' or for an effective sub-cultural or alternative value system.

Conclusions

From the evidence of this project, therefore, benefit fraud does not signify any erosion of the work ethic or of people's desire to participate in conventional life-styles. It is a conflictual and relatively unrewarding activity for most of those engaged in it. However, in the context of a restrictive benefits regime and a highly casualised labour market, benefit fraud represents a rational survival strategy for some people, and is clearly benefiting employers who operate at or beyond the margins of the formal market. It is also consistent with - if it has not been nourished by - an impoverished conception of citizenship.

Publications

Dean, H. and Melrose, M., "Fiddling the Social: Understanding Benefit Fraud", Benefits, 14, 17-18, September 1995.

Dean, H. and Barrett, D., "Unrespectable Research and Researching the Unrespectable", in H. Dean and D. Barrett (eds.), Ethics and Social Policy Research, University of Luton and the Social Policy Association, 1996.

Dean, H. and Melrose, M., "Unravelling Citizenship: The Significance of Social Security Benefit Fraud", Critical Social Policy, 16,3, 3-33, August 1996.


Link to Full List of Project Publications

Link to List of Programme Discussion Papers