Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper uses qualitative interview evidence to understand the ways in which working age social security recipients in England use and understand different payments. The divergent ways in which different payments are understood and used have important implications for the design of social security policy.

Policy documents suggest that social security payments are designed with the assumption that the way in which a payment is labelled, and delivered into the household, will influence how its recipients perceive and use it. However, evidence suggests that other contextual factors beyond a payment’s ‘design’ affect how this money is understood and used. This paper will present preliminary findings from a qualitative interview study with social security recipients in east London to understand how and why they organise and spend their social security money as they do. The study is carried out on a ‘policy fault line’, as existing working age social security payments are gradually being replaced by the new Universal Credit, making its findings particularly pertinent.

The paper draws on insights from new economic sociology, a perspective that has not been extensively applied in the British social security literature, and particularly the work of Viviana Zelizer. Money should not be regarded as a neutral, objective medium, but as one which is highly dependent upon context, and that will be interpreted and used differently according to the given context.

The central finding is that there are both tensions and consistencies between the ‘design features’ of social security payments and how they are interpreted and used by their recipients. The ‘features’ of a social security payment, including its label, payment regime, and entitlement criteria, all provide prompts for how a recipient will use a payment. Examples of this include the frequency of a payment being reflected in a recipient's’ budgeting timescales, or payments labelled as being for children being put to one side to be spent on a child. However, these ‘features’ can also come into conflict with the priorities or interpretations of the recipient. For example, payments labelled as being for children being used to pay an urgent utility bill, or tax credits that are conceptualised as an extra ‘reward’ for work being dipped into to pay the rent which is not covered by a housing benefit payment. Recipients are often aware of, and work to negotiate and reconcile, such ‘transgressions’. The ways in which recipients negotiate these instances of ‘cognitive dissonance’ add to our understanding of the implications of social security policy design.