Alison Park: Public opinion has hardened towards the welfare state

SINCE the 1980s, there has been a huge change in the way that people in Yorkshire and Humberside think about welfare benefits and the unemployed.

Today the 30th British Social Attitudes survey reveals that more than half of people in Yorkshire and Humberside think that unemployment benefits are too high and discourage people from working.

Compare this with the fact that fewer than a third of people thought this in 1986 and you see a clear change in how the people in the region view benefits. They are not alone, however, as this hardening of public opinion has happened across the UK.

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NatCen Social Research has been collecting the views of people on a range of political, social and moral issues since 1983 and some of the most striking findings concern the way in which the public thinks about the welfare state. A quarter of a century ago, more than half of people in the Yorkshire and Humberside region said that they wanted government to spend more money on benefits for the poor, even if it meant raising taxes; this has now fallen to less than a third.

How do attitudes in Yorkshire and Humberside compare with those in other parts of the country? We can rank the regions from the most favourable to more spending on the welfare state (the top two being London and the North West) to the most sceptical (the East and the South of England), with Yorkshire and Humberside lying pretty much in the middle. These regional differences reflect a number of factors, particularly their social and demographic make-up.

Because the British Social Attitudes survey asks questions about this issue every year, it is possible to look at when attitudes changed, and among whom, giving us clues as to what might lie beneath this major shift in the public’s mood.

This shows that the 1990s were a key period of change; with one interpretation for this being the impact on the public’s views of the tougher approach to benefits for those who were out of work being taken by the Labour Party from the mid-1990s onwards.

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Much like David Cameron today, Tony Blair had put forward major welfare legislation citing public concern as a key reason for reform. The reforms, among other things, promoted the importance of paid work while emphasising the responsibilities as well as the rights of benefit recipients.

It is worth recognising that despite this trend towards a hardening in our attitudes to welfare benefits, the Yorkshire public still remain divided on this key policy issue.

When we ask people in Yorkshire and Humberside if they agree with the statement “around here, most unemployed people could find a job if they really wanted one”, exactly half agree; but the remainder do not. Similarly, while the number of people who want to see an increase in spending on benefits for the poor has fallen over time, a third would still like to see this – which is roughly the same proportion as those who would oppose any such increase.

Despite this overall trend, our 2012 survey, carried out when welfare reform and austerity were at the top of the political agenda in the months after the passage through Parliament of the Welfare Reform Act, shows what might be the first signs of a softening in attitudes.

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Nationally there has been a sharp fall in the proportion of people who say unemployment benefits are too high and put people off finding work (dropping from 62 per cent in 2011 to 51 per cent) and a smaller increase in people saying that they would be happy for spending on benefits to increase from (42 per cent to 47 per cent).

However, opinion on these issues didn’t in fact move as much in Yorkshire and Humberside as they did elsewhere.

The biggest shifts occurred in the South West, East and South East of England and Scotland, where attitudes to whether benefits are too high moved by well over 10 percentage points. But there were still indications that attitudes might be starting to change.

Our interviewers are still working on our 2013 survey, the first since the Government introduced the so-called “bedroom tax” and the benefits cap, and we are eager to see their findings so that we can examine what impact these policy developments have had on public attitudes.

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The findings we have seen this year hint at the public becoming more sympathetic on welfare and the unemployed, a change that could well gather speed as the impacts of austerity take hold.

*Alison Park is Head of Society and Social Change at NatCen Social Research which carries out the annual British Social Attitudes survey.