Justifying conditionality: sanctions, support and behaviour change in UK

Welfare conditionality is about linking welfare rights to ‘responsible’ behaviour. Within and beyond the UK, the use of conditional welfare arrangements that combine elements of sanction and support which aim to ‘correct’ the ‘problematic’ behaviour of certain recipients of welfare is now well established and is currently embedded in a broad range of policy arenas including unemployment and disability benefit systems. Professor Peter Dwyer is one of the leading thinkers on welfare conditionality in the UK. He will offer some early findings from the five year ESRC funded ‘Welfare Conditionality—Sanctions, Support and Behaviours Change’ project. The lecture will set out the extent to which welfare conditionality has become a key component of the UK welfare state and then explore the ways in which key informants seek to justify or oppose its use in a range of welfare settings. This lecture will be chaired by Dr John Hewson. Dr Hewson is the Chair of the Tax and Transfer Policy Unit at the Australian National University. He is also a Board member of the Sir Roland Wilson Foundation Board. This lecture is presented by the Sir Roland Wilson Foundation, and is co-hosted by the Australian Centre for Applied Social Research Methods, the Crawford Social Policy Institute and the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at the Australian National University. It is being held as part of the International Conference on Welfare Reform: Meeting the Policy Challenges of Change.