15-minute read
Dermot Feenan
LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law FRSA
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On 11 January 2019, Amber Rudd, newly-appointed Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in Theresa May’s Conservative government did a remarkable thing. She made several references to compassion in her first public speech – on reforms to the controversial benefits scheme, Universal Credit.
The proposed reforms included plans to scrap the retrospective application of a two-child benefit cap and to ensure that household payments go directly to the main carer.
She described the scheme as “a vital reform delivering a fair and compassionate welfare system, which helps people into work.” Towards the end of her speech she said: “A British welfare system should reflect the values of our country. We believe in fairness and compassion. We believe in standing-by people when times get tough. We believe in helping each individual reach their full potential.”
In response to questioning, Ms Rudd said that Universal Credit is delivered with “professionalism and care and compassion”. She added: “The overall product that is Universal Credit is absolutely compassionate […] a vital reform delivering a fair and compassionate welfare system.”
On the same day, she made similar statements in an interview on BBC Radio 4: “Maybe things that were proposed previously weren’t effective or weren’t compassionate in a way that I want them to be. So, I’m going to be perfectly bold about making those changes where I need to.”
These numerous references to compassion are notable for a number of reasons, which I explore here; and, for related reasons which I set out, must be subject to a high degree of scrutiny and scepticism.
Claims by political parties to be for compassion are, of course, not new. In a recent general election, Labour, the Conservatives and UKIP all featured the concept in their manifestos. However, calls for compassion as a basis for political action may, writes Professor Jonathan Marks, be “at least as likely to foster despair and rage as it is to foster benevolence.”
Universal Credit: a vehicle for compassion?
Universal Credit is a benefit for working-age people. It consolidates into one payment six existing benefits (income support; income-based jobseeker’s allowance; income-related employment and support allowance; housing benefit; child tax credit; working tax credit).
It is necessary to recall the genesis of Universal Credit. While lauded by Ms Rudd as “a vital reform delivering a fair and compassionate welfare system”, Universal Credit was the central plank in the Welfare Reform Act 2012 which also introduced harsher benefits sanctions, the benefit cap, the “bedroom tax”, and replacement of Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payments. These reforms emerged within a set of assumptions that treated poverty as resulting from debt, addiction, poor educational attainment, worklessness and family breakdown, not unjust distribution of wealth. According to this logic, says Bernadette Meaden, an associate of the Christian political think-tank Ekklesia: “Fixing poverty meant fixing poor people and making them behave differently. There was a preoccupation with people who were not working, and a belief that many had made a lifestyle choice to live on benefits. Because of this, making life on benefits far more difficult for people and thus driving or ‘incentivising’ them into employment became an overriding aim of welfare reform and UC [Universal Credit].”
The House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee described the proposal to apply the two-cap policy retrospectively as cruel. Cancelling a policy that others call cruel does not necessarily mean that the person cancelling that policy is compassionate. But Ms Rudd will not lift the two-child cap. Her reasoning? “We’re asking people to think, just as people do on…who are in jobs…who have incomes, about whether they can afford a third or fourth child”, she said.
Thinking, by itself, cannot prevent poverty. Families may be unable, through unplanned pregnancies, to limit the number of children to two. They may be unable to avoid hardship due to unforeseen change in their financial circumstances, such as redundancy or illness, which necessitates reliance on benefits. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the announcement “makes no difference to the long-run generosity of the benefit system”. It added that eventually “all children will be born after April 2017, and so the two-child limit will apply to all families with more than two children.”
Tom Waters, an economist with the Institute, said that the two-child policy would still leave 700,000 families entitled to less support, of which a third would be single-parent families, if the population remained similar to today. He cited previous research that suggests it would increase child poverty by around 300,000 for a saving of £2 billion to the exchequer.
Extensive evidence that Universal Credit causes harm
There is abundant evidence that the reforms overseen by the Conservative government exacerbate and create suffering.
Sanctions have been applied at disproportionately higher rates towards some groups such young BAME claimants and self-declared disabled Job Seeker’s Allowance claimants. According to research by Professor Peter Dwyer and others, not only have sanctions not moved disabled people closer to work, they have worsened many disabled people’s illnesses and impairments, particularly mental health conditions. Professor Michael Adler found in his 2018 study Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment? Benefits Sanctions in the UK that sanctions “cause great suffering”. He concluded that sanctions do constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The operation of the system has led numerous observers to conclude that the sanctions are punitive. They are, according to Dr Kesia Reeve, “not being used only as a system of last resort but are imposed on people keen to work, keen to engage, but who have been set conditionality requirements they cannot meet”. The National Audit Office found in 2016 that the Department did not use sanctions consistently and that “use of sanctions is linked as much to management priorities and local staff discretion as it is to claimants’ behaviour.” Ms Rudd’s claim that the system is fair seems hollow, but the same claim was made about sanctions by one of her Conservative Party predecessors, Damian Green MP.
In February 2017, researchers reported that work capability assessments for access to disability benefits “for many, caused a deterioration in people’s mental health which individuals did not recover from” and in the worst cases led to thoughts of suicide.
Ms Rudd’s much-promoted announcement about compassion is entirely silent on the effect of sanctions, the way in which work-capability assessments are conducted – even though there has been and continues to be clear evidence of their harmful effects.
There has been a surge in suicide and suicidal ideation since the introduction of Universal Credit. The soaring rate of homelessness, including rough-sleeping, has been linked to the new scheme. An investigation in October 2018 by The Observer found that for one homeless shelter the roll out of Universal Credit was a factor contributing to one third of its intake.
There are numerous cases that could be used to illustrate the cruelty of the benefits system, but one here is indicative. Kevin Dooley committed suicide in December 2018 after the Department for Work and Pensions stopped his Employment Support Allowance even though his doctor said he was too sick to work due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
In October 2017, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Person with Disabilities recorded its concern with the negative impact of the benefits system, including Universal Credit, on persons with disabilities in the United Kingdom.
Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights visited the United Kingdom in November 2018 and reported:
“Endless anecdotal evidence was presented to the Special Rapporteur to illustrate the harsh and arbitrary nature of some of the sanctions, as well as the devastating effects that resulted from being completely shut out of the benefits system for weeks or months at a time.”
These incidences of suffering caused by Universal Credit do not amount, as Ms Rudd insists, to “one or two cases”. This wilful minimisation by the Minister represents a staggering level of deception which alone should lead to her resignation. The minimisation of harm has become a trademark of the Department. In response to the report on fit-to-work tests in 2017, a departmental spokesperson said: ““Only thirty people were interviewed for this report, which fails to acknowledge any of the significant improvements we have made to our assessments – particularly for people with mental health conditions.” Data analysed in the NHS Digital’s Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, 2017, which surveyed around 7,000 adults in Britain, showed that 21 per cent of those claiming incapacity benefit (replaced by Employment and Support Allowance) had attempted suicide – compared with 6 per cent of the general adult population – more than doubling between 2007 and 2014. In 2018, another qualitative study found that Universal Credit had so profoundly affected claimants’ mental health that some claimants considered suicide.
Researchers have found that claimants experienced the system as “hostile, punitive and difficult to navigate.” I, too, had occasion to sign on for Jobseeker’s Allowance recently. I found the system shambolic, degrading, Kafkaesque, and incompatible with respect for dignity. Indeed, such was the judgemental, disrespectful behaviour of one assessor that I lodged a complaint, with reference to the Department’s own service delivery standards.
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report in October 2018 concluded that the Department “has persistently dismissed evidence that Universal Credit is causing hardship for claimants and additional burdens for local organisations, and refuses to measure what it does not want to see.” The Committee’s overall assessment was that “Universal Credit was causing unacceptable hardship and difficulties for many of the claimants it was designed to help.”
Yet, Ms Rudd used her first appearance in the House of Commons as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on 19 November 2018, to condemn the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights as “wrong”. She stated that she was “disappointed, to say the least, by the extraordinary political nature of his language.” She added: “that sort of language was wholly inappropriate and actually discredited a lot of what he was saying. We look forward to working with experts in the area to make sure that we get the right outcome for the people whom we want to look after.” The implication is that Alston was no such expert, and that the report was unreliable.
The House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions said in its 2018 report on Universal Credit that the “gap between the Department’s original vision for Universal Support and the meagre offer it now funds is vast.”
The references to compassion by Ms Rudd seem to be part of a series of ideological subterfuges well-known to seasoned Tory-watchers. Ms Rudd repeated the Tory canard that work leads to security. “Work gives purpose, dignity and security. The opportunity to provide for your family, progress in earnings, and build a fulfilling life.” Except, work doesn’t now lead to security. Increasing numbers of working people are in poverty. Work does not necessarily provide for family, progress earnings or build a fulfilling life. This may be beyond Ms Rudd, whose financially privileged upbringing means she cannot see that for some wealth rather than work provides security.
Amber Rudd: a compassionate politician?
Amber Augusta Rudd’s father was a stockbroker, her mother upper-class. She was educated at the independent fee-paying school, Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Her privileged social connections led to her credit as “aristocracy coordinator” for the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Her late husband, A.A. Gill, called her “the Silver Spoon”, in recognition of her well-to-do upbringing, in his restaurant columns.
Amber Rudd’s record as an MP raises doubts as to her recent comments about compassion.
Ms Rudd was elected MP for Hastings and Rye on 6 May 2010 and has remained an MP since then.
In the nine-and-a-half years between her election and her first speech as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in 2019, she used the word ‘’compassion” five times in debates in the House of Commons. The first use was on 9 February 2017, as Home Secretary, in a debate on unaccompanied child refugees. She did not, therefore, use the word once in her first six-and-a-half years in any debate in Parliament. To put this in some context, the word was used 1,240 times in the House of Commons during this nine-and-a-half-year period. Her use of the concept (or its variants; ‘compassionate’ or ‘compassionately’) in debate does not reveal a clear concept which is tied coherently to specific intervention.
Ms Rudd’s use of the concept as responsible minister has not in fact led to delivery of government policy in a way that could be remotely characterised as compassionate, as evident in the fact that the Home Office’s 2016 Vulnerable Children’s Resettlement Scheme target to resettle 3,000 child refugees in the United Kingdom led to only 20 children being resettled in two years. This occurred on her watch as Home Secretary, and coincided with the government’s policy objective of a “hostile environment” for immigrants which led to the deportation of people from Commonwealth countries who had been lawfully-admitted to, and long-settled in, the United Kingdom on the basis that they could not meet the onerous standards to prove lawful status. Known as the “Windrush” scandal, after the first ship that brought Commonwealth people from the Caribbean to Britain, it ultimately led to Ms Rudd’s resignation as Home Secretary on 29 April 2018 after she misled the Home Affairs Selection Committee on her department’s deportation targets. Three days earlier Ms Rudd told the House of Commons that: “It is my experience that our caseworkers work with compassion and care in administering their duties.” Yet, in response to criticism from Labour MP David Lammy earlier that month, blamed her department: “I am concerned that the Home Office is becoming…has become too concerned with policy and strategy and sometimes lose sight of the individual”.
Ms Rudd had already been held in contempt of court after ignoring orders in 2017 to arrange the return from Afghanistan of a deportee in breach of an earlier High Court ruling ordering her to do so due to the threat to his life.
In 2016, Ms Rudd refused, as then Home Secretary, to open an inquiry into violent clashes between police and pickets at Orgreave during the miners’ strike in 1984. She said that there was “not a sufficient basis” to do so. During the clashes, South Yorkshire police injured miners. Fifty-five miners were arrested and prosecuted. All the prosecutions collapsed, with the Independent Police Complaints Commission finding “evidence of perjury and perversion of the course of justice” by the police.
Ms Rudd’s voting record in Parliament hardly suggests a compassionate MP. She voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have access to an excess bedroom; against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices; and for a reduction in spending on those benefits.
Her dismissiveness of the reporting of hardship and suffering by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights is another way in which Ms Rudd’s claims to compassion are questionable. Professor Philip Alston is a highly-regarded human rights expert, holder of eminent posts at universities worldwide, and author of numerous research works. His report was based on extensive research, citing a wide range of evidence from reliable sources, including from government and parliament; think-tanks such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies; research foundations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; charities with expertise in the field such as the Child Poverty Action Group, and; academic experts.
Beneath the veneer of compassion in Ms Rudd’s statements remains unreconstructed Tory blame-culture. In Ms Rudd’s constituency of Hastings and Rye there was over a 20 per cent increase in the number of street homeless in January through March 2018, consistent with increases in homelessness among those claiming Universal Credit in other parts of the country. In 2013, Ms Rudd said in an interview with the Financial Times: “you get people who are on benefits, who prefer to be on benefits by the seaside. They’re not moving down here to get a job, they’re moving down here to have easier access to friends and drugs and drink.”
The hostile political discourse towards benefits claimants legitimises similar treatment by some staff and agency assessors working for the Department for Work and Pensions. Andrew McDonald, a former top civil servant who developed Parkinson’s disease and terminal prostate cancer described the system as a “hostile environment”.
Dickensian charity
The political deployment of the concept of compassion can be done specifically to supplant state responsibilities, undercutting existing entitlements. Professor Didier Fassin argues in his book Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present that, since the last decades of the twentieth century, humanitarian reason and governance have begun to supersede the language of rights as a response to suffering, with compassion mobilised at the expense of formal structures of rights and legal obligation.
The reliance in the Victorian era on pity and charity to meet hardship and distress staunched broader structural changes that would have entailed distributional justice, for instance by increasing taxes for those best able to pay and redistributing this to others on the basis of need.
Tory politicians such as Jacob Rees-Mogg appear to condone the use of food banks through the valorisation of charity. He said in 2017 in response to the rapid increase in food banks: “I don’ think the state can do everything.” He added, “to have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens, I think is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.” The soaring numbers relying on food banks (alongside increasing homelessness, poverty, and destitution), gives rise to frequent accusations that under the Tory government the country is sliding back to a Dickensian state of affairs, associated with the poor social conditions of Victorian England depicted in his works from Pickwick Papers, 1836, through Edwin Drood, 1870. These conditions were part of a distinctive political economy of laissez-faire, which re-emerged in late-twentieth century neoliberalism and remains evident in resurgent calls for free trade and de-regulation in twenty-first-century Britain.
Hypocrisy?
What might be an opportunity for embedding compassion comprehensively into policy is often destroyed by lack of recognition of how macro policies create micro-sufferings. This can be exacerbated when people believe that the disjuncture between policy and practice reflects hypocrisy. Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher and Walton, for instance, said in May 2017: “the typical user of a food bank is not someone who is languishing in poverty, it’s someone who has a cash flow problem episodically.” The then-current data from the food bank charity Trussell Trust showed that the most common reason people were referred to a food bank were delays to social security benefits. This was marginally above low income as a reason for referral. Trussell Trust do not, understandably, use ‘languishing in poverty’ as a category to survey food bank use. However, Adrian Curtis, a food bank network director for the trust, noted the connection between poverty and food bank use: “the main reasons for a food bank referral are delays and changes to benefits payments and low income issues that include people who are struggling with low pay or insecure forms of employment.” Mr Curtis added: “It is our experience that people living in poverty are more likely to experience a sudden short-term crisis where they are referred for emergency food, whilst the underlying causes are addressed.”
Ms Rudd’s position is consistent with the hypocrisy of the Tories’ apparently coordinated photo-opportunity donations at food banks in the run-up to Christmas when their party’s policies have driven up food bank use. Dominic Raab tweeted: “Thank you to Tesco in Molesey and the Trussell Trust for partnering to encourage customers to generously provide food collections for families in our community, who are struggling at this time of year” (See image below).
The challenge in trusting claims to compassion can also arise from how those claims are situated within broader discourses.
Civility-policing
Professor Keith Thomas of the University of Oxford notes in his book In Pursuit of Civility that by the eighteenth century compassion was seen as a distinctively modern emotion in England, unknown either to the people of the past or to the perceived ‘barbarians’ of foreign countries.
This contrast with barbarism served also to consolidate the developing idea of English civility, which, in turn, enabled imperial subjugation of the uncivilised. It is perhaps of little surprise that Ms Rudd’s apparent Damascene conversion to compassion coincides with a reversion to civility-policing among those on the right of the Conservative Party at a time of Brexit-related imperial nostalgia. This is evident in the report An Age of Incivility by Trevor Phillips and Hannah Stuart for the lobby group Policy Exchange (2018) and the categorisation by the International Trade Secretary Dr Liam Fox of the peaceful, lawful protests against Donald Trump’s visit to London in 2018 as a breach of “good manners”.
When Amber Rudd speaks of compassion and British identity (“A British welfare system should reflect the values of our country”), it is difficult not to see this also as jingoistic virtue-signalling which seeks to shore up fragile ideas of British identity at a time of national crisis.
Conclusion
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights referred specifically to compassion in his damning overall assessment of the British benefits system:
“compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instill discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping with today’s world, and elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest levels of British society.”
Ms Rudd’s statements about compassion have an element of legerdemain, or sleight of hand, like the con man who will make you think one thing with a wave of one hand while relieving you of your belongings with the other.
The pointed references to compassion perhaps cannot either be divorced from the jostling for leadership within the Conservative Party and the narrow electoral margin Ms Rudd has in her own constituency. The references might not be unconnected with the parlous state of the Conservative Party as it faced the biggest test of its parliamentary legitimacy in months, with the meaningful vote on 14 January 2019 on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement for exiting the European Union.
At crunch points in the past, Conservatives have tactically mobilised the concept of compassion. Ian Birrell, former speechwriter to David Cameron, wrote days before the Conservative Party’s General Election manifesto was launched in 2015 that Cameron needed to re-impose his “compassionate credentials.” Conservative Party activist Tim Montgomerie argued before the election that if the Tory leader could “prove that his conservatism is compassionate rather than individualistic, he can still secure that last-minute swing.”
While I firmly support the appropriate development of compassion in policy, law and practice, there is nothing in Ms Rudd’s expressed embrace of compassion itself which evidences an understanding of what the concept means, why it is important, or how it would apply.
Compassion exists in doing. The concept itself and its mere repetition has no power, unless animated, to relieve suffering. Ms Rudd, like others, must be judged by her actions not words. Her record is not reassuring.
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© Dermot Feenan 2019