The British Social Attitudes survey tells a mixed story about public views on welfare. Attitudes have softened as well as hardened, with 'Generation Y' taking the toughest stance
I co-authored the chapter on attitudes to government and social security in this year’s British Social Attitudes 30 survey. (You can find all the data at NatCen’s excellent interactive website.) Press coverage has focused on the softening of attitudes on social security benefits in this year’s report.
Although over the last 30 years there has been a steep reduction in public support for working-age welfare benefits and their recipients, the 2012 data shows important signs of anxiety about recent cuts. The view that benefits for the unemployed are too high and discourage work fell from 62 per cent in 2011 to 51 per cent in 2012, and 47 per cent now say that cutting benefits would damage too many people’s lives, up from 42 per cent. A little more than a third of the population even wants higher taxes to pay for higher benefits.
But attitudes are complex and often contradictory. A majority of the population still believes that unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work, and that the unemployed could find work if they wanted to do so. The focus groups conducted by political parties still report visceral attitudes to ‘scroungers’, so political calculations about welfare reform are not about to change overnight. It will take a few more years of the shifts in attitudes seen in this year’s BSA for a significant trend to emerge.
On other issues, the British public resolutely refuses to change its mind. It strongly supports collective provision in the shape of the NHS, the basic state pension and the education system. It is no surprise that political rhetoric converges on the importance of these areas and that spending on them is relatively protected. It also resists free market libertarianism: the proportion supporting cutting taxes and cutting spending has never risen above 1 in 10 over the last thirty years.
But the public has had its fill of increasing taxes to support higher spending. Support for that proposition was satiated after the big cash injections into the NHS and schools in Labour’s second term.
Interestingly, there has been a convergence over recent decades across the social classes and supporters of different political parties on the view that the income gap is too high. Fully 8 in 10 people believe that the gap between rich and poor is too great and 7 in 10 that government should reduce it. But that does not translate into support for government redistribution of incomes, which garners assent from only a little over 4 in 10 people. Strategies for achieving a more equal society have to contend with this apparent state-scepticism (as I set out in a forthcoming essay in the IPPR's journal Juncture).
Some right-wing commentators have argued that the young are less collectivist, more entrepreneurial and less supportive of the welfare state than older cohorts. (It is something of a recurring fantasy of theirs that each generation of young people will turn out to be Thatcher’s true children.)
On some measures, they are right to spot changes. Young people are the least likely to think that the income gap is too large (76 per cent, compared to 85 per cent for those aged 65+). This is the opposite of the situation in 1987, when the youngest age-group were the most likely to think this. While the proportion agreeing the income gap is too large rose in all other age-groups between 1987 and 2012, it fell among the youngest age-group.
There is little difference in the support for redistribution expressed by different age-groups. However, in 1987, the youngest age-group were most likely to support redistribution. Over time, support for redistribution has declined most in the youngest age-group; it has remained stable or increased in all other age-groups.
The youngest two age-groups are also less likely to support extra spending on welfare benefits for the poor, compared to the oldest two age-groups. But this has always been the case; since the mid 1980s, support for welfare spending has declined to a comparable degree for all age-groups. (Similarly, the youngest age-group has always been less likely to identify social security as its first or second choice for extra government spending. This remains the case, though support among the oldest age-group has declined sharply.) The youngest age-group have always been more likely to agree that many people who receive welfare don’t really deserve any help; this view has increased among all age-groups to a similar extent.
Negative views have increased most among the youngest age-group in some areas, however. Although there is no clear pattern by age-group in terms of agreement with the view that unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work (54 per cent of those aged 18-34 think this, compared to 58 per cent of those aged 65+), agreement with this view has increased most among the youngest age-group since 1987 (by 31 percentage points, compared to 17 percentage points for the oldest age-group); at that time, the youngest age-group was less likely to agree with this view.
Agreement with the view that cutting benefits would damage too many people’s lives has declined among all groups – but most markedly among the youngest age-group (from 60 per cent in 1987 to 47 per cent now, compared to a decline from 52 per cent to 44 per cent for the oldest age-group). In the mid 1980s, the youngest and oldest age-groups were equally likely to hold the view that most unemployed people could find a job if they wanted one; by 2012, the youngest age-group were more likely to think this, with 60 per cent agreeing with the statement.
So there has been a toughening up of attitudes to social security among young people on some key issues, even if this does not make them Thatcherites. And the older age-groups can still be relied upon to take the toughest stance on the view that ‘many welfare recipients do not deserve help’ and that the welfare state encourages people to stop helping each other.
The findings on the spread of social liberalism reported elsewhere in coverage of the BSA report are doubtless much more significant indicators of long-term social trends than young people’s attitudes to public services and welfare.
Nick Pearce is director of the Institute for Public Policy Research. This blog first appeared on the IPPR website
