Universal Credit (UC) is a major welfare reform in the UK. Its in-work progression element departs from previous policies by introducing conditionality rules previously reserved for unemployed people to low-income workers. In return for UC support, they are required to increase their earnings.
This thesis uses the capability approach as an analytical lens to explore how policymakers designing policies, frontline workers implementing them, and low-income families experiencing the policy in their everyday lives conceptualise progression. It aims to understand how the policy could be improved by considering everyday spatial realities and by recognising how capabilities are enabled and constrained at each stage of the policy process.
The research is based on qualitative interviews with policymakers and low-income parents claiming UC, as well as secondary analysis of interviews with frontline workers. The thesis differs from existing research by comparing views of progression across all three groups of research participants. It finds that all three groups believe in an ideal holistic and human-centred in-work progression policy that includes paid and unpaid work, care, and other meaningful activities. However, their abilities to design, implement or experience this ideal are found to be constrained in different ways. Policymakers feel unable to bring multi-dimensional goals and measures of progression into a narrow and abstract policy process, while frontline workers feel constrained by inflexible rules, lack of time and large caseloads. Low-income families feel unable to balance the requirement to earn more with established family responsibilities anchored in time and space, and do not think working more will lead to progression and greater well-being.
The thesis illustrates how policies develop contexts that define people’s capabilities whether they design, deliver or experience them. To avoid policy mismatches, it recommends including the perspectives of individuals and families embedded in everyday geographies to facilitate a capability-based in-work progression policy.
