6 - Racialised institutions in the UK welfare state

Summary

Introduction

The year 2020 has come to signify one of the key moments in UK race relations for two reasons; firstly, the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionally impacted on racialised communities in the UK, as this population was more likely to be infected and suffer deaths from the virus (Public Health England, 2020). Secondly, the horrific killing of George Floyd in the US fuelled global #BlackLivesMatter protests across the world, including in the UK, demanding that urgent attention is paid to the societal structures that are literally and figuratively killing racialised communities in the UK. It is therefore crucial that UK social policy, which seeks to respond to the societal challenge of inequalities, has an explicit focus on how racial structures prevent or minimise opportunities for racially minoritised1 (RM) people to benefit from social policies.

This chapter will examine how the institutional arrangements of welfare services delivery can (re)produce racial inequalities. Beveridge envisioned that the provision of welfare would be concerned with meeting needs by providing services and benefits for all rather than seeking provision on a selective basis (Lewis, 1996). However, he conceived the persons who would need social services to be ‘male, married, with family responsibilities and White’ (Williams in O’Brien, 2010: 33). Beveridge's legacy in the construction of public social services has shaped the contemporary design and delivery of these services, which is centred on the ‘universal’ notion of need.

Using the case of Universal Credit (UC), the dual objective of this chapter is to put forward theoretical arguments that racialised institutions are present in welfare services delivery and to suggest the types of institutions that could be formed. Institutions in this chapter denotes the ‘combination of formal rules (including structures and processes) and informal conventions (established and routinised practices): this is what Elinor Ostrom (1999) refers to as “rules-in-use” … Such configurations of rules are backed up by customary narratives, which elaborate the underpinning ideas – the “reasons why” institutions operate as they do’ (cited by Lowndes and Lempriere, 2018: 227– 228). This chapter puts forward arguments derived from an institutionalist perspective which shows that the ‘rules-in-use’ in the UK welfare state has a legacy of marginalising RM people.