Women’s Budget Group calls for a new post-COVID social security system based on dignity and autonomy

New report from Commission on a Gender-Equal Economy includes recommendations for welfare reforms that move away from means-testing to focus on the wellbeing of claimants

The Women’s Budget Group has called for a new post-COVID social security system based on dignity and autonomy as part of a series of recommendations included in a report from its Commission on a Gender-Equal Economy on creating a 'caring economy.'

In Creating a Caring Economy: A Call to Action, the Commission highlights that there has never been a better time for publication, as it lands at a unique moment in global history, after the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic and ahead of a likely second wave, and a deep and brutal recession.

Charting a new approach - having firstly undertaken surveys into people's attitudes in a post-COVID-19 world that reveal that two-thirds of people in the UK say that wellbeing should be used to measure the success of economic policy - the report outlines eight steps to creating a ‘caring economy’ based on gender equality, wellbeing, and sustainability and covering policy areas including housing, employment, social care and social security.

In relation to social security, the report says a caring system should be -

‘… based on dignity and autonomy, and which helps to ensure people fulfil their capabilities and live a meaningful life, in and out of employment and regardless of migration status, throughout their lives.’

To that end, having examined the false economies of low benefit rates and the system's current reliance on means-testing, that can stigmatise claimants and entrench and exacerbate poverty, the Commission makes a number of recommendations for government action, including for it to -

• ensure that dignity is safeguarded by withdrawing ‘punitive and unreasonable’ sanctions
• ensure that the social security system provides more autonomy for women, for example each partner in a household establishing their own claim to benefits;
• improve and extend individual non-means-tested benefits to replace means-tested benefits wherever possible;
• ensure benefits to meet the additional costs of caring for children and of living with disabilities reflect the real level of these costs and are non-means tested;
• increase carer’s allowance for those providing long-term unpaid care;
• implement a universal basic income for retired people such as a non-earnings-related, non-contributory pension for all that genuinely supports a decent standard of living;
• ensure that people are not excluded from social security because of their migration status by abolishing the ‘no recourse to public funds’ policy and extending the Destitution Domestic Violence Concession to all migrant women; and
• embed flexibility into the social security system in order to support the self-employed, ‘gig economy’ workers and freelancers, to reflect how their earnings can be subject to sharp variations.

Concluding the report, the Commission says there is strong public support for building a more equal, more dynamic, caring economy as we come out of the coronavirus crisis -

‘… just as plans for the welfare state were developed during the darkest days of the Second World War, so we need to be thinking now about what economy we need to build as we emerge from the pandemic. Before the current pandemic hit, a recentring of the economy around gender equality, wellbeing and sustainability was already long overdue. But now, we find ourselves truly at a turning point. We know that the UK and its constituent countries can come out the other side of the current crisis with a stronger, better, more equal, more dynamic, caring economy. And there is strong public support for this: it has never been clearer that people do not want a return to business as usual.’

For more information see Final Commission on a Gender-Equal Economy report - Creating a Caring Economy: A Call to Action from the Women’s Budget Group website.