Guiding principles for social security policy: outcomes from a bottom-up approach

Michael Orton, Kate Summers and Rosa Morris

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Covid-19 has highlighted the inadequacy of UK social security but also the lack of consensus among progressive actors about what would be a better system. One way forward is to focus on the principles that should underpin social security. We present outcomes from a project in which principles were considered by a panel of Expert by Experience benefit claimants. We argue that while scholars often engage in descriptively identifying social security principles in existing policy, the bottom-up approach presented here offers a way of generating normative principles to guide an improved future system. We identify key contributions of this bottom-up approach relating to: the critical importance of principles as a guide to the fundamental purpose of social security, and policy making; the relationship between the treatment of claimants and benefit levels as co-dependent; and how a bottom-up process can produce results that engage with and contribute holistically to the debate.

Keywords: data and research; qualitative; social protection and security; welfare policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E6 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2022-05-01
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Published in Social Policy and Administration, 1, May, 2022, 56(3), pp. 485 - 501. ISSN: 0144-5596

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:113617

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