‘The unwilling and the unwell’? Exploring stakeholders’ perceptions of working with long term sickness benefits recipients

Abstract

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractThis paper draws on qualitative research with Incapacity Benefit (IB) stakeholders in the North East of England, UK. Stakeholders' experiences of working with long-term sickness benefits recipients reveal multiple barriers that both sick and disabled people, and themselves as practitioners, clearly face. Reflections on what ongoing welfare reform could mean for future practice for both stakeholders and recipients will be explored. The findings suggests that whilst stakeholders recognise the complex barriers faced by those receiving sickness benefits, a wider moral dialogue between 'deserving' and 'undeserving' is being created and sustained as a result of negative stereotyping of sickness benefits recipients.

Fear of the Brown Envelope: Exploring Welfare Reform with Long‐Term Sickness Benefits Recipients

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“…It seems that the political and media coverage of benefit claimants could give implicit permission to denigrate others' 'lifestyle choices' (Pemberton et al 2016b). This seemed to lead to a sense of being misunderstood and of their suffering being unseen and unacknowledged (Baumberg-Geiger, 2016;Garthwaite et al, 2013). Such negative experiences of self seem to powerfully mirror and re-enforce one another across these contexts, creating a potent negative feedback loop.…”