#work programme

In this study, there were also occasions where the conditional obligations the government were seeking to impose on claimants interfered with and compromised the duty and obligations individuals felt as parents, with this a notable example of how conditionality can undermine individuals’ capacity to make their own choices about what being a ‘good citizen’ entails. James described being forced to attend the Work Programme, even when it clashed with legal appointments relating to his battle to become residential parent for his seven year old daughter: 'I believe going to court for [my daughter], and fighting that case, that is really important to me and I need to go there before I go to [Work Programme], so they should take that sort of thing into consideration instead of just saying, ‘Listen, that’s your appointment, if you don’t turn up, skip . .. ’ That’s how they approach it. (James, W3)'

The sanctioning of disabled people is also prevalent in the UK. At its peak in August 2014, 125,000 disability benefit (WRAG – see earlier) sanction referrals were being made each year, with almost 50,000 initial sanctions (where benefits are stopped pending potential challenges), and resulting in 35,000 confirmed sanctions (for sources and notes, see Web Appendix 1). Sanctions during 2009–10 were primarily for not attending interviews, whereas sanctions during 2013–15 were primarily for ‘not carrying out activity’, which is primarily failing to take part in the contractor-led ‘Work Programme’. While sanctioning is still rare among those subject to conditionality (3% of WRAG claimants were sanctioned in 2014/15; see Webster, 2016b), it is clearly happening at a non-negligible scale, with over 400,000 confirmed sanctions being applied to disability benefit claimants since conditionality was introduced in 2008.

The twin thrusts of neoliberal paternalism have in recent decades become central elements of policy reform agendas across diverse policy arenas and welfare systems and the conceptual framework of neoliberal paternalism offers considerable potential for our understanding of these shifts in terms of governance practices, subjectivation and systemic outcomes such as poverty, inequality and power. The nature of the subject is, however, uncertain, heterogeneous and even contradictory across the two sides of this conceptual and accompanying policy framework. Conceptually, the awkward existence of this paradoxical subject implicit within the lens of neoliberal paternalism appears at first to weaken its claims to capture coherently these twin thrusts of policy activity in recent decades. Yet it is perhaps a more accurate conclusion to state that the conceptual framework merely reproduces the internal fractures and contradictions that exist within neoliberal paternalistic policies themselves. This flexibility and fracture presents policy makers both with risks of unintended mismatch as well as opportunities for deliberate mismatch and ‘storying’ across the four key analytical spaces of ontology, deontology, ascetics and teleology, with considerable implications both for programme appropriateness and effectiveness as well as for broader ethical concerns around social justice and social inclusion. Making these paradoxes of the subject explicit is an important first task in recognising their implications both for policy design and for welfare users.