Citizenship and social security

The idea of paying through taxes or holding authentic claims by virtue of citizenship remains largely an intellectual conceit of the social scientist and the socialist. For the majority, the idea of participant citizenship in distributive processes outside the market place has very little meaning. Consequently, most applicants for social services remain paupers at heart. (Pinker, 1971.) '... it was the Poor Law that carried connotations of universality, communitarianism and citizenship, while it was social insurance that entailed exclusion, differentiation and limited contractual rights.' (Harris, 1996.)

The aim of this paper is to situate the Labour government's reforms to the social security system in an account of the nature of citizenship that seems to be presupposed by these reforms. I say 'seems' in this context because, despite the centrality of these reforms to the government's domestic agenda, there has been rather little by way of a general and theoretical justification produced for the overall thrust of the reforms. This paper will attempt to put some of these issues into a wider theoretical context to do with the nature of citizenship and inclusion in a modern open market economy set within a competitive global framework. I should make it clear at the outset that I am writing as a political and legal philosopher rather than as someone with specific expertise in social security. It is worth pointing out, however, that political philosophers have long been interested in issues to do with citizenship and welfare - the terms on which individuals can become integrated and participating members of a modern society and the normative resources that can be drawn upon to justify different sorts of models of such integration.

Both Kant and Hegel, for example, wrote about citizenship, belonging, individualism and the nature of the economic security, if any, that the State could offer individuals, and some of their writings are highly prescient in indicating matters that are now of central normative concern in thinking about welfare. Kant in The Metaphysical Elements of Justice dwells upon the ways in which economic resources can be secured to individuals in ways that do not compromise their dignity and individuality. Hegel in The Philosophy of Right argues that poverty, which he saw as a natural consequence of the operation of the market, was the greatest threat to a sense of cohesion in modern society. He was much troubled by the question of how economic security could be secured to individuals within a society whose economics and politics were marked by a strong sense of individualism and a strong sense that such individuals should be as independent as possible. So there is a long and subtle history to debates about citizenship, economic security and social integration. In the first part of this paper, I want to argue that in Britain the debate about the role of economic security and the role of social security within that has engaged two rather different and in some ways incompatible notions of citizenship and that a short exploration of this history will help to shed light upon the appropriate way of thinking about current social security, benefit and tax reforms in the context of citizenship.

I think that it would be true to say that, over the years, the Welfare State in the UK has embodied two contrasting and, in many respects, contending notions of citizenship. This is at the level of both practice and theory; that is to say, welfare policies have emphasised one or other of these different views of citizenship; and at the level of theory: those who have sought to defend welfare provision and to give the Welfare State some kind of moral foundation have invoked rather different conceptions of citizenship.

The first view of citizenship is that it is a status which is not fundamentally altered by the virtue, or lack of it, of the individual citizen and irrespective of whether the individual citizen is making a recognised contribution to society. As a basic status that comes through membership of a particular political community, citizenship implies a set of rights; these rights are of two sorts: rights to be left alone, not to be interfered with - that is to say, negative rights; and positive rights to the economic and social conditions of citizenship health, education and welfare. On this view, status and membership are the crucial issues in relation to rights, not whether a particular citizen lives a life that is approved of by others and, in particular, not whether a citizen makes a positive contribution to society as a whole. So long as the individual does not interfere with anyone else in exercising his or her right to live life in his or her own way, then he or she should be secure in his or her rights, both negative and positive. These would be freedom from coercion to allow individuals to live a life shaped by their own interests and conceptions of the good together with the welfare goods to enable this to happen. If this way of life is disapproved of by others, so long as it does not interfere with the choices of others, it will not detract from the possession of such basic goods and rights. The rights are linked to the possession of common needs for security, health and education. As common needs, their moral force should be recognised by society and the means of their satisfaction financed out of general taxation, with individuals having the needs being entitled to these resources to meet such needs. The universalism of the system was to be rooted in common membership, common needs and common rights. The purest form of such an approach would be an unconditional basic income.

The second, and alternative, view of citizenship places much less emphasis on rights and focuses instead upon obligation, virtue and contribution. On this view, citizenship is not a kind of pre-existing status, but rather something that is developed by contributing to the life of society - it is an achievement rather than a status. The ideas of reciprocity and contribution are at the heart of this concept of citizenship: that individuals do not and cannot have a right to the resources of society unless they contribute to the development of that society through work or other socially valued activities, if they are in a position to do so. Citizenship has to be earned, it is not a given. Paradigmatically, this contribution would be a direct financial contribution via a system of insurance payments. It is this contribution which secures the right to resources. Indeed, the right is created by a sort of quasi-contract between the State and the citizen via the insurance contribution. In this sense, the universalism of social insurance was viewed as the hallmark of a new ethic of solidarity and social citizenship.

It is arguable that the first conception of citizenship played perhaps the dominant role in thinking about welfare and the idea of welfare rights not being dependent upon discharging concomitant obligations during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This was the heyday of what Mrs Thatcher stigmatised as the 'entitlement society',1 and the citizenship-as-status approach that I have described was linked with ideas about the universality of welfare, the need to avoid stigma, the growth of a concern with rights and the idea that benefits could contribute to a more egalitarian society. What is very clear now is that the present government wishes to develop welfare reform very much in terms of the paradigm of the alternative achievement- or obligation-based conception of citizenship or, at the very least, to argue that an entitlement view of citizenship has to be reformulated in order to take account of a more reciprocal and obligation-based view. Of course, the central question then is whether or not these can be linked together in a coherent way.

Before looking at this point in detail, however, I want to illustrate my claimed contrast between these two models of citizenship with some examples. In her essay on 'Contract and citizenship' in Ideas that Shaped Post War Britain, Professor Jose Harris, the biographer of Beveridge and our leading historian of the Welfare State, argues that 'Contrary to its reputation for stigma, discretion and selectivity, the English Poor Law had been available for several centuries as a system of relief rooted not in contribution and contract but in mere membership of the community'.2 What she had in mind here was the Elizabethan Poor Law, which secured a right to subsistence for paupers who were out of work in virtue of their membership of a parish. This right to subsistence arose out of the fact of membership of the local community. This principle was also central to the Speenhamland System of the late eighteenth century, which not only secured a right to subsistence to paupers but also subsidised the wages of the worst-off via a link to the price of bread. Implicit in these approaches was a view that being a member of the society secured a right to subsistence irrespective of contribution to that society and, in particular, without insurance contributions.

The assumptions behind the idea that benefits or, less anachronistically, 'relief' might be paid without contribution and reciprocity was criticised by welfare reformers on several grounds. One of the most vigorous critics of the entitlement approach to benefit was Nassau Senior, the economist, whose work played a major part in providing the intellectual rationale for the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. He took the view that individuals will act in a utility-maximising way - that is, they will pursue their own interests in their own way - and that an entitlement-based view of benefit would lead to individuals having an incentive to secure relief since there was an assured subsistence level below which he or she could not fall. An entitlement-based view sapped personal responsibility to provide for one's own family and to take a long-term view of the need to save and act thriftily. So, very early on, there was a critique of what we would now call an entitlement-based view of welfare in terms of the effect on character, the creation of dependency and the undermining of personal responsibility. This critique was continued in the late Victorian and Edwardian period by the Charity Organisation Society (COS), although its philosophical assumptions were rather different from those of Nassau Senior. The COS criticised schemes that led to what it called the dole or public relief, or what we would now call benefits, coming 'miraculously' - that is to say, unattached to contribution and not subject to stringent conditions. Also, it was argued that unconditional benefits would create moral hazard for the poor. Many of the poor were in that condition because they lacked virtue, they were not thrifty and they lacked discipline, organisation and foresight. Unconditional benefits payable as a right of citizenship would not help to build up the qualities of mind or character that the poor needed to develop to escape from poverty.3 As Charles Loch of the COS argued in 1904, welfare should 'strengthen habit, strengthen the family, promote public measures that tend to social and personal competence, and to oppose public measures that tend to lessen exertion and foresight'.4

The entitlement approach neglected the effect of unconditional benefit on the character of citizens and this was absolutely central in the critics' view. It was also the case that such an approach meant that voluntary societies such as the Charity Organisation Society had to be highly judgemental in their social work with individual claimants and to ensure that claimants for relief were prepared to develop the qualities of mind and character that would help them to help themselves. This contrasts rather sharply with the non-judgemental approach to social work that became part of the official ethical basis of social work in the period after the second World War. Such a judgemental approach is, of course, not required on the entitlement approach to citizenship and benefit.

The earliest steps towards a national Welfare State - for example, in Lloyd George's pension scheme - embodied, however, in its initial stages, a non-contributory approach, because pensions were to be paid even though contributions at that initial stage had not been built up. That is to say, the early Welfare State was more compatible with the citizenship-as-status approach since the benefit was applicable without reciprocity, but was rather financed out of general taxation. This did mean, though, that it was subject to quite extensive social enquiries before it was paid to ensure eligibility. That is to say, a non-contributory citizen's benefit was made subject to means testing.

So, by the time William Beveridge came to work on his report, the two approaches to citizenship that I have mentioned as animating approaches to welfare were becoming more clear-cut. One was based upon status, paid for out of taxation, non-contributory, but means-tested; the other was based upon contribution and, in particular, payment by insurance as a way of making sure that, amongst other things, the beneficiary had in fact developed attitudes of saving and thrift and was prepared to make provision and take responsibility for the family. During the 1930s, with the notable exception of Harold Laski, the Labour Party's chief intellectual, the Labour Party had come to favour benefits paid for out of general taxation rather than insurance, and thus had endorsed what I have called the status view of citizenship.5

Beveridge, however, decisively set his face against this approach, and his whole report is a clear endorsement of the insurance-based approach - that is to say, one based upon contribution and reciprocity. It was certainly not a view rooted in the idea of citizenship as a status. Security was to come through participation in the labour market and paying insurance contributions when in work. Work was a basic obligation and the payment of insurance through this citizen obligation to work was the source of the right to benefit. Benefit was not an entitlement for the able-bodied, divorced from contribution; rather, rights were created by the insurance-based contribution, which in turn depended upon being in work. 'Benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire.' (Beveridge, 1942, p. 11.) Thus economic and social citizenship had to be earned; it was not a pre-existing status which gave rise to a right to benefit. National Assistance, on the other hand, for those who fell outside this system, was a system of means-tested and character-tested non-contributory benefits. Full citizenship therefore came via contract, through the insurance contract, not through membership and status. Benefits were to be available for those unable to discharge the obligations of citizenship. However, Beveridge was stringent in his attitude to those in this position. He argued that it was vital that an assistance scheme should

leave the person assisted with an effective motive to avoid the need for assistance and to rely on earnings or insurance ... Furthermore an assistance scheme which makes those assisted unamenable to economic rewards and punishments while treating them as free citizens is inconsistent with the principles of a free community.

Beveridge, 1942, p. 11

The rejection of the idea of a citizenship right to an unconditional benefit could hardly be more stark. The Beveridge Report argued that, while insurance benefits were genuine rights, having been built up through individual contribution, and they should therefore be free of any tests of character and conduct, nevertheless means-tested National Assistance not related to contribution should always be provided in such a way as not to condone any breach of citizen obligation. So there was a central distinction to be drawn between insurance and assistance. Far from the status of citizenship creating rights, it was, for Beveridge, insurance and contribution to the labour market that created rights; the status of citizenship only created a means-tested benefit which would be subject to extensive enquiry into the character of the individual and his or her preparedness to accept obligations. Work and contribution were the passports to citizenship rights.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a good deal of this vision was lost for a variety of reasons. First of all, it is vital if a sharp distinction is to be drawn between the rights created by contribution, insurance and work on the one hand and more residual and conditional assistance on the other, that the integrity of the insurance system should be maintained so that benefits reflect contribution. However, this turned out not to be the case. Already, by the early 1950s, pension contributions were a very long way from covering pensions actually payable. In addition, there were always far more people on National Assistance than Beveridge had foreseen and this made it more and more difficult to keep apart a contributory and non-contributory approach. Also, the Labour Party in particular had begun to argue, in a way that became paradigmatic after the publication of The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland in 1956, that public expenditure on welfare could be an instrument of greater social and economic equality. If this was to be the case, however, then general taxation was going to have to play a much larger role in securing benefits than insurance contributions. Crosland argued that the fiscal dividends of economic growth would allow the government to invest in the public services, which would improve the relative position of the worst-off, while maintaining the absolute position of the better-off. (This is more or less exactly the opposite of Thatcherism, whose market-led reforms were designed to improve the relative position of the better-off, because of the need for incentives, while maintaining the absolute position of the poor via the trickle-down mechanism.) This strategy did not logically imply the undermining of the contributory principle but, in practice, this is what happened.

Finally, the emphasis on universality and the need to avoid stigma (non-judgementalism again) argued in favour of at least blurring any sort of sharp division between insurance-based and other types of benefit. Here, the negative view of means testing developed during the 1930s played an important role. One of the basic problems for the present government, in respect of something like the Crosland position, is that such a social democratic approach today would run too counter to the market, since the approach implies a kind of disjunction between welfare policy and economic policy on the one hand and, in the case of a particular citizen on the other, a type of motivational schizophrenia. On this view, the job of the Welfare State is to redistribute either directly or indirectly (through investment in public services) at least some of the extra benefits of growth to benefit the worst-off, and welfare is seen as a kind of corrective to the market and economic activity. In the case of the individual citizen, market logic dictates that he or she should act in an entirely utility-maximising way in respect of economic activity, while being prepared to vote in a moderately altruistic way to improve the relative position of the worst-off. The present government has made it clear that it wants the Welfare State to work with the grain of the market economy in terms of improving social and human capital rather than being seen as some sort of corrective to the market. This involves clear changes not just to policy but to the whole conception that the post-war left has had about the role of welfare.

The government has emphasised that it wishes to move the UK back to at least some of the principles that underlie the Beveridge Report, with a major emphasis on the ideas of reciprocity and of contribution and an obligation-based view of citizenship, with particular emphasis being put on the idea of work as a major component of citizenship. Animating its view of the need to reform the Welfare State are a number of considerations and arguments and, taken together, they add up to a formidable case for reform.

1. The government is concerned about dependency - the ways in which recipients of benefits become privatised, cut off from the disciplines, the sociability, the growth of knowledge and confidence that come through being a member of the labour market.

2. This leads on to questions of moral hazard - that an entitlement approach to benefit will foster the habits of mind and character that lead individuals into poverty and lack of attachment to the labour market. This is strikingly reminiscent of the critique of entitlement that I mentioned earlier with reference to the late Victorian and Edwardian period (for example, in relation to lone parents). In so far as this state is self-chosen, it is a choice that will lead to poverty and dependency, with the costs of benefits to sustain that lifestyle, albeit at a low level, being offloaded onto others.

3. This, in turn, leads to a concern with free riding - that is to say, that the benefits paid out through the non-contributory part of the welfare system have to be funded out of general taxation, which is paid largely by people who have to work, many of whom pay substantial tax on wages from low-paid jobs. People should not be free to choose a life on benefit when there is the opportunity to do otherwise and when the costs of such a choice are loaded onto the tax bills of the generality of citizens who are prepared to meet their social and labour market obligations.

4. This, in turn, leads to a concern that even if one thought that an entitlement view of welfare on a non-contributory basis was legitimate, in moral or philosophical terms, nevertheless, taxpayers would not be prepared to fund such non-contributory entitlements at a level that would lift people out of poverty.

5. Nor, indeed, ought they to do so, because the UK has to compete in an intensely competitive global market in which competitor countries in the Far East and in central Europe have far lower costs. The idea of raising taxes to pay non-contributory benefits to those who choose not to seek to discharge their social obligations is, on this view, impossible to justify, whether in economic or moral terms.

6. The government wants to place a great deal of emphasis upon the development of both human and social capital as ways of allowing individuals to take more control of their own lives, by making them more effective in the labour market and as securing the best pathway out of poverty.

7. There is also a critique of the idea of equality in what is perceived to be its mid-twentieth-century social democratic form. The emphasis is upon a very radical kind of equality of opportunity by trying to enhance both employability skills and the strength of local communities in order to give the worst-off greater opportunities in the labour market.

All of these considerations lead the government in the direction of a reform that emphasises contribution, reciprocity and obligation. However, it is worth just taking stock at this point in the argument, because it would be a mistake to see the emphasis of the government on these themes as endorsing the insurance basis of the Beveridge view. For Beveridge, as we have seen, it is a specific kind of contribution which creates the right - namely, a contribution to National Insurance. The right to benefit is correlated to a specific form of contribution. This, however, is not the government's view, despite its emphasis on obligation. The contribution is a much more generalised one of being active in the labour market with a job, looking for a job or undertaking training to enhance employability skills or under the New Deal undertaking socially beneficial work through participation in the Environmental Task Force. So while the government's approach to social security reform is contribution-based, it is not like the contribution that comes from insurance. Although National Insurance contributions are part of what secures the rights of citizenship, they are by no means the whole of the story. It is discharging much more general obligations in society that secures the rights of citizenship. So there is agreement with the Beveridge position up to a point, but not a total reliance on the insurance principle as a way of securing general social integration and a sense of common citizenship.

It is perhaps easy to see why this is so. A Mark 2 Beveridge would have to imply two things which would be essential to its future maintenance (apart, that is, from any question of cost). The first is that the integrity of what would have to be a massively expanded National Insurance scheme would have to be secured so that it was beyond political interference and discretion. It is not clear, given the level of distrust of politicians and political processes, that any government could convince the electorate that it would protect the integrity of the scheme, which would, after all, be the conduit to their social security rights rather than the level of general taxation. Secondly, it is clear that there would have to be a substantial amount of crediting into the system of people who could not afford to pay contributions if the system were to avoid a return to something like Beveridge's National Assistance. Those who could not afford to pay - take carers, for example - would have to be credited in. This, however, compromises the insurance principle that rights derive from individual contribution, since some people would get the rights without having made the contribution. Secondly, it would require that government would have to draw distinctions between those who were worthy to be credited in - presumably because they were doing socially valuable, if unpaid, work as a carer or working unpaid for a charity - and those who would otherwise free ride on a crediting-in system. Given that there would be such a need for widespread crediting-in which would undermine the link between rights and specific financial contribution, one way of understanding the strategy of the government is to say that it accepts the Beveridge emphasis on contribution and reciprocity, but does not want to tie this down to a specific insurance contribution over the whole of the benefit system. Hence, if I am right about this, work and related activities, or, in the case of pensioners, having worked in the past, rather than insurance solely are to be seen as the creators of rights to benefits.

Against the background of assumptions and arguments I have tried to tease out so far, the welfare-to-work strategy makes a very great deal of sense. However, there are two major pitfalls with such a strategy, which have to be avoided if it is to retain the confidence of society. The first has to do with work itself and the place that work is given in New Labour's great scheme of things. If work is to be the passport to social and economic citizenship, as it must be if we take seriously government rhetoric about how benefits will not lead people out of poverty, then we must expect to see pretty stringent work tests, particularly on groups such as the disabled to see whether the degree of disability does preclude a person from entering the job market. If, however, the unemployed or those on disability benefits are to be encouraged, in a very broad range of understandings of that term, to return to the labour market, then employability is going to be central. That is to say, those who are currently outside the labour market must be equipped with the skills that employers want. Now this is no straightforward task, because we are also told with increasing frequency that there is a smaller and smaller market for those with low skill levels. If this is true and if the young unemployed are to be got back to work with a prospect of lifetime employability, if the long-term adult unemployed are to be got back to the labour market and if the abilities of the disabled are to be capitalised upon, then the skilling level is going to have to be high and sustained over a long time. There is no doubt about the government's commitment to increasing employability skills, both for the groups that I have mentioned and in lifelong learning for everyone. However, in the context of the unemployed who are to be got back to work, I have several sorts of worries.

The first is the amount this will cost. There is, of course, the input cost in terms of equipping people with skills, and the government has an excellent record so far on that. However, there are also output costs. Many of the providers who work with the long-term unemployed have an excellent record, but the cost of getting people into jobs is high. In addition, many of the jobs are in the public and voluntary sectors. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it is obvious that the sustainability of jobs in those sectors depends, to a very great extent, on either central or local government funding. In addition, it seems to me that schemes such as skill shadow as a way of helping the disabled into the labour market are wholly admirable but, again, are very costly, and, equally, many of the posts to which such people may go are likely to be publicly funded in one way or another. So, there are input and output costs - that is to say, costs in giving people the appropriate skills to compete effectively in the job market and the cost of keeping the job market in the public, particularly local authority, sector and the voluntary sector buoyant. These costs are likely to remain because, despite the government's emphasis on increasing educational attainment, it would be very optimistic indeed to assume that one major effort with the present cohort of the young and the long-term unemployed will basically solve the problem. The overhaul of social security in favour of work-oriented schemes means that these changes have to be sustainable in the long term out of taxation.

This brings me on to my second point about work. As I said earlier, the government is going for a contribution- and obligation-based approach to the reform of the benefit system. One way of putting this point is that work is central to citizenship and to the ending of social exclusion. However, one major worry, which is implicit in what I have just said about output costs, is that the government must not see its own responsibility in relation to work as the defining contribution of citizenship purely in input or supply-side terms - skills, employability and so on. That is to say, with its emphasis on work as the basic badge of citizenship, it is cutting the moral ground from under the idea that the able-bodied have a citizenship right to stay on benefit when there is work available. However, as a strategy, this does require one to be optimistic about the future of jobs and the buoyancy of the labour market, because if the jobs are not there, then the government would be willing the end and not the means: it wants welfare to be replaced by welfare-to-work and status citizenship to be replaced by supply-side or contribution-based citizenship. But while it can organise the supply side and has done so in a very impressive way since 1997, the question of whether there are jobs for those equipped with supply-side skills to do is another question altogether. The logic of the government's position that work is the passport to social and economic citizenship and the way out of social exclusion is for the State to become the employer of last resort, or at least the work funder of last resort, where ordinary labour markets do not produce the jobs. Without this ongoing commitment, the government would be taking a severely supply-side view: that all it can do is to give people the skills to take up economic opportunities as and when the market supplies such opportunities. Or, to put the point another way, the government is emphasising contribution and reciprocity as a central condition of citizenship without being at all able to guarantee, short of its becoming the employer/funder of last resort, that society can in fact keep its side of the bargain. If the government were to become the employer of last resort, this would hardly help the dependency side of the argument about welfare and work, because, it seems to me, there is a big difference between securing a job for oneself in the labour market and being allocated a job by the government. This point has been well made by Jon Elster (1992):

Self esteem is undermined by the belief that one is parasitic on others. If true, this claim implies that highly and visibly subsidised work or make-believe work ... is not a source of self-esteem. The self-esteem of people who are living on unemployment insurance may be damaged because they feel that they are being parasitic, but they would not be happier if they performed work that visibly was not paying its way.

This, incidentally, was very much Hegel's point in 1821. In his view, the market order in general and the labour market in particular are a too contingent and too unpredictable framework for something as central as the integration and cohesion of society. How to secure economic security to individuals in a market society without undermining self-respect and the individualism that the market order secures is, for him, one of the most pressing problems of modern society.6

The second major issue to be addressed by the proposed reforms is the question of those who cannot be part of this world of obligation, contribution and reciprocity - that is to say, those who will have to live on benefits because they cannot be active in the labour market. There is a danger that the government's rhetoric will undermine the moral legitimacy of benefits paid for out of general taxation without reciprocity from the beneficiary. It seems to me that the government must be very careful about its rhetoric in respect of those who have to depend on tax-based means-tested benefits, otherwise they will become a stigmatised group like those on National Assistance post-Beveridge. We surely cannot go down a road that would lead us to a position which, however inadvertently, stigmatises those who cannot meet the conditions of being active and contributing citizens, and this is the central danger in wholly undermining the idea of citizenship and rights to benefit as a status that does not depend upon contribution. If citizenship, contribution and work leave no space for benefits in terms of status not based upon contribution, since none can be made by, say, a very severely disabled person, then it would be difficult to present that person's access to benefits as anything other than access to something based upon charity/altruism and compassion rather than a right of citizenship. Apart from anything else, as Beveridge found, those on National Assistance went way beyond the limited groups he had envisaged, and in the new world of welfare-to-work, during a recession there are going to be many who have to be back on jobseeker's allowance for long, and perhaps very long, periods unless, as I have said, the government, as seems most unlikely, becomes the employer/funder of last resort for all the long-term jobless in a recession. Yet, as I have said, the government's own rhetoric has the potential to undermine the moral and political legitimacy of precisely those sorts of benefits.

The government has been seeking a new normative basis for the benefit system and it has found it in the idea of reciprocity and has moved away from both the status view and the Beveridge view. The status view has the benefit of universality: common needs, common rights funded by collective taxation, and many important figures in the history of the Welfare State have stood for this: Keir Hardie, the Webbs, James Meade and others. It does, however, fall foul of the various criticisms of its moral and disincentive effects mentioned earlier. It has also moved away from seeing the principle of reciprocity being embodied in the insurance principle. It is odd that insurance has been seen as the vehicle of common citizenship, since it makes full citizenship dependent upon a contract to which not all can be a party and it assumes the sustainable integrity of the insurance system. The government has therefore gone for a much wider sense of contribution to which work is central, but it also includes (for the New Deal) training, education and the Environmental Task Force. This, in a sense, avoids the problems of crediting in those who, under a strict Beveridge scheme, could not afford the contributions while sustaining the idea of citizenship as requiring contribution and reciprocity. Because of the emphasis on work and work-related activity as the centre of social citizenship, the government has been able to extend the role of benefits in its reform of the tax and benefit system to large numbers of those in work and their families through the child tax credit and the working tax credit, a scheme that will extend to single people at work in a short time. Through this means, it has been able to give income guarantees to very large numbers of people. These are paid out of general taxation and, to that extent, are quite unlike the Beveridge view and have at least that much in common with the status view of citizenship. At the same time, they do depend upon a rather generalised obligation, which is not as narrow as the Beveridge insurance-based one and has thus been able to overcome the problem that, for Beveridge, the circle of citizenship was drawn too narrowly via the insurance contract. In this sense, what has come to be called 'progressive universalism' is something beyond the paradoxically narrow universalism of Beveridge while avoiding the claimed moral hazards in the lack of conditionality in the status/taxation view. However, as I have argued, the government will have to find a way to have some less-than-residual role for a status view if those who cannot contribute because of disability or because of a prolonged recession are not to fall out of the circle of social citizenship.