Laura Colebrooke, Catherine Leyshon, Michael Leyshon and Tim Walker, ‘‘We’re on the edge’: Cultures of care and Universal Credit’, Social and Cultural Geography 24, 1 (2023), pp. 86-103
In the later 2010s some geographers at Tremough began to work on an evaluation of a European Social Fund (ESF) project in Cornwall designed to help vulnerable ‘clients’ into employment or training. This was the latest in a long string of similar schemes driven by the neo-liberal assumption that the cure for poverty lies with the individual and not the way society is structured. I well remember tutoring on one of the early Restart schemes of the 1990s when the official guidance very firmly warned us not to discuss with our ‘clients’ the way the economy was organised.
However, the context of the ESF scheme of the 2010s was specific. Brexit was making it one of the last of its kind. Moreover, in Cornwall by 2017 Universal Credit (UC), designed by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Government of 2010-12 to discipline the labour force, was just beginning to roll out in Cornwall. Care providers were aware that UC demanded a set of skills – computer literacy, management of finance and budgets, dealing with officialdom and the like – that were in short supply among those on benefit.
According to the researchers this provoked a sense of anxiety about the current situation and an anticipatory dread about what might be to come, one shared both by those on benefit and the practitioners (care professionals in the Voluntary and Community Sector Organisations and housing associations involved in the project). They rather cleverly coin the term ‘edgy-ness’ to describe this emotion, one that also hints at the Cornish location of the project.
Uncertainty and insecurity are familiar emotions for the poor who are used to negotiating a ‘late liberalism’ marked by growing ‘precarity’, one where their everyday life is, in the authors’ words, darkened ‘by the shadow of capitalism’ (p. 88). But what their interviews and ethnographic research also revealed was a similar sense of edgy-ness on the part of practitioners as UC changed the parameters of their work and potentially heaped pressure on them that was leading to different forms of intervention.
This was required to deal with three aspects of ‘edgy-ness’ identified here – the impact of ten years of austerity and its dire effects on voluntary support networks, the lack of relevant skills on the part of the poor, and the cognitive and emotional state of claimants which sometimes made it difficult for them to access the support they needed to cope.
Under these strains they concluded that care cultures were shifting. Practitioners saw ‘good’ care as developing the capacity to withstand precarity, for example by generating self-confidence, as much as the material outcomes – x number of people into the labour market – beloved by funders. ‘Good’ care was not about escaping precarity but helping the vulnerable become attuned to teetering on the edge rather than be overwhelmed by the looming abyss.
The conclusion here that the impacts of precarity and austerity ‘shape how care is practiced and understood by those involved’ is interesting if predictable, although hardly earth-shattering. More depressing is the fatalistic conclusion that good care only goes so far as helping the poor live with their predicament, thus surely colluding with that ‘dark shadow of capitalism’ the authors identified earlier.
Cornish studies resources 