Welfare Fraudsters: A Long History 1601-2027

Spanning the different organisational forms and chronological boundaries of the British welfare state from its foundation as the Old Poor Law in 1601 to the present, this project develops the first long history of benefit fraudsters in England, Scotland, and Wales. The project has three framing contexts: (i) Continuity and change in definitions of fraud/fraudsters, and (consequent on the dynamics of definition) their numbers; (ii) The motivations and stories of fraudsters themselves from when they first emerge as a category in 1601, to the present. We will identify and capture life-cycle, gendered, and spatially specific experiences of welfare fraud. The project will also explore continuity and change in the motivations, fears, emotions, expectations, susceptibility to punishment, and understandings of contribution and their ‘place’ in the welfare system, of fraudsters; (iii) The experiences and attitudes of those accused (often wrongly) of fraud.

Academic and public debate on modern fraudster motivations coalesce around relatively sharp dichotomies: Are fraudsters driven by need or by greed? Is fraud driven by the circumstances of the individual or by organised gangs? Do fraudsters just want to meet subsistence needs given inadequate benefit levels, or do they have unrealistic and luxurious expectations? Are the disabled more disposed to fraud or have the life stories and experiences of disabled people been weaponised by successive governments to imply that they are? Do some fraudsters act because they perceive themselves to have made a societal or tax contribution, while others are just ‘chancers’? Is fraud a reflection of confusion, a function of the intricacy, complexity, and illogicality of scheme rules, rather than deliberate intent? With the exception of some discussion about fraud, homelessness, and begging, the deep history of fraudsters is missing from these analyses. Equally, historians themselves have had little to say explicitly on fraud and fraudster motivations even though contemporary debate was fierce, and sources exist to conduct such a discussion.

It is thus unsurprising that much public, policy, and academic debate about welfare fraudsters understands them as variously a product of the modern welfare state, modern social relations, the modern economy, and the deterioration of the modern moral framework. How to deal with fraud also has an entirely presentist perspective; the modern problem requires modern medicine: less welfare complexity, reporting hotlines, moral reconstruction, sophisticated surveillance, AI tools, media campaigns, more prosecution, and either increased or reduced benefit levels.

This presentism is misplaced. The overarching aim of this application is to suggest that we can reconstruct the motivational landscape of welfare fraudsters in the three mainland nations and across this long period, that we should do so, and that understanding continuity and change in motivations is so important for modern debate about policy futures that we must undertake such an exercise.

This is an empirically rich project. While it is broadly true that sources embodying or containing the life-stories of fraudsters become more common over time, earlier sources tend to be remarkably rich compared to some later forms such as newspaper reporting. We will collect and analyse three types of source material:

• That which is publicly available and already transcribed including letters by or about those accused of being fraudsters collected under the auspices of the English, Welsh and Scottish poor laws and covering the period 1715-1929 (amounting to some 2 million words); some Acts and report recommendations that framed welfare provision across the period; autobiographies and diaries; prosecution records and associated witness statements covering much of the period; and oral history transcripts from various communities reaching back to the interwar years.
• Material that has been digitised and is available but which has yet to be transcribed, including: newspaper reporting at scale from the 1780s; contributions to community history projects aiming to create biographies of local people, running from the 1820s to the present; Acts and reports that framed welfare provision across the period; welfare application investigations; and the comments left by the general public on blog sites or in relation to newspaper articles where people often rehearse their stories.
• New material including oral histories; summative focus group records; unpublished life-writing; coronial records (where those who committed suicide because of fraud accusations or convictions often had their stories rehearsed); petty session and other court records; and so-called ‘memorial books’ which from the 1790s captured histories of places and their stand-out characters (in the manner of ‘Nottingham I have known’ for instance), amongst whom welfare fraudsters were disproportionately represented.

At the methodological level the project tackles three broad macro-problems: (i) Censoring, self-censoring, mediation and sensationalising of the stories contained in narrative source material, as for instance in life-writing or newspaper reporting; (ii) Extracting motivations and then fusing together perspectives from very different source-types and periods; (iii) The linguistic register in which fraud might be described and motivations constructed, which one might expect to vary by place, nation and over time.

The team is alive to these complexities and will use a mixed methods approach to analysis, including counting the number of welfare fraudsters over time; coding of motivations in narrative documents such as letters; semi-structured interview techniques aimed at capturing the life stories and view of c.20 people convicted or accused of fraud; categorisation analysis; and detailed case studies of person, place and time period.

Of course, such sources and methods can appear ‘dry’ but the project outputs will be driven by the colourful, mundane, messy and sometimes emotionally challenging stories of real people.

Just because we can write a long history of welfare fraudsters does not mean that we should or that it will be useful. We thus aim to made a difference at four levels:

• Shaping historiographical debate about the history of welfare/welfare states in Britain and elsewhere. This will be the only long-term history of welfare fraudsters. Understanding their experiences, motivations and some of the wrongful accusations across a wide historical period may well reshape how we ‘read’ the intent and character of the welfare state.
• Contribution to other disciplines including Social Policy, Sociology, Economics and Politics. This contribution will involve new estimates of the number of welfare fraudsters over the long-term, new data on welfare residuality, and the first systematic exploration of the structure of and motivation for fraud. Other significant contributions will include a challenge to the presentism of many of these disciplines as they engage with current political and policy dilemmas, and a provocative argument about the centrality of long-accumulated history to current policy debate.
• New data. Subject (where necessary) to ethical consents, all project data will be deposited with required meta information in an open access repository.
• A new and active voice for the policy futures debate. In 2025 political and public attention has returned viscerally to the scale of welfare spending and rapid post-Covid growth in levels of disability and long-term unemployment. The concealed, or indeed often not concealed, narrative is a sense that many of those receiving welfare are dishonest scroungers. Budget cuts to welfare payment sin 2025 are merely a stepping stone in one of the key societal debates of the later 2020s. We will have to debate the future of the welfare state and welfare citizenship. The project team will involve themselves in these debates, arguing that there is no policy future without a clear integration of the welfare past.

We want our data, analysis and outputs to have real world impact with journalists, policymakers and others. Watch this space!