Vulnerability seems to have been used in policy for some time prior to 1997. For example, in 1957, the Wolfenden Report on ‘prostitution and homosexual offences’
made reference to the need to provide safeguards to those who were:
Specially vulnerable because they are young, weak in body or mind, inexperienced, or in a state of special physical, official or economic dependence (Wolfenden, 1957: 9-10)
The notion appears to have been particularly significant before 1997 in arenas such as nursing (Appleton, 1999) and natural hazards/disaster literature (see Schiller et al, 2007: 5 for a useful summary). Yet a review of the academic and official
literature related to ‘vulnerability’ revealed that notions of vulnerability took on new significance in policy during the New Labour era. ‘Vulnerability’ as a notion seems most notable within policy arenas related to disability, services for children and families, housing and also crime and disorder, which are selectively explored in more detail below. Discourses of vulnerability have continued to be influential under the Coalition government which came to power in 2010, but in slightly different ways. In relation to each policy domain where a ‘vulnerability rationale’
was evident, there are reflections on how continuities and changes under the Coalition have shaped and altered the policy landscape. Brief comments on the Coalition’s rhetorical reliance on the concept of vulnerability are also included.
3.1.1 The governance of welfare for vulnerable adults
As indicated in the previous chapter (2.1.2), under New Labour, ‘vulnerability’ came to play a fundamental role in the governance of welfare for adults who were seen
to lack the capacity to protect themselves. The seminal No Secrets guidance issued in 2000 had the idea of vulnerability and ‘the protection of vulnerable adults’ at its core (Department of Health, 2000). Initiated after a series of high profile cases of residential home exploitation of older people, the guidance addressed older people and disabled people under the same banner of ‘vulnerable adults’. It appears that this policy enshrined vulnerability as one of the key criteria in the assessment of adults ‘qualifying’ for various state interventions and safety procedures (Dunn et al, 2008; Fawcett, 2009; Hollomotz, 2011). Policy and practice initiatives in this arena are often referred to as the ‘protection of vulnerable adults from abuse’ or simply
‘POVA’.
Safeguarding Adults (ADSS, 2005) revised the language used in policy-making, but the legacy of the idea of vulnerability endures in legislation and the No Secrets definition is still widely used in practice (Hollomotz, 2009 and 2011; McLaughlin, 2012). Alongside No Secrets, various other initiatives developed under New Labour which addressed the presumed vulnerabilities of disabled people. Having won the right to receive ‘direct payments’ in 1996, disabled people were entitled to arrange some of their own services and buy help they wanted. New Labour then altered initial plans for the direct payments scheme, with ‘vulnerable’ disabled people apparently deemed incapable of making these choices (Hasler, 2004). Extensions of the High Court’s power to make declarations about interventions into the lives of
‘vulnerable’ instead of simply ‘mentally incapacitated’ adults were also granted in the first decade of the new millennium (see Dunn et al, 2008).
The vulnerability status of welfare recipients was brought closer to the centre of New Labour policy in social care with the passing of the Safeguarding of Vulnerable Groups Act in 2006. This legislated for a ‘Vetting and Barring Scheme’ (VBS) which would instigate extra checks for people who work or volunteer to support children and ‘vulnerable adults’. Under the Act, a national database of the details of these workers/volunteers would also be implemented13. For supporters of ‘small
13 This legislation followed the Bichard enquiry’s investigation of the 2002 ‘Soham murders’
in Cambridgeshire, where two school children (Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman) were killed by the caretaker of their school (Bichard, 2004).
government’, this policy was alarming and disproportionately far-reaching in scope in relation to the risks posed to vulnerable groups by individuals who sought to harm them. It was seen by some as an inappropriate balancing of the need to safeguard ‘vulnerable’ individuals with the restricted collective freedoms arising from this; that legislating for the vulnerable had ‘gone too far’ (Prospect Magazine, March 2010). McLaughlin (2012: 113) argues that this policy was a classic example of governmental presumption of citizens’ inherent vulnerability, where ‘caring relationships are recast as ones of potential harm and abuse’.
The Coalition government made significant changes to the plans for the VBS after they came to power. In June 2010, Ministers announced that the implementation of the VBS was to be halted, pending a thorough review. The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 has now been passed, which outlines a scaled- back employment vetting scheme and reform of the criminal records checks system for those working with vulnerable groups. The justification for this move was a need to ‘redress the
balance’ of risk to be less in favour of protecting the vulnerable, and more in favour of avoiding the constraints and implications of this for the rest of society
(Department for Education, Department of Health and Home Office, 2011; 3). This was a more cautious approach perhaps, but a discourse of vulnerability nonetheless remains institutionalised within this policy domain.
3.1.2 Children and young people
The previous chapter showed that special protections have been focussed on children for some time, based on assumptions about their innate vulnerability (see 2.1.1). However, under New Labour these notions seemed to move from operating in informal spheres to also playing a role in more formal policy and processing mechanisms for those under the age of 18. As previously discussed (see 2.2.1), Every Child Matters (ECM) drew on theoretical notions of all children as positioned along a spectrum of vulnerability (Department for Education and Skills, 2003: 15).
The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) initiative, designed to standardise the assessment of children’s ‘additional needs’, was also connected with this idea of positioning all children on a vulnerability spectrum. In the city in which the empirical case study took place (see Chapters 5-8), Local Authority CAF models
encouraged practitioners to position children on a ‘windscreen’ of vulnerability in order to determine how services responded to their circumstances (see especially 5.1.3).
New Labour initiatives targeted resources at specific groups of children seen to be at elevated vulnerability because of their adverse circumstances. Introduced in 2003, the Vulnerable Children Grant (VCG) was intended to improve access to education for ‘vulnerable’ children, and encouraged local authorities to develop their ‘strategic approach’ to dealing with this group (Kendall et al, 2004a). This
‘block funding’ replaced previous ‘ring fenced’ sums for pre-defined groups of pupils (such as looked-after children or Gypsy and Traveller children), and enabled local authorities to be more flexible about which children and young people received additional educational support (Kendall et al, 2004b: i). ‘Targeted Youth Support’ was also launched under New Labour in 2007, a multi-agency working initiative aimed at supporting ‘vulnerable’ young people to prevent them reaching the thresholds for statutory ‘child protection’ interventions (Department for Education and Skills, 2007).
Within youth justice policy and practice, the assessment of vulnerability came to play a role in determining interventions for young offenders under New Labour.
Alongside Youth Offending Service (YOS) interventions which were based on risk of re-offending, young people working with the YOS began to be assessed on the basis of their vulnerability (defined as the risk of them being harmed). The vulnerability status of a young person came to be deemed ‘highly relevant’ when determining ‘a suitable response’ to young people’s actions, especially where a young person might face a custodial sentence (Youth Justice Board, 2006: Appendix 12; 7). The link between young people’s (mis)behaviour and their perceived vulnerability status is a particularly interesting area and is considered in more detail later in the chapter.
The influence of the vulnerability rationale in the provision of children’s services is still evident under the Coalition, with the Education Minister centring his defence of the new bursary scheme for 16-19 year olds in education on the premise that Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) will be replaced by a fund which
‘targets’ the ‘most vulnerable’ in full time education (Gove, 2011). However, Gove has quite tightly defined his ‘most vulnerable’ children as those in care, care leavers, and those on income support14, perhaps a narrower view of vulnerability than that informing New Labour’s VCG (although the new funding is not necessarily a direct descendant of the VCG). The Department for Education has also announced that it will be ‘streamlining funding for the most vulnerable children and families’ in a new Early Intervention Grant, with the aim of ensuring local authorities have greater flexibility over allocating such resources (National Youth Agency, 2010; 3). It is possible that we may be seeing narrowing of entitlement in relation to children’s
‘vulnerability’ status under the Coalition.
3.1.3 Crime, ‘anti-social behaviour’ and terrorism
As we saw in the previous chapter, some academics have argued that a ‘politics of vulnerability’ underpinned New Labour’s approach to order maintenance, operating alongside a new exaggeration of crime (Waiton, 2008: 45). A focus on the
vulnerability status of victims of crime has been noted as particularly significant in the field of disability hate crime, with responses to incidents of hate crimes increasingly regarded by police as requiring a different approach in cases where victims were ‘vulnerable’ (Roulstone et al, 2011). Under the Coalition, the idea of punitive interventions being informed by a victim or perpetrator’s vulnerability has continued to thrive. Following the inquest into the death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca Hardwick in Leicestershire15, the protection of ‘vulnerable’
adults seems increasingly to be used as one of the justifications for the continuation of strong control mechanisms to deal with those seen as perpetrating ‘anti-social behaviour’. Obligations to ‘vulnerable victims’ (as opposed to victims generally) and those ‘least able to protect themselves’ seem to be taking on even further
significance (see Home Office, 2011: 1).
14 Young people on income support are teenage parents, teenagers living away from parents and young people whose parents have died.
15 Fiona’s daughter was disabled and Fiona had repeatedly reported incidents of ‘hate crimes’ committed against members of the family to the police before killing both herself and her daughter (see Independent Police Complaints Commission, 2011).
As indicated in Chapter 2 (2.2.3), evidence of an implied relationship between vulnerability and transgression emerged from a review of the literature related to vulnerability. This vulnerability-transgression nexus is also evident in official
discourses of vulnerability, especially since 1997. For example, in the governance of prostitution under New Labour, women who sold sex were configured as
‘vulnerable’ rather than ‘criminal’, whilst at the same time empirical realities indicated that they were being treated in increasingly punitive ways (Carline, 2011;
Phoenix and Oerton, 2005; Phoenix, 2012a). It is notable that the ASB agenda is now being couched in terms of ‘tackling troubled families’ (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011) or ‘problematic populations’ (Flint, 2006b), but a cluster of other terms are also often used to describe those governed by this agenda, amongst which ‘vulnerable families’ often features (cf Centre for Social Justice, 2010; Flint et al, 2011; Morris, 2012). As Flint (2006b) has argued, this discourse highlights the problematic behaviour of particular individuals or
households, distinguishes the actions of these populations from the behaviour of
‘ordinary’ people, and reflects tendencies to locate the causes of and solutions to
‘problem behaviour’ within local communities rather than society as a whole.
Some of the terrorism literature also indicates that ‘vulnerability’ is entwined with
‘threat’. Richards (2011: 150) observes that those who cause a threat to the safety and security of the UK via terrorist activities are often positioned as ‘vulnerable’
people. Indeed, Richards notes that in the updated version of the government’s strategy document on terrorism (Contest 2, or ‘Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare’), the words ‘vulnerable’ and ‘vulnerability’ were used a total of 32 times. This use of
‘vulnerability’ here functions to imply ‘diminished capacity for rational behaviour’
(Richards, 2011; 51). Or, to put it another way, vulnerability discourses here would seem to serve to underline that people who disagree with mainstream ideas cannot be of ‘sound mind’. This is a striking representation of the subtle message that ‘the vulnerable’ are problematic and need to be dealt with in order that they do not pose a risk to the rest of society.
3.1.4 Housing policy
‘Vulnerability’ is also one of the three defined predicaments which triggered
‘priority need’ under the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, making ‘the vulnerable’ amongst those classified as needing special ‘fast tracking’ through the social housing application process. The Act was given renewed support and was updated during the New Labour era, most recently in 2002. Developments in this period continued to refine what did and did not ‘count’ as vulnerability into one of the key dividing lines in the provision of social housing resources. Decisions about vulnerability status were to some extent guided by precedents in case law, from cases such as Ortiz v Westminster City Council (1993), where a woman was deemed ineligible for ‘priority need’ status because it was ruled that her previous alcohol and drug use did not amount to her classification as ‘vulnerable’16.
Although offering some parameters for decision-making, these precedents left ample scope for housing practitioners’ discretion in judgements about whether a housing applicant was ‘vulnerable’ or not (cf Lidstone, 1994; Niner, 1989: 96). This has resulted in vulnerability being particularly important in terms of the more informal ways in which people are ‘processed’ within the housing system (Cramer, 2005). New Labour’s Supporting People programme was also explicitly aimed at homeless ‘vulnerable’ individuals and families. Those using services attached to this funding stream were subject to certain behavioural conditionalities. Under the Coalition there have been radical changes to housing services and allocations of social housing. In terms of the ideas related to vulnerability, under the Localism Act 2011 authorities will continue to be obliged to ensure that social homes go to ‘the most vulnerable in society’ (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011; 15), but the impact of how those who qualify for priority based on
vulnerability will be affected by matters such as overall allocations of fixed-term tenancies is as yet unclear.
16 The impact of devolution has been significant in some policy areas including housing.
Rather than seeking to diverge across the countries within the union, the present study deals only with UK policy. This may mean that trends or debates are often considered in a way that omits aspects of specific practices in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
3.1.5 ‘Protecting the vulnerable’ in an age of austerity: a note on Coalition rhetoric
Increasing rhetorical reliance on the concept of vulnerability would appear to be a trend in the development of the vulnerability rationale under the Coalition. The vow to ‘protect’ the ‘most vulnerable’ appeared frequently in most of the
Coalition’s earlier policy announcements related to the resourcing of public services.
For example, pledges to afford special protections to the ‘vulnerable’ appeared a total of thirteen times in the government’s first Comprehensive Spending Review (HM Treasury, 2010). As spending cuts have been made, drawing on notions of vulnerability offers a possible means of reassuring the public that those who need and ‘deserve’ services the most will not be affected, thereby perhaps bolstering the moral and economic credentials of the government. Given the subjectivity involved in defining who counts as ‘vulnerable’, such undertakings may be difficult to hold governments to account for, so could be regarded as being relatively safe political promises. Vulnerability rhetoric, however, seems to have been less visible in more recent policy announcements. Perhaps even vague pledges to protect loosely-defined groups and individuals may have been deemed to risk sounding hollow, given the effects of the austerity measures on the poorest.