A new edited collection explores diverse lives lived in the vast shadow of welfare conditionality. The collection comprises six chapters reporting independent research by doctoral candidates framed by an introduction and afterword (both by the editor Peter Dwyer). In keeping with the larger ESRC-funded research project that Dwyer led on ‘Welfare Conditionality: Sanctions, Support and Behaviour Change’, each chapter uses qualitative semi-structured interviews (in some cases, repeat interviews) to gain insights into how welfare conditionality affects the lives of a specific group of people: such as women involved in the criminal justice system, or Roma migrants. All the studies were undertaken in the United Kingdom and are thoroughly situated in the relevant policy context.

Two chapters focus on perspectives of workers in third sector organisations, two concentrate on the views of welfare service users themselves, and the remaining two consider the accounts of welfare service users and the third sector workers they encounter in light of each other. For example, in the chapter on Polish migrants in Edinburgh, Regina Serpa shines light on the tension between homeless migrants’ pride in their own refusal of services and service providers’ scepticism that homelessness can ever be a choice.

One of the strengths of qualitative research is its capacity to promote empathy with people who are stigmatised or misunderstood. Helen Stinson’s chapter on vulnerable welfare recipients does this particularly effectively, giving the reader vicarious experience of what it’s like to navigate online-only or telephone-only customer service systems with dyslexia or while homeless. There are important lessons here for policy makers in the UK and beyond.

Yet this is not polemic, nor is it participatory action research. All the authors maintain some critical distance from their interviewees’ viewpoints. Katy Jones, for example, shows that third sector organisations are highly critical of the government’s embrace of conditionality, but at the same time are sometimes complicit in the system of compulsory volunteering.

An important thematic thread is the agency of people living in poverty. Larissa Povey’s exploration of the lives of women at the penal-welfare nexus makes for heartbreaking reading. Povey brings a gendered analysis, which is absent in the other chapters. She argues that her interviewees pragmatically accept their place at the bottom of society, exercising agency only in the limited sense of trying to put their damaged lives together, hoping (often futilely) that their efforts at reforming themselves will be enough to convince the authorities to return their sons and daughters to their care. They are victims – of poverty, of sexism, of violent crime, of parental neglect – but collective action against the unjust structures that have shaped their lives seems beyond them.

Regina Serpa’s provocative chapter on homeless migrants, on the other hand, portrays them as (unorganised) dissenters proudly refusing both the assistance and the constraints of the benefits system. Like many people travelling abroad, the Poles she interviewed feel less constrained by social norms than they would feel at home. This chapter potentially offers ammunition to xenophobic politicians who view migrants as troublemakers defiant of mainstream values. It is based on such a small sample of migrants (n=5) that we cannot really know how prevalent this philosophy is among migrants from A8 countries. By contrast the exploratory chapter by Liviu Dinu and Lisa Scullion on Roma who have received social assistance challenges stereotypes about this minority group by emphasising the way their desire to work and contribute is thwarted by prejudice towards them.

The book presents evidence that many vulnerable people are unable to comply with the conditions placed on their benefits. Emily Ball’s chapter looks beneath the surface success of a programme aimed at changing the behaviour of troubled families. She reveals the irrationality of punishing people to change behaviours born of trauma and unmet need. The book repeatedly questions the ethicality of punishing people for behaviour they lack the support to change. Dwyer contends that ‘the real purpose of the overtly behavioural turn in contemporary social policy’ (p. 177) is to blame people for their own poverty and exclusion.

Together the chapters paint a very bleak picture of austerity Britain – a heartless society indifferent to the grim fate of people whose needs are not fulfilled in the labour market. The data for these studies was gathered from 2015 to 2017, and, though the UK benefits system is undergoing major reform, the lessons drawn by these chapters remain all too relevant. Helpfully, Helen Stinson’s chapter was undertaken in an area where Universal Credit had already been rolled out and she focuses on particular features of Universal Credit.

Running through the chapters are stories of people resorting to food charity, debt, informal support from family, and survival crime. This is what it means to try to survive in a relatively affluent country in which there is no reliable safety net. It is not that no effective help exists – the authors do report both negative and positive interactions with paid helpers – but these chapters show that accessing needed services is difficult and uncertain. This book is insightful on the topic of why people disengage entirely from social security system – and why others can be tempted to disengage, but don’t.

The state’s insistence – that welfare recipients will orient their energies to complying with the behavioural conditions it chooses – means people have less to give to more worthwhile activities. This is counterproductive conditionality. Within these pages there is evidence that the stigmatising, disempowering interactions that people go through to access payments have ripple effects into other aspects of their lives.

Another strength of the book is its illumination of the way the state’s reinterpretation of its responsibility impacts on the capacity of third sector organisations such as homelessness services to fulfil their missions. It is not just recipients of benefits who are ‘dealing with welfare conditionality’ – third sector organisations must reorient their practices to deal with effects of counterproductive conditionality on their clients too. For this reason this book should be of interest not just to scholars of social security but readers whose primary social policy interest is third sector service delivery.