Chapter 9
COVID-19 and the legal regulation of working families
Introduction
In this chapter we critically assess the UK’s response to COVID-19 in terms of its implications for working families with care-giving responsibilities. The chapter draws upon a prior historical consideration of how working families have been regulated through labour laws and policies (Busby and James 2020) and builds upon the arguments presented there by considering the repercussions of the UK state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our critique is framed with reference to the vulnerability theory (VT) pioneered by Martha Fineman (2008, 2010, 2019, 2020), which has at its heart the vulnerable subject as an alternative to the ‘mythical autonomous liberal subject of neoliberal rhetoric’ (Fineman and Grear 2013, 2). We demonstrate how, during the pandemic, priorities were framed, and policies imposed, that expose and compound existing fragilities surrounding law’s engagement with working families in the UK. Here we consider the impact of the state response on working parents and carers as well as those requiring care, specifically older people with care needs and children. Of course, families are composed and function in myriad ways that defy classification based on social identity (Fineman 2020, 30). VT helps reveal part of our core argument: that the interests of working families have largely been sidelined or ignored during the pandemic. The response of the UK to the pandemic is reflective of an historically embedded approach which problematically underscores and promotes liberalism’s idealization of the autonomous and independent ‘liberal legal subject’.
We then consider the UK government’s long-term strategy for recovery from the effects of the pandemic and assess this with reference to VT. This analysis demonstrates that despite the pandemic’s exposure of substantial gaps in the legal and policy framework surrounding working families and the huge social costs endured by many, no real lessons have been learned: the government’s response is to revert to ‘business as usual’. We conclude by reimagining an alternative vision, one where ‘the vulnerable subject’ is the target of legal and policy intervention, and consider what the resulting framework might offer by way of improvements to the lives of working families.
Theoretical framing
Fineman (2008, 10) contrasts the vulnerable subject with the liberal subject, which is the human construct at the heart of political and legal thought. As the following analysis shows, individual transactions and interactions with the state and its institutions are focused on this supposedly autonomous and independent actor in processes of negotiation, bargaining and consent. Competence is assumed and differences in power, circumstances or ability are ignored. In contrast, Fineman argues, the state should act on behalf of the vulnerable subject, representative of all of humankind, which recognizes that our vulnerability is inherent and inescapable (19). This approach has obvious resonance in the context of a global pandemic through its recognition that our corporeality places us in a state of constant vulnerability. In contrast to dependency, which in most cases arises from a temporary phase such as childhood, illness or old age, vulnerability is ‘universal, inevitable and enduring’ (8). In arguing that ‘[l]ike vulnerability, dependency is not a harm or injury, nor is it deviant or exceptional’, Fineman (2020, 28) underlines the distinction between vulnerability which ‘arises from the characteristics and essence of the body’ and dependency which describes ‘relationships we have with particular social or institutional arrangements’. In critiquing the law and policy framework relevant to working families, VT has much to offer. It has been particularly influential in critical feminist legal theory, as it can help us to understand and give value to reproductive labour and care for dependants (Kittay 1999; Dodds 2007; Fineman 2008; Busby 2011; Busby and James 2020). This understanding of vulnerability as an inevitable consequence of human existence has also been used to theorize disability in ways that seek to challenge oppression and problematic paternalism (Beckett 2006; Clough 2017).
In challenging the political liberalism that idealizes the liberal legal subject as the appropriate target of law and policy, VT offers an alternative political theory which is based on collective societal responsibility rather than the valorization of individual autonomy and endeavour. VT thus offers a theoretical frame which draws on our common humanity and which provides an opportunity to assess the impacts of pre-existing structures, systems, processes and practices on our ability to live with and through the pandemic. The resulting analyses can inform our choices about how we want to live in the future and how law can best support those choices. In this way, VT can directly contribute to the desire that lies at the heart of this collection to make sense of the relationship between law and the pandemic through the insights offered by the humanities.
The counter to vulnerability is not invulnerability but resilience, which varies between individuals based on our capabilities and the opportunities that we are able to access over the life course. It is this variation that determines individuals’ susceptibility to harm. Central to VT is the claim that we have a collective responsibility, exercised through the state, to be responsive to vulnerability, primarily through the establishment and support of societal institutions which aid the building of resilience (Fineman 2010, 255). The ‘responsive state’ is thus driven by meeting the practical and ethical obligations involved in the inevitably messy realities of our embodiment over the life course. The role of the responsive state is not to eliminate vulnerability, which is a constant – and often positive – feature of our humanity, but rather to mediate, compensate or lessen any negative consequences of our collective and individual vulnerability by promoting greater resilience in individuals and institutions. Thus, ‘comparisons should not be made between individuals based on how vulnerable they are, but between states and institutions based on how good they are at providing us with resilience to our shared vulnerability’ (Mattsson and Katzin 2017, 117). Resilience in VT is not embraced in order to promote the negative, neoliberal desire to glorify independence and autonomy. Rather, accepting the state’s role as a resilience-builder enables us to interrogate institutional arrangements and practices that (re)produce inequalities and injustices and perpetuate disadvantage, and to reimagine state activities and obligations. In this way, VT ‘brings institutions – not only individual actions – under scrutiny, redirecting attention to their role in providing assets in ways that may unfairly privilege certain groups, even if unintentionally’ (Fineman 2008, 18). Fineman (2019, 342) calls for ‘a state that is responsive to universal human needs and for the reorganization of many existing structures, which are currently based on a conception of legal order that unduly valorises individual liberty and choice and ignores the realities of human dependency and vulnerability’. It is with this in mind that we interrogate the UK government’s response to, and recovery plans out of, the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state response: a working families’ perspective
There is no doubt that the catastrophic and global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused millions of deaths and continues to have an impact on the health, well-being and functioning of most of humanity, required a state response. In this chapter we unpack and consider what the UK state response reveals about law’s engagement with working families from a VT perspective. The plethora of government interventions impacting the lives of working families have changed during the pandemic, with variations between the four nations of Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland. Our focus and primary evidence base is England, although we flag English-specific and/or devolved policy provisions where relevant. As a whole, the interventions under review represent a degree of state interference that is, in the UK at least, historically unimaginable and certainly unprecedented in peacetime (Rodgers 2021). It is this broad interface of regulation that we seek to capture when we refer to the UK state’s ‘response’ to COVID-19.
We do not offer a detailed account of all legal provisions, but the term clearly incorporates key measures that have impacted the functioning of the labour market. These include the March 2020 Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations that restricted movement of workers in England (similar regulations were enacted in the devolved nations), requiring us to ‘work from home where possible’, and a tier system of local restrictions from March 2020. They also include the UK-wide Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme of March 2020, whereby the state covered 80 per cent of a furloughed employee’s wages up to £2,500 (for discussion of the scheme’s pitfalls, see Bogg and Ford 2020) and relevant provisions around schooling, childcare and other care-giving facilities.
The first enforced school closures were announced in March 2020, with schools remaining open only for critical workers and vulnerable children. Most schools opened, with limitations imposed, for some year groups prior to the summer recess, but a further lockdown occurred across the UK from January to March 2021, after which regular lateral flow tests (home testing) and mandatory face coverings were introduced alongside a complex system of home isolation requirements for those testing positive as well as for anyone who had been in close contact with that individual. Early year (EY) providers were also closed during the first lockdown but not the second, and care homes closed their doors to visitors and subsequently introduced limited visiting provisions.
Finally, the term includes the more generic measures and guidelines that have impacted everyone’s lives during the pandemic, such as the general restrictions on travel within and beyond the UK, rules around isolating, distancing and face coverings, closure of non-essential businesses and often strict limitations on which individuals could meet, as well as how many and where.
The state’s response to COVID-19 has penetrated all aspects of our lives. The following discussion explores the impacts of the UK state response to COVID-19 on working families, focusing on working parents/carers first and then considering the ‘cared for’ – children and older people in need of care.We demonstrate that the impacts of the state response have been immense and consider, more broadly, how lived realities of working families have too readily been ignored, undervalued and sidelined.
Parents and carers
The state response to COVID-19 is reflective of a deeply entrenched problematic approach to regulating working parents and carers per se. Despite legislative reforms over several decades in both the UK and the EU that have clearly responded to the need for paid work and unpaid care work to be reconciled (for critiques, see Lewis and Campbell 2007; Busby 2011; Busby and James 2015; James 2016; Caracciolo and Masselot 2020), it is still too often assumed that unpaid care work is easily absorbed by families in general, and mothers or daughters in particular. This assumption has been promoted throughout history by policies of gendered ‘familization’ which construct care work as a principally private, female concern (Busby and James 2020; Herring 2013, 110–15). This problematic assumption is itself underpinned by an equally problematic belief that families are permanent, unchanging, always willing and competent institutions in this regard (Fineman 2004, 155). The core assumption of easy absorption has, we would argue, permeated the response to COVID-19, and harmed working parents and carers.
The ramifications of the approach adopted to circumvent the repercussions of COVID-19 consistently downplay or ignore the implications of those policies for working parents and carers. The lived realities that have resulted from the state response have been considerable. These realities undoubtedly change over time and, significantly, vary between individuals. For example, the ‘pandemic journey’ has been substantially harder for the 1.8 million lone parents in the UK and those caring for children with special needs – and the existing inequalities of their circumstances have been ‘exacerbated’ as they cope with what has been months of pressure (Clery, Dewar and Papoutsaki 2021; Disabled Children’s Partnership 2020). To demonstrate the harms caused, three broad core realities are outlined here: the increase in workload experienced by parents and carers, the impact on mental health and well-being of working parents and carers, and the repercussions in terms of workplace security and experiences.
Workloads
Lockdowns, closures of schools and childcare provisions, and isolation policies have meant that, for many working parents and carers, home schooling and/or a significantly increased amount of care work and domestic chores had to be undertaken alongside paid work responsibilities (IFS 2020). In addition, the response often disrupted informal support structures, revealing and restricting an ‘invisible workforce’ that, pre-pandemic, enabled many working parents and carers to function productively (see Lafferty et al. 2021 for discussion of this reality in Ireland). Moreover, studies demonstrate that the majority of the inevitable additional unpaid care work that resulted from national lockdowns was undertaken by women. There is evidence that during lockdowns, fathers in households with different-sex parents doubled the amount of time they spent caring for their children, especially where they had lost their job or had been furloughed, and their partners had continued in paid work (IFS 2020). However, the same study suggests that mothers spent less time than fathers on paid work and were interrupted by household responsibilities over 50 per cent more often. For working carers, the number of hours spent caring increased significantly, as the help they would normally have received – both formal and informal – was drastically cut (Dementia UK 2020).
Mental health and well-being
The mental health of working parents in the UK has deteriorated more significantly than that of other members of the population during the pandemic. This is strongly related to financial insecurity (see below) and childcare/home schooling (Cheng et al. 2021). This is not equally distributed, however: a study of working mothers by the Trades Union Congress (TUC 2021) found that nine out of ten mothers had experienced stress and anxiety during the pandemic, and Cheng et al. (2021) found that greater numbers of mothers and working parents in poorer families experienced mental health issues. Many working carers also experienced significant difficulties around mental well-being during the pandemic. For example, a study by Dementia UK (2020) found that carers experienced greater feelings of isolation (89 per cent) and loneliness (85 per cent).
The state response to COVID-19 caused huge repercussions in terms of workplace insecurity. The number of recorded redundancies in the UK during the pandemic is far greater than the highest rate reached during the 2008–9 financial crisis – 370,000 in the three months to October 2020 (ONS 2021) – and unemployment was predicted to increase dramatically following the end of the furlough scheme in September 2021 (see discussion in Cribb and Waters 2021). Job insecurity and in-work poverty are likely to challenge many families, and this is particularly concerning given the poverty levels, discussed further below in relation to children, that already exist in the UK.
Whilst redundancies and an increase in job insecurity are likely to affect all workers, the state response again has been particularly harmful in this regard for women. Indeed women, not least because of the implications of closures of the workplaces where they are often employed, were more likely to have been compulsorily furloughed. Women were also more likely to leave or lose their paid employment (IFS 2020). Yet, interestingly, where working mothers requested to be furloughed to enable them to care for and home-school their children, their requests were overwhelmingly denied (TUC 2021). The scheme clearly protected the needs of businesses and employers but was used less sympathetically in relation to the needs of working families. It is unsurprising that many mothers used annual leave to manage the extra care work required during the pandemic, or reduced their working hours, or took unpaid leave (TUC 2021). These strategies adopted within working families offered short-term solutions, but as the state response to the pandemic entered a new phase of ongoing sporadic home schooling due to contact rules in schools and limits on wrap-around care, the struggle, especially for lone parents (Clery, Dewar and Papoutsaki 2021), to balance paid work and care work was set to continue. Of course, the wider picture is key here, as workers without care-giving responsibilities are more likely to have been able to thrive during the pandemic, with less commuting time and more availability to rise to the work-related challenges that the pandemic might create. This cohort will be more likely to benefit, in the long term, from demonstrating loyalty, whilst, restricted by the constant and exhausting realities of lockdown, working parents (especially mothers) and carers will have been less able to perform beyond what they are contractually obliged to do during the working week. This gendered dimension of the harm caused by labour laws and policies is reflected in our historical engagement with paid employment and unpaid care work (Busby and James 2020). The state’s response to COVID-19 is likely to have entrenched gendered expectations and to have reinforced the divide between the experiences of workers with and workers without care-giving responsibilities, bolstering the problematic liberal subject that VT seeks to challenge.
Having touched on some of the key implications of the state response for working parents and carers, it is clear that many have struggled, and many continue to struggle, as a direct result of the restrictions imposed. The main argument presented here is that the particular realities outlined above have been consistently ignored or downplayed. This is not new – it is in keeping with an historical approach to working parents and carers that has consistently prioritized and privileged certain groups and interests above others (Busby and James 2020) and, in doing so, has denied the realities of the human condition (Fineman 2008, 2019).
Dependants
This section shifts the focus to those family members who are dependent upon others for their care – elderly dependants and children – and demonstrates how the state response also under-represented and sidelined their needs during the pandemic.
Elderly dependants
Whilst the needs of older dependants, whether living in care homes or within family homes or living alone, have also been under-represented in the state response to COVID-19, it is not that this cohort have been ignored. Indeed, much of the initial state response and later the vaccine roll-out was largely initiated with a core stated aim of protecting the ‘vulnerable elderly’. This very construction is problematic, as it positions old age as a ‘separate category of human existence’ rather than viewing it as a natural part of the human life cycle (Mattsson and Katzin 2017, 129; Fineman 2008, 12–13). Moreover, whilst the well-being of older people appears to have been a core focus of state attention, it is clear that their real needs have been secondary to the greater ambition of protecting the NHS and getting all ‘non-vulnerable and autonomous’ individuals back to normality. A closer consideration of the real impact of the development of the state response on older people reveals how their lived realities have not been adequately engaged by policy makers. In fact, these members of working families, who are in need of care in their old age, have arguably suffered an immeasurable amount of harm as a result of the state response to the pandemic. Research undertaken by Age UK (2021) discovered that many older people found that their physical health and mental well-being deteriorated during lockdown restrictions. Many reported isolation and loneliness, and suffered when support with mobility and meal preparation was withdrawn. Even in periods where restrictions on movement and lockdowns were not in place, many older people were unable or unwilling to leave their homes because they were shielding or simply concerned about the virus, which is understandable given that it is older people who are most at risk of developing complications and dying if they contract COVID-19. The Age UK study found that ‘many face a double-edged sword where they are afraid of leaving the house but at the same time cannot cope with the loneliness and isolation at home’ (11).
These impacts felt by older people largely echo those felt by all generations, but the knowledge that COVID-19 could, for them, be fatal impacted their lived realities in a particularly profound way. However, the variety of concerns of older people were not identified or factored into the state response; hence, the impacts on them and their particular needs, as with those of their carers, have been ignored. For example, one study shows that for those with dementia, the imposition of restrictions on movement and visitors, staff turnaround and mask wearing was particularly harmful (Alzheimer’s Society 2020). It is also clear that older BAME people, who may be more likely to catch COVID-19 and more anxious as a result, were disproportionately affected by the virus (Age UK 2021). In terms of our core argument, these nuances of the lived realities of older members of families appear to have been under-explored and under-represented when policy responses to COVID-19 were developed. Indeed, the state response was reactive, with the government appearing to have lacked any clear strategy, or to have even been willing to sacrifice the needs of older people in developing its response. This is especially evident in the lack of strategy around personal protective equipment (PPE) in care homes. A study by Brainard et al. (2021) found that a lack of PPE or inadequate supplies helped to spread the virus amongst care home residents, who were very likely to have health complications that could more easily lead to hospitalization and death. Problems with maintaining consistent staffing levels within care homes during the pandemic were never prioritized by the government and, significantly, an abhorrent policy of releasing individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 in hospital back into care homes was mandated, which increased the spread with catastrophic results. A Public Health England report (2021) acknowledges that mistakes were made, and that this policy led to hundreds of deaths in care homes in England and Wales. However, the report has been criticized for using a methodology that underestimated the true impact, especially given the problems with testing during that time (O’Dowd 2021).
The final family members to be considered in this section are dependent children, and here we outline how the state response failed to engage meaningfully with their well-being. The closure of schools and EY settings, the impact on childminders and, later, the isolation rules are the main responses that had a direct impact on children’s lives. They are our core focus here, but the lived realities are also fundamentally affected by broader impacts of the pandemic and the state response. For example, COVID-related increases in redundancies (see above) and poverty (discussed further below), increases in incidents of domestic violence and severity of abuse (ONS 2020; Harvard 2021), the operation of furlough schemes (TUC 2021), the impact of ending eviction bans and rent and mortgage payment relief (Hetherington 2021) and the deaths of loved ones from/with COVID-19 (Young Minds 2021) have all hugely impacted children’s well-being. In addition, the economic impacts of the pandemic and the approach to fiscal management in particular are likely to have a negative impact on the well-being of this generation of children for years to come (Mayhew and Anand 2020). These issues are an important part of the monumental harm caused to children by the UK state response, and whilst their detailed consideration is beyond the scope of this chapter, we outline key detriments caused to children’s academic/developmental and mental health and well-being, once again to demonstrate the persistent sidelining and under-prioritization of the lived realities of families.
Various changes have been made to the academic grading process for students whose studies were impacted by the lockdowns during years when they would normally sit exams, but these were hugely controversial. Concerns were raised around the fairness and appropriateness of the processes adopted and the broader implications of loss of learning opportunities. The closure of schools meant that, not including the impact of isolation rules, most children missed over half a year of face-to-face schooling (Sibiete 2021). It is estimated that children face losing over £350 billion in lifetime earnings as a result of lost learning opportunities (Sibiete 2021; Thorne 2020; Adams 2021).
Beyond their academic significance, schools and EY settings are also key to children’s social development and their physical and emotional well-being. The broad importance of in situ schooling – including face-to-face teaching and organized sports, performing arts and music events – is well known. The majority of EY providers felt that upon return after the first lockdown, many younger children had regressed in terms of their basic development: for example with language and communication skills, toilet training and confidence. Interestingly, regression was noticeable where parents had been unable to spend quality time with children at home during the lockdown due to work pressures (Ofsted 2020). In relation to mental health and well-being, there is evidence of an increase in poor mental health in children during the pandemic: the Mental Health of Children and Young People in England report estimates that 16 per cent of children aged 5 to 16 had a mental health issue in 2020, compared to 10.8 per cent in 2017 (NHS 2020). Children with existing mental health conditions reported how symptoms had worsened during lockdowns (Young Minds 2021), and it seems that already fragile NHS provision is now stretched beyond capacity, leaving needs unmet.
Beyond the list of harms that the state response to COVID-19 has caused, or at least magnified and exacerbated, the fact that the response has cemented persistent forms of inequality is particularly evident in our discussion of children’s well-being. The shift to online learning left many without access to education, as they had no or inadequate devices or space for working at home. Families often felt that children with special needs had been ‘forgotten about’ (NCB 2020), and school closures had a particularly harmful impact for the most ‘at risk’ children. There was a significant rise, of nearly a quarter, in the number of child exploitation and abuse cases reported to charities and councils, and yet this was felt by many to be the tip of the iceberg, as there had been a worrying decrease in referrals to social services from schools, clubs and health visitors (Razzall 2020; NSPCC 2021). Many children were simply ‘off the radar’ during lockdown and isolated from those who could offer protection against an increased threat of abuse and exploitation both online and offline (Interpol 2020).
For many families, however, basic poverty magnified the hardships they faced during the pandemic. The state’s historical failure to tackle child poverty in the UK has been revealed, and the problem escalated as a result of its response to COVID-19. Millions of families had been living in poverty prior to the pandemic – an estimated 34 per cent of children in the UK in 1999/2000 (House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee 2003–4). Before COVID-19 this number had been predicted to rise to over 37 per cent, or over five million children, by 2020 (Hood and Waters 2017). Poverty levels increased as family incomes reduced – and was further exacerbated when the furlough scheme came to an end – with an increasing number experiencing food insecurity (Loopstra 2020) and resorting to the use of food banks (Trussel Trust 2020). For many children school meals are a necessity: there was a national outcry at the numbers going hungry when schools were closed, but the true depths and implications of child poverty in the UK have been historically and conveniently ignored (Busby and James 2020, 106), or constructed as a private familial problem (Main and Bradshaw 2016). To be clear, though, poverty ‘permeates every corner and every crevice of the poor child’s social landscape’ (Goldson 2002, 686). The fact that basic welfare provisions were not a central concern when initiating a response to COVID-19 reflects, once again, how the realities of children are ‘often invisible in a society that promotes the interests of those who are already in possession of power and resources – those who are autonomous and self-sufficient’ (Busby and James 2020, 110).
We have demonstrated how the implications of the state response for parents, carers, older people and children has exposed fundamental flaws: the needs of members of working families are not valued and care work is not fairly distributed. Cracks in the historical retreat of state responsibility for care (Busby and James 2020) have been revealed. This has occurred over many decades of familization strategies which, over time, (re)placed the main onus for care work firmly upon individuals and families. Within the context of this deeply neoliberal framework, families and outsourced care providers have clearly struggled to support those in need of care throughout the pandemic. The ongoing lack of state support for these critical institutions has perpetuated and deepened harms to parents and carers and those in need of their care. The state response has exposed the limits of a strategy that fails to apportion responsibility fairly for the provision of care work and to support such work which arises because of our human vulnerability and dependency across the life course.
A vulnerability approach
What can VT add to the current critique of the UK’s response to COVID-19 in terms of its implications for working families with care-giving responsibilities? Under Fineman’s schema, vulnerability is both embodied – our physical state makes us all susceptible to viruses and other ontological harms – and embedded, so that we are all part of or connected to social institutions through the state in all its guises including its narrow governmental form. VT recognizes and asserts our connectivity and dependence through the various relationships that structure our lives, whether within the ‘private’ domain of the family or the ‘public’ realm constituted by the various state institutions on which we are all, to varying degrees, reliant over the life course. These institutions are themselves vulnerable to the effects of changing extraneous circumstances, including government policy (Fineman 2008, 11; 2010, 269). The relationship between our shared and individual vulnerability and the conditions imposed upon us by the pandemic is clearly identifiable. However, the undoubted challenges which have shaped our lives since 2020 derive largely from the pre-pandemic landscape and the lack of recognition within existing law and policy of the need to counter vulnerability with resilience.
When the pandemic hit UK institutions, the education system and childcare infrastructure, which as core sites of our collective reliance building should have long been the recipients of state investment, were sorely tested and found wanting in myriad ways. These institutions, collectively deemed to be the stalwarts of the UK’s system of support and often held up as exemplars of ‘the best of British’ (see, for example, Johnson 2019), floundered and, at times, appeared to lack the necessary infrastructure and resources to mount an effective and sustainable response to the pandemic. As the discussion above has highlighted, much of the responsibility for supporting and caring for individuals was (re)located in the family, and it became increasingly apparent that the public institutions had in fact been weakened and depleted over many decades by the liberal state’s preoccupation with privatization.1
The delegation of care primarily to women through their roles as mothers, daughters and partners is evident in the shift from public service provision to the private profit-making sphere. Yet the distinction between private and public that liberalism’s social ordering is predicated on is itself a false and fictive premise. This resulting dichotomization of home and work, reproductive and productive labour, is reflected in Britain’s post-war settlement. The creation of the modern welfare state was intended to herald a new social contract between the state and its citizens with a focus on social intervention and redistributive policies intended to provide protection ‘from cradle to grave’.2 However, despite an increased emphasis on the state’s role in protecting and advancing the rights of workers, unpaid care work in the post-war era remained an almost exclusively female activity which took place within the private and unregulated confines of the family home. Women’s waged labour was viewed as secondary to their care commitments. Men, in their role as ‘breadwinners’, were deemed responsible for bringing home the family wage. State interference in household arrangements, although seemingly innocuous and laissez-faire, was distinctly engaged in maintaining this gender order over the subsequent decades (Busby and James 2020, Chapter 2). As Judy Fudge (2015, 14) asserts, ‘The boundaries between home/market and public/private have become deeply inscribed in contemporary legal doctrines, discourses, and institutions to such an extent that the initial jurisdictional classifications appear natural and inevitable rather than political and ideological.’
VT challenges the central tenets of liberalism, namely that the market is autonomous and that the state is, in turn, neutral and inactive, by offering an alternative account of the market and the state’s role in social and economic ordering. In Fineman’s (2010) view, the state is always active and the central question we should ask ourselves is ‘in whose interests does it act?’ Likewise, the notion of markets as naturally occurring, self-sustaining phenomena is replaced by an understanding of them as man-made constructs imbued with an innate ability to reproduce and sustain pre-existing hierarchies of power and privilege. The liberal subject is rational, autonomous and unencumbered, enabling him to participate ‘freely’ in the contractual relations necessary for the operation of the market through the performance of productive labour. Notwithstanding the encumbrance such an individual almost certainly places on others who are required to perform reproductive labour on their behalf, this formulation overlooks the basic human need for interconnectedness which arises from our universal vulnerability (Fineman 2019, 357). A responsive state which acts in the interests of the vulnerable subject who, as the true subject of legal and policy intervention, is representative of all of us, ‘fulfils [its] responsibility primarily through the establishment and support of societal institutions’ (Fineman 2010, 255) concerned with imparting socially just outcomes. Our ability to counter our inherent vulnerability through resilience building, which, because of our social and economic positioning, will vary, is led and facilitated by the actions of the state. The pandemic exposed our vulnerability both through our physicality and in relation to our embeddedness in social institutions and relationships. How has this shared experience shaped the UK state’s medium- to long-term plans for recovery as we move out of the pandemic?
The UK’s COVID recovery plan
The UK government’s COVID recovery plan is built around its ‘Build Back Better’ initiative, which focuses on economic growth. In the Spring 2021 budget, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a ‘£65 billion three-point plan’ (Sunak 2021). In extending the furlough scheme and support for the self-employed, and continuing the £20 uplift in universal credit for a further six months, the spending plans provided some short-term relief for those families struggling to manage the continuing uncertainty brought about by the pandemic. However, the longer-term recovery plan is based on a particular interpretation of the events of 2020 and their causes and effects, as well as on a specific conception of the role of the state in guiding the country out of the crisis. The budget set out a range of fiscal repair measures, by which the government expected to reduce borrowing from its 2021 rate of 10.3 per cent of GDP to 3.5 per cent in 2023/24, its aim being to reduce the budget deficit to near zero during the same timeframe. However, the renewed focus on fiscal consolidation is likely to require a return to the austerity policies that predated the pandemic and which ‘had undermined the very services – health and social care – that were needed for an effective response and, thereby, directly contributed to the UK having one of the highest mortality rates from Covid19 in the world’ (Women’s Budget Group 2021, 6). This return to the economic modelling of the past is repeated in other aspects of the recovery strategy.
With its plan to ‘build back’ literally through construction projects, the government adopts a very narrow conception of what comprises infrastructure. The focus on narrow economic goal setting does not extend to investment in the UK’s social infrastructure, including health, education and social care, which was found to be so seriously under-resourced during the pandemic and which has undoubtedly been further depleted as a direct consequence of it (Women’s Budget Group 2021). Even on a purely market-based assessment, such investment with accompanying social goals, for example to eliminate or reduce child poverty, could be seen as the stimulus needed to yield increases in productivity and employment as an aid to recovery. Furthermore, because of the large numbers of women employed in related occupations, investment in social infrastructure would contribute to closing the gender pay gap, which has potentially widened during the pandemic (Scott 2020).3 Despite the closure and consolidation of many businesses, particularly in the service sector (Women and Equalities Committee 2021, Chapter 2) – another big employer of women who were significantly more likely to be furloughed than men (IFS 2020; Adams-Prassl et al. 2020) – the plan makes no mention of additional spending on social security. It is also largely silent on social care, despite the clear evidence of a system already under severe strain prior to COVID-19, and further decimated by the effects of managing a pandemic on behalf of those most at risk with scant resources (Glasby and Needham 2020; Dunn et al. 2021). In relation to housing, the policies highlighted in the plan were largely targeted at homeowners through the extension of the stamp duty holiday until 30 June 2021 and the introduction of a government mortgage guarantee for lenders who provide mortgages to home buyers with a 5 per cent deposit (Sunak 2021), but with no investment in building more affordable homes. Local government bore much of the brunt in terms of additional spending on essential services during the pandemic (Gore et al. 2021), yet no additional funding was allocated to the sector.
Reimagining the state’s response
In reimagining the state’s response to enable a more sustainable, inclusive and socially just future for all, it is necessary to go much further back than the start of the pandemic. As this chapter shows, many of the social institutions and related systems and processes already in place were straining, fractured and ill-equipped for life in pre-COVID times. Thus, when the pandemic struck, individuals, families and communities lacked the state support necessary to manage the sudden change in working lives, educational provision and social care arrangements. The conditions exposed by the pandemic have severely challenged liberalism’s central tenets, as the supply and demand necessary for global capitalism have been disturbed, revealing its core fragility and the need for alternative thinking (Grear 2013). VT’s potential to move beyond the narrow comparative approach, within which all valued human activity is measured against the standard of the unencumbered liberal subject, gives it a particular currency in this context. A vulnerability approach is built on a responsive and reasoned analysis rather than the reactive and somewhat erratic determination to get back to ‘normal’ in record time characterized by the government’s Build Back Better campaign. It requires an integrated response aimed at building and bolstering resilience in the most effective and sustainable way. It demands recognition of vulnerability and dependency, not as signs of weakness, but as inevitable components of human existence.
Over the course of the pandemic, our shared and inherent vulnerability has been laid bare, exposing our dependency and need for care in a variety of ways related, but by no means confined, to the parents/carers and recipients of care considered in this chapter. It can be argued that ‘care provides a better focus from an investment stimulus [perspective] than construction’ (De Henau and Himmelweit 2020). If the state investment in employment which will inevitably be needed to lead recovery is focused on the childcare industry, and in recruiting and improving working conditions for ‘the massive numbers of care workers’ needed to remedy the ‘dire state of social care in the UK’ (5), rather than in construction and physical infrastructure projects, this would result in the same multiplier effects but with greater social benefits. The resulting investment in social infrastructure would ‘enhance the UK economy’s resilience’ and ‘yield returns to the economy and society well into the future in the form of a better educated, healthier and better cared for population, preventing social costs being shifted to other parts of the public sector, improving productivity and helping prevent the need for greater health and care interventions’ (5). Such investment, albeit embedded in the current social and economic structures, would signal a positive move towards a vulnerability approach. However, the full realization of our embodied and embedded vulnerability requires a more fundamental redesign of the social arrangements on which the state’s relationships with its citizens are founded.
The individuals grouped together and classified by way of their social identities are too often assessed in terms of their relational and relative values. This may be as economic actors (current or future workers) or in terms of the ‘burden’ that they place on those economic actors or on state resources, for example through reliance on state pensions, social security benefits or social care and health service provision. This valorizes independence, casting dependency as an exceptional state. In contrast, VT cuts across this restrictive focus on social identities, recognizing that they are in fact the products of legal and social relationships shaped and defined through the choices made by law and policy makers. As Fineman explains:
social identities are not natural and inevitable, although they may correspond with natural human impulses and emotions. As legal or social relationships, they are constructed by policy choices in which the state, through law, confers not only responsibility, but also power and privilege (Fineman 2020, 30).
The resulting legal subjectivity treats independence and autonomy as the natural state, casting vulnerability and dependency outside the range of everyday experience. By reifying the conceptualization and acknowledging the universality of vulnerability as the human condition, VT makes possible a different value system: a system that, at its core asks ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and then considers the repercussions of our understanding of what it means to be human for institutions, relationships and rules. The humanities-based approach required by VT’s application enables us to build upon this normative question in seeking how to achieve a more just society. In doing so we must recognize that the state is not neutral ‘and cannot be passive, noninterventionist or restrained’ (Fineman 2020, 32).
As life during the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed, we are bound together through common experience so that our shared vulnerability is ameliorated through relationships of care and expressions of solidarity. This need for interconnectedness does not exist solely between human beings, but also between people and the institutions that bind us and are required to support us, which thus should be structured in response to this fundamental human reality. Liberalism’s preoccupation with independence and individual autonomy and the resulting impact on social ordering has left those institutional sites of resilience building susceptible to risk, which has been exposed but not caused by the pandemic. Unfortunately, the UK government’s prioritization of economic targets and business as usual in its plans for recovery do nothing to disturb existing institutional arrangements.
Recovery will require recognition of both our vulnerability as embodied beings and our reliance on social institutions which are themselves vulnerable. An appropriate state response thus would be aimed at providing the necessary resources to future-proof both aspects. This is not just about the ‘hundreds of thousands of needles going into arms every day’ (HM Treasury 2021, 6), but also requires resilience building within and from the social institutions, including the family, that have been heavily relied upon during the pandemic and on which we are all to varying degrees dependent. This reconceptualization calls for a wider, more inclusive definition of ‘infrastructure’ which incorporates care and related activities. By asking in whose interests the state is acting in its response to, and in its plans for our recovery from, the pandemic, VT requires us to look beyond the immediacy of the current crisis, to reflect on our pre-pandemic lives and to interrogate the state’s lack of preparedness and derogation of its duty as a builder of resilience. A reasoned response to the individuals, communities and institutions that together contribute to the lived experiences of working families demands a complete re-evaluation of our legal and policy framework that places care and dependency at its heart.
Notes
1 The term ‘privatization’ captures the turning over of public services to the private sector as well as to the private sphere of the family.
2 The Labour Party’s victory pledge following the 1945 general election that it would provide for the people ‘from cradle to grave’ gave it a mandate to strengthen welfare state provision, so that in 1945 family allowance was established, which provided financial support for low-income families, with National Insurance being introduced in 1946.
3 The overall effect of COVID-19 on the gender pay gap is unknown, as gender pay gap reporting requirements for employers with more than 250 employees and related enforcement activities were suspended for the 2019/20 financial year due to the pandemic.
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