Welfare Policy as Cultural Policy in the UK

This chapter considers how welfare policies constitute an alternative form of cultural policy, allowing cultural workers to develop creative skills and identities outside formal employment. Based on the experience of the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, we examine how various policies and institutions not explicitly designed to support artists, including the Enterprise Allowance Scheme and access to higher education, provided a ‘hidden subsidy’ for informal, unfunded creative activities. As a result, cultural workers were able to develop the social capital and experience to embark upon a creative career. These systems will be compared to contemporary UK policies, which have mostly taken a more austere and conditional approach to welfare (e.g. Universal Credit) and to work itself. This narrower and more targeted version of welfare has restricted access to creative careers and cemented inequalities in the cultural labour market. This chapter will highlight the importance of unstructured time in the creative process, the democratizing effect of welfare systems in granting time and space to those otherwise unable to afford the luxury of a creative career, and the idea of welfare systems as a form of implicit cultural policy.