ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon recent developments and policy proposals related to the SF and other loans. It examines these in the context of New Labour's concerns financial exclusion and in the context of claims made by analysts and more recently by the then New Labour government that SF loans can be understood as a credit facility for social assistance claimants. In examining such issues the chapter critically engages with the concept of financial exclusion and explores continuity in concerns SF payments between their introduction in the late 1980s and their being placed under the policy spotlight in 2008 and 2010. The chapter demonstrates that, despite in 2008 and 2009 the longest and deepest recession that Britain has witnessed for many years, the political commitment to loaning the poorest people money, rather than granting them it, is as strong, and perhaps stronger, than it was when the discretionary SF was introduced in 1988.
