The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy the centre of public policy discussions, even as official statistics suggest that relatively small amounts of money are lost to such schemes.

In Fraudulent Lives Steven King focuses on the British case in the first ever long-term analysis of the scale, meaning, and consequences of welfare fraud in Western nations. King argues that an expectation of dishonesty on the part of claimants was written into the basic fabric of the founding statutes of the British welfare state in 1601, and that nothing has subsequently changed. Efforts throughout history to detect and punish fraud have been superficial at best because, he argues, it has never been in the interests of the three main stakeholders – claimants, the general public, and officials and policymakers – to eliminate it.

Tracing a substantial underbelly of fraud from the seventeenth century to today, King finds remarkable continuities and historical parallels in public attitudes towards the honesty of welfare recipients – patterns that hold true across Western welfare states.

Steven King is professor of economic and social history at Nottingham Trent University and co-author of In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900.

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“A highly original and important work. King’s argument – that contemporary attitudes towards the welfare system in Britain have existed throughout the history of British public welfare, since the foundation of the Poor Law in 1601 – is well-supported by a range of documentary sources covering the time period, and human voices from the recent past.” Pat Thane, Birbeck College, University of London