Since the end of the 1970s, successive Conservative and Labour governments have based policies on the belief that widening asset ownership results in an ‘opportunity society where all have an equal chance to succeed’ (Blair, 2004). As part of this turn towards asset-based welfare, the focus of government policies has shifted away from providing public insurance against potential future risks to an emphasis on personal responsibility, as can be seen in a statement by Margaret Thatcher from 1987:

Whereas the goal of providing publicly funded welfare is to support consumption during periods of income shortfall, asset-based welfare aims to increase economic participation and rests on the assumption that by accumulating assets everyone can gain a stake in the economy (Cutler and Waine, 2001; Sherraden, 2015). In line with this belief, the publicly funded welfare state has been continuously dismantled over the past four decades and social responsibilities which used to be borne by the state are increasingly carried by individuals. Consequently, the UK has one of the lowest social welfare provisions among OECD countries (OECD, 2015, 2017). Unemployment benefits, sick pay and state pensions have been reduced to the degree of solely providing poverty relief, and socially reproductive activities such as caring for family members, domestic work and maintaining communities have been increasingly privatized (Fraser, 2017; Chzhen et al, 2019).