One of the main characteristics of public policy, common to the different countries of the EU and its associated members is to develop priority targeted action programmes following a logic of individualised needs and differentiation of goods and services offered. At the same time, especially in the social policy sphere, a powerful rise in the significant phenomena of provoked and voluntary or wilful rupture with public services: exit from (EF) and non-take up (NTU). This raises questions regarding the relation between the abandonment of universalism and the adjustment of public services to the needs of citizens. This issue is central to a reflection on the models of development and social welfare in Europe, on the “European policy of eradication of social exclusion”

The main objective of this project was to accumulate knowledge produced on this issue in six European countries, so as to produce a synthesis of methods and types of analyses and compare them in an analytical fashion. It also aims at presenting tools and methods of analysis and evaluation used at the local or national levels, concerning these phenomena.

- Non-take-up is “inadvertent”. It concerns individuals who for different reasons (social, economic or cultural) are not capable of satisfying their demands on public services and who do not receive all or even part of the goods and services they are entitled to. This notion implies the idea of an absence of effects, in the large sense of the term, of those services on individuals, without referring to a specific cause as it mostly refers to individuals’ difficulties. NTU shows the gap between what can theoretically be offered and the actual production (those benefits or services that are actually used). Much effort and many policy outputs miss their targets; eligible people are lost. In fact, the EXNOTA Consortium intends to show, through this phenomenon, the erosion of the universal dimension of social protection systems.

- Exit from public services, by contrast, corresponds more to a choice. This phenomenon is associated with individuals who for diverse reasons decide to do without social benefits or public services and who eventually try to obtain these services somewhere else. Exit thus can be identified as one element explaining swings of interest and disinterest among the public for targeted and individualised public supply. It also illustrates the problem of effects but in terms of a disinterest toward the public supply judged to be inefficient, too costly, not practical enough or ‘a-dime-a-dozen’. In this case, ‘non-take-uppers’ are those people who abstain from or redirect their demands towards other services or solutions.

Two observations were made from the outset:

- The scientific work and debates are on NTU and incidentally on EF. Only the notion of NTU is defined, while the possibility of EF appears sometimes, as a sub-category of NTU (“voluntary NTU”). Difficulties of access to benefits and services have become a political and scientific concern, but this is apparently not the case with the specific issue of exit from the public offer.

- The issue of NTU interests each country in different ways, depending on the level of development of the welfare State. In certain cases the main issue is not the take-up or not of benefits or public services, but above all the fact of having them. Consequently, NTU is always related to a state of benefits and services. In other words, the NTU phenomenon is not necessarily an object of research or an object of action in all six countries under study.

Beyond these remarks, the emergence of NTU/EF phenomena appears through the following aspects:

• The quest for “welfare-State improvement” in the Netherlands during the 1970s.
• The debate on “new poverty” and consequent measures in Germany in the 1970s and later in France.
• The debate on “administrative reform” in France, Greece and Hungary.
• From the point of view of “labour and social inclusion” in Spain and Greece.

All these aspects are discussed in the Final report submitted in March 2005. In conclusion, this report proposes an interpretative hypothesis around the question of “Selectivity of benefits and NTU”. Indeed, the NTU observed in the majority of countries under study concerns means-tested benefits set up, long ago in some cases, to avoid residual poverty during periods of economic growth and to be able to provide welfare for the most underprivileged groups during periods of rising unemployment and precariousness.

The literature on NTU has often related it to the means-testing principle. In the selectivity/universality debate, a very old (and recurrent) debate in the US and the UK, one of the arguments opposed to means testing is the fact that selective benefits have higher rates of NTU than universal benefits. Here too, with these six other countries, it is believed that we cannot escape a general framing of NTU characterised by changes in the welfare State as efforts are made to control public expenditures. This is resulting in a revision of conceptions of social welfare and in restrictions on expenditure on public services.

In all the countries under consideration the welfare State system was built around a paradoxical combination between universal values and insurance institutions, with full employment making it possible to avoid strong tensions between the two. With the rise of unemployment and “new poverty”, a great divide set in between employment-related solidarity (financed by contributions) on the one hand and, on the other, insurance mechanisms financed by taxes and supposed to act as a relay for those people who had been excluded from the job market either permanently or for long periods, on the other. The key hypothesis is that the shift from social benefits based on social insurance, to means-tested benefits financed by taxes (“national solidarity”), is at the heart of NTU phenomena.

Explanatory factors have been mentioned repeatedly in our discussions, especially: stigmatisation and complexity of regulations. National reports shed more light on these factors. From one reform to the next, from insurance deficit to insurance deficit, the definition of those entitled to benefits has been marked by instability, as has the border between insurance benefits and social action. The apparatus and access conditions of the different forms of solidarity are subject to symbolic political demands, leading to sedimentations that seem erratic or arbitrary. This is visible in national reports concerning many benefits. Because there is always a phase of maturing, of learning about a new benefit, frequent renewal of measures generates a high level of frictional NTU. Our discussions have also spawned other explanations that warrant empirical verification by measurement. This is the case of family responsibility, in particular. In the reformist rhetoric, it is necessary to move on from a perspective of state-controlled social protection to one that is society-controlled. We thus witness an NTU triggered by the fact that people refuse aid or benefits which are subject to contribution by the family.

At the same time, EF from and NTU of public services also seem to be associated with policies to restrict public expenditures characterising the past decades, associated with consumerist tendencies that limit citizens' loyalty to the public services. Several possible explanations are put forward: geographic inequalities and inequalities of access; rationing and exit from; rationing and social stigmatisation; rate scales and EF; lack of motivation in the civil service; stricter or narrower interpretation of conditions of access.

The link between selectivity and NTU needs nevertheless to be qualified in relation to data on the proportion of means-tested benefits in Europe In fact, the increasing proportion of means-tested benefits in the 1990s – visible throughout Eurostat data – must be imputed to trends concerning expenditure on benefits for families/children, invalidity, housing, and other forms of assistance for the poor. Judging by the studies on NTU that we have identified, it is not necessarily these benefits that have been focused on most. The benefits that have been subjected most to means testing have, to a large extent, remained excluded from concerns about NTU. It is primarily for those benefits that weigh the most in the total welfare expenditure, but that are the least limited by means testing, that the question of NTU is raised. But this questioning focuses on the parts that are means tested, such as the guaranteed minimum income or universal health insurance, which everywhere have become emblems of new national solidarity. Seen from this angle, it is less selectivity as a type of policy that draws attention to NTU, than the political necessity to show an interest in the effectiveness of “key measures”, either to demonstrate the legitimacy of government choices or to criticise them.

If we explore stigmatisation and complexity of regulations as valid explanations for NTU we perceive other elements that complete and even add to the hypothesis of a close link between selectivity of benefits and NTU.

Apart from what we know about the dissuasive aspects of access to services and to certain types of benefit, we need to emphasise those aspects considered in the different explanatory models of NTU proposed until now, essentially in Anglo-Saxon countries. In particular, we need to consider the limits of the prevailing behavioural and institutional explanation in relation to specific questions on chosen or assumed dimensions of NTU, in terms of lived experience, transformation of lifestyles and change of expectations vis-à-vis the public offer of benefits and services. Between an explanation of NTU that concentrates on the sordid aspects of life and a critical analysis of policies and administrative functioning, there is place for an in-depth exploration of possible disinterest in the public offer and, beyond that, a form of social and political “desocialisation”. This hypothesis was part of our initial project and we now have some evidence to verify it.

This hypothesis relates to an in-depth analysis of the efficiency of public policies (“What if they do not or no longer reach their publics?”) and of the reality of the political link today, addressed at the crucial level of perception of systems of solidarity and welfare, and of the consequent take-up of social benefits. It is based on several observations carried out in parallel with the EXNOTA programme, which relate to particularly significant if not worrying findings. These would need to be verified in follow-up work. Two of them are discussed briefly below.

- The generational dimension of NTU. Although NTU concerns all age-groups, single young people (with or without dependents) do seem to be concerned more, statistically. Other variables also play a part, such as gender, nationality, qualifications, occupational status and income. But the findings of qualitative surveys, available to the French team in particular, show the existence of “nomadism” that signals a high degree of irregularity in seeking welfare benefits, having access to them and actually taking them up, among the youngest potential beneficiaries. This raises the types of question on trends in lifestyle, expectations and concerns, that the current sociology of youth tends to explore.

Certain findings suggest the possibility of lasting NTU of a public welfare offer seen as inaccessible or unfair, ineffective or useless, especially when NTU concerns young people whose parents or older siblings are or were also in a situation of NTU. It is the memory of unemployment but also of a lack of education, poor housing, no buying power etc. that emerges strongly here, from one generation to the next, and that mentally puts individuals off their benefits, in a sense. This is reminiscent of observations about “hereditary poverty” due to social and racial inequalities (see the common glossary). These were first signalled in 1962 in the famous Harrington report, The Other America. Poverty in the United States, and far more recently around debate on "social capital" and its decline that has highlighted inequalities of opportunities which penalise the youth and minorities.

- The political expression of NTU. We have to be careful not to reduce NTU to the issue of social exclusion. NTU can concern all social categories and relate to individual choices and preferences. This observation needs to be explored further by qualitative research, which is lacking on the subject. NTU can signify deliberate distance from the public offer and the institutions concerned, and thus a possible rift in the system of solidarity and welfare in place. An analysis in terms of cycles of interest and disinterest in the public offer, or of TU/NTU, as defined by Albert O. Hirschman (political economics professor at Princeton), therefore seems necessary to qualify the NTU phenomenon as a possible expression of political desocialisation. It is one expression among many, if we bear in mind other phenomena such as the rise of “secessionism” experienced by systems of solidarity and principles of social justice, with reference to the many scientific studies in urban sociology and development in the US and Europe. This possible political desocialisation has not gone unnoticed. It is referred to in political discourse on exclusion and its consequences. But it also clarifies the very definition of social exclusion which, in political and scientific discourses throughout Europe, has supplanted notions of poverty and deprivation. It refers to the necessity to pay attention to the multiple causes and effects of exclusion, like NTU which can be both a cause and an effect.

At the intersection of these two observations, the issue of NTU appears as a reaction to longstanding social and economic inequalities that targeted policies are unable to remedy. In fact, rather than being a solution, these policies worsen inequalities when they demand potential beneficiaries for additional proof of their efforts and their good faith. In other words, people subjected to inequalities over a long period of time feel unable to take up their benefits and even lose the wish to do so. The higher morbidity-mortality rate in these groups points to a sequence of deprivation and “giving up”.

Without going so far as to say that the shift from social benefits based on social insurance, to means-tested benefits financed by taxes, is an accelerator of NTU (different periods would need to be compared), we can affirm that policies targeting “disadvantaged groups” do not seem able to curb the emergence of an underclass as regards access to welfare benefits, especially in groups living just over the social minima (who may have access under certain conditions). It is in this respect that NTU seems to be a phenomenon that characterises those known today as “the poor workers” (temporary workers, jobless young people, the aged with small pensions, etc.). Does this mean that with the solidarity systems which are developing today, it is better to be poor than precarious? This is possible and to be feared, judging by the gradual impoverishment of the middle classes almost everywhere in Europe.

NTU does not seem to be an urban phenomenon only but also to affect those areas furthest from social welfare and assistance apparatus, irrespective of the efforts made in certain countries in terms of neighbourhood services. Discussions within the Consortium have shown that Hungary and Greece, which face problems of “geographical discrimination” (see: Glossary), are no exceptions in this respect.

This additional information, that warrants validation through qualitative research, prompts us to question NTU as a risk per se of social welfare, in addition to recognised risks, i.e. the risk of actually not having legal access to the social welfare to which one is entitled. If the hypothesis is true that the shift from social benefits, based on social insurance, to means-tested benefits, financed by taxes, impacts on the NTU phenomenon, and if it is confirmed that there are lasting rifts with the public offer, we need to take a fresh look, at the end of this programme, at the nature of the crisis of welfare systems. This crisis seems to be due not simply to the fact that these systems have not been able to provide better coverage, but also to the fact that their shortcomings and dissuasion have totally undermined trust in their value and importance. In other words, we are back to a debate on welfare, like the precursors of the NTU issue, but somewhat differently compared to initial controversies on the negative impacts of each system. What we are able to state here is that, irrespective of the inadequacies of welfare systems, the repetition of their negative impacts seems to cause disinterest and withdrawal, that is, a political and not only social form of NTU, when trust in the idea of social welfare is effectively eroded.

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