The word ‘adequate’ means sufficient for purpose, just enough but not
necessarily more than enough. No one boasts of having an adequate holiday: it
does not mean luxury.1 But what is the purpose for which it is adequate?
‘Benefits’ is a general label for a variety of forms of income maintenance that
people need temporarily or permanently, not only for interruptions of earnings
because of retirement, sickness, invalidity or unemployment, but when there
are certain recognised expenses that reduce already low incomes unacceptably,
such as housing costs or council tax. Child benefit and tax credits play a similar
role, as do the variety of tax allowances that are also known as fiscal welfare
benefits. What we call benefits are all those forms of support paid for out of
our individual contributions or general taxes that help to support us and others
when we have low incomes. Whether that support is adequate cannot be
answered in the abstract, nor can it be decided by government decree. Since the
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14 What do we mean by
‘adequate’ benefits?
John Veit-Wilson
support given may vary for each of the benefits mentioned, their adequacy can
be understood only in its concrete forms by considering four questions:
adequate for what; adequate for whom; adequate for how long; and who says
what is adequate?