Pip2

 

Professional Competence, Social Contracts, and the Quiet Erosion of Agency

As a professional engineer, I invest deliberately in the services that enable me to operate at the highest level of competence for my employers, clients, and society. Professional status is not conferred solely by pre- and post-nominal designations, although I hold them with pride: Doctorate, Chartered Engineer, and Member of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. It is equally expressed through attitude, behaviours, and the choices we make about how we live and work.

Over a career of 30 years, I have worked alongside many entrepreneurial and flexible professionals. They have consistently shared certain qualities: resilience, creativity, accountability, and an ability to see opportunity where others see inconvenience. These are the same values I was raised with, and they remain central to how I approach both my career and my responsibilities as a parent.

For many years, the largest proportion of my personal expenditure was not discretionary. It wasn’t even the rent. It was childcare. During my child’s early years, half of my take-home salary was committed to nursery costs alone, before accounting for the wider ecosystem of childcare services required to sustain full professional participation. As a single parent food and rent must be afforded out of what remains after childcare and the costs enabling you to go to work. To make this viable, I sold my home and relocated to a significantly cheaper area. And the car. Indeed, anything I had of value. That decision was not made lightly, but it was made deliberately, in service of remaining economically active and professionally engaged.

In doing so, I again encountered something remarkable: local, entrepreneurial service providers solving real problems with intelligence and care. A businesswoman who coordinated school collection, nursery transport, after-school care, and holiday provision. Overnight stays. Holiday activities. Integrated, human-centred solutions that enabled parents to work, contribute, and progress. These services did not merely provide convenience. They created community, employment, dignity, and economic circulation.

Recently, my circumstances changed. My child turned sixteen, and I was required to transition them from Disability Living Allowance to Personal Independence Payment. This administrative necessity triggered an avalanche of targeted messaging encouraging not only the PIP application itself, but the full suite of associated and linked benefits. I was encouraged to view them as entitlements.

In parallel, I became more aware of how deeply these systems shape behaviour. A driver I used in the course of serving my clients coincidentally derives most of his income from local authority contracts - tied to benefits. Transport services that replace what was once a walk to school. Safeguarding clauses that, while well-intentioned, result in children being driven short distances within the same village.

What struck me was not malice, but consequence.

When we default to entitlement rather than agency, we unintentionally displace entrepreneurial services, reduce opportunities for meaningful work, and weaken the habits that sustain economic participation. We remove exercise from children’s lives. We remove autonomy from parents. We erode local economies built on trust, effort, and reciprocal value.

More concerning still is the subtle message embedded in this shift: that it is preferable to withdraw from societal contribution in exchange for managed support; that independence is risky; that convenience should trump capability. As a single parent of a disabled child, I find this deeply troubling.

I come from a family shaped by single parents in council housing, people who worked long hours and endured long commutes because they understood something fundamental: opportunity rarely arrives unannounced or effortless. It is usually dressed as responsibility, sacrifice, and sustained effort.

As engineers, we are trained to interrogate systems. To ask what does the customer need, what will the stakeholders value, what are the benefits, what incentives are created, and what unintended consequences emerge over time. When we apply that same discipline to social frameworks, uncomfortable truths surface.

Not every shiny offering is benign. Not every entitlement strengthens society. And not every convenience serves our long-term freedoms.

Professional life, family life, and civic life are not separate systems. They are coupled. When we weaken one, the remaining elements respond.

I choose to invest in capability over dependency, in community over abstraction, and in work that creates value rather than merely redistributes it. That is not ideology. It is systems thinking.