Introduction The social security system in the UK has undergone a series of changes in the recent past. Some of these changes touch on the issues of rights and responsibility. Historically, this has been a thorny issue and thus the need to deliberately address it from the perspective of the effects of the changes to the social security system and how these changes reflect upon the rights and responsibilities. Throughout history the rights and responsibility in the Britain’s social security has been referred to as passive due to the inactivity of the labor laws in the country. However, after the 1997 social security reforms, the terms rights and responsibility have adopted new meaning as well as implications. Changes brought by the new policies in the social security also meant that the way the security system was governed had to change. The change was intended to ensure efficiency is implemented in to the system. This paper thus looks at how these changes reflect on the implication of the terms right and responsibility as well as governance on the social security systems in the UK. This paper will be structured in a systematic manner that will begin by giving a historical perspective of the social security in the UK. The focus on the rights and responsibilities begin with the Poor’s Law of the early 1900s where there was the initial reference of the rights of the claimants as well as the responsibility of the employer. This possibly was the foundation of the welfare state, which was realised about 50 years later. The paper briefly focuses on how social security improved the rights and the responsibility immediately after the World War II and the effects of the changes on citizen’s contributions, marriage as well as benefits during off working days. The paper also puts emphasis on the onset of the Rights Movement in 1960 and attempts to show how this impacted up on social security issues. There is also discussion on the successive percentage increase on contribution for employed people by successive UK governments in Britain to date. The paper also focuses on the rights and responsibilities that concern the unemployed and if their rights as well as their responsibilities and contributions differ from those of the employed colleagues. Lastly, there is the issue of governance concerning the social security in the UK especially after the reforms that were instituted in 1997. The laws involved a series of policy changes as well as developments that ushered new realizations. New polices also meant a change in how the terms rights and responsibility were applied in the UK’s social security agenda. The roles of UK’s treasury as well as other governments departments in the implementation of the new social security policies are also be analysed in light of these new changes. The paper is organized systematically from highlighting the emergence of the social security idea in the pre-1900 Britain and how the idea of rights and responsibilities has evolved with time. This will be preceded by a detailed albeit brief review of the main literature concerned with the issue of social security in UK. This includes the definition of the terms rights and responsibility in relations to social security. The changes that occurred espec