Welfare Reform Team Evaluation of European Social Fund pilot project 2014-2015

The team should consider whether data collection for future projects should be
conducted separately from caseworker triage meetings, and who would be the most
appropriate person to do this.
Regression analysis results: What are the odds of customers finding work?
• The odds of finding work for customers who had been unemployed for between six
months and a year were more than six times (620%) higher than for customers with
any other duration of unemployment.
Conventional wisdom suggests that it is easier to find work if you are already working or if
you have just lost a job. Our analysis says that the provision of support services to project
customers experiencing unemployment for between 6 months and a year increased their
chances of finding work by a factor of six. This indicates a clear benefit in providing
dedicated services (including support with confidence and motivation) for this group, which
may help them into work soon.
• The higher a customer’s weekly housing benefit shortfall, the lower were the odds of
them finding a job.
For every pound increase in a customer’s weekly loss, the odds of getting employed at the
end of the project reduced by 2%. Again, conventional wisdom suggests that taking money
off benefit claimants (e.g. by sanctions or cutting benefit rates) acts as a financial incentive
to get a job.
Our analysis says that the opposite is in fact true, at least for this project cohort. Higher
benefit losses may correlate with higher rent and larger families, and financial hardship; as
childcare and debt 15 are established barriers to work, it is perhaps unsurprising that
customers with higher benefit losses are less rather than more likely to get into or back into
work.
This is corroborated by Citizens Advice research 16 into how people are likely to deal with tax
credit cuts proposed by the government in the July 2015 budget. Citizens Advice asked
people how they felt they would be able to cope with a notional £100 a month cut to their
household finances; over half (52%) said that they would find it very difficult to cope, rising
to 96% of all respondents with an annual household income of under £14,999.
When asked how they would respond to a cut of £100 a month to their household budget,
only 28% told Citizens Advice that they would try and increase their income through work.
15 Just under half (48%) of project customers who answered this question at triage admitted to being
in debt; of these, two thirds (65%) owed less than £2,500, a fifth (19%) had debts of between £2,500
and £4,999, and the rest (15%) owed more than £5,000 to their creditors.
16 Citizens Advice (2015). Cutting Back: Dealing With Changes in Income.[Online] Available from:
www.citizensadvice.org.uk/Global/CitizensAdvice/welfare%20publications/Taxcreditbarometer.pdf
[Accessed: 25 November 2015]
51