Project Overview

Universal Credit (UC) has transformed the benefit system with new requirements for job search activity and for low-paid claimants to seek to increase their earnings. What effect will this new approach have on the quality of work and earnings of claimants?

The effects could go either way. Employment support could increase the skills of claimants, and requirements for in-work claimants to increase their earnings could provide a supportive ‘push’ that improves work outcomes. Alternatively, pressure to take any job could mean work is taken that is unsuited to a person’s skills or circumstances, and so is less likely to provide ‘good work’ or training that leads to progression.

What happens in practice will determine whether UC exacerbates or is a potential solution for the
UK’s problems of persistent low pay, limited progression, and increasing insecurity.

Most of the evidence on UC focuses on whether people get into work, not what happens to them once in a job. We will survey, and carry out in-depth interviews, with UC claimants, developing new ways to understand their interactions with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the effects of these interactions on claimants’ ability to secure good work and progression.

Eight million people are due to be on UC by the time it is fully rolled out, of whom around half will
be subject to work-search requirements. If the DWP can improve the extent to which its services support good work and progression, there is the potential to make a material difference to prospects for those on low pay in the UK.

Project Outcomes

The project aims to provide new insight into the extent to which DWP employment support delivered through UC helps claimants secure good employment opportunities with prospects for progression. We will:

a. Develop a new framework for quantifying UC claimants’ experience of DWP employment support.

b. Generate new evidence on UC claimants’ experiences of employment support, including the nature of interactions with work coaches and of the degree of variation in the service received.

c. Generate new quantitative and qualitative evidence on the relationship between the experience of employment support and UC, progression in the workplace and job quality for low-paid workers.

d. Provide insight into the extent to which UC as currently designed and delivered offers a solution to, or exacerbates, low pay in the UK.

e. Inform debate on how UC and active labour market policies (ALMPs) can be designed to maximise the prospects for progression and good work.

Partner Organisations

The project is funded by the Nuffield Foundation.