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Support for All in the UK Work Programme? Differential Payments, Same Old Problem
Author(s) -
Rees James,
Whitworth Adam,
Carter Elle
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
social policy and administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9515
pISSN - 0144-5596
DOI - 10.1111/spol.12058
Subject(s) - payment , incentive , work (physics) , welfare , government (linguistics) , business , public economics , qualitative research , plaintiff , economics , marketing , finance , political science , sociology , engineering , microeconomics , law , mechanical engineering , market economy , social science , linguistics , philosophy
The UK has been a high profile policy innovator in welfare‐to‐work provision which has led in the Coalition government's Work Programme to a fully outsourced, ‘black box’ model with payments based overwhelmingly on job outcome results. A perennial fear in such programmes is providers' incentives to ‘cream’ and ‘park’ claimants, and the Department for Work and Pensions has sought to mitigate such provider behaviours through Work Programme design, particularly via the use of claimant groups and differential pricing. In this article, we draw on a qualitative study of providers in the programme alongside quantitative analysis of published performance data to explore evidence around creaming and parking. The combination of the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggest that creaming and parking are widespread, seem systematically embedded within the Work Programme, and are driven by a combination of intense cost‐pressures and extremely ambitious performance targets alongside overly diverse claimant groups and inadequately calibrated differentiated payment levels.