The Government should stop forcing benefit claimants to jump through hoops like attending Jobcentre meetings in order to claim benefits, a policy unit set up by Downing Street has recommended.
The Behavioral Insights Team, set up by David Cameron in 2010, said piling unemployed people with responsibilities on pain of sanction might actually be making it harder for them to get jobs.
The so-called Nudge Unit, which was part-privatised in 2014, warned that some Government policies were reducing so-called “cognitive bandwidth” or “headspace” of the people they were designed to help.
“There is evidence that welfare conditionality in the UK – mandatory behavior requirements such as attending meetings with work coaches or providing repeated evidence of disability in order to receive benefits – is associated with anxiety and feelings of disempowerment,” the policy unit said in a report released on Thursday.
“However, as far as we know no one has examined whether welfare conditionality has cognitive depleting effects.”
The report, headlined “Poverty and decision-making”, tries to apply the latest findings from behavioral science to improve government services.
It says that far from anxiety-inducing forms and meetings the welfare system should instead be taking steps such as providing annual summaries of benefit entitlements to people.
The researchers called on the Department for Work and Pensions to conduct experiments into whether welfare conditionality actually had any positive effects and suggested that self-set and enforced goals might be a better way of helping people into work.
Dr Kizzy Gandy, a led researcher at the policy unit, said “simply tweaks” to services could help improve the way services worked.
“Government policies should help people to have less on their mind, not more,” she said.
“We are optimistic that behavioural science can help government departments to better design policies to help those who are ‘just managing’ in order to prevent and overcome poverty.
“We find that in many cases, simple tweaks to service design can yield disproportionate gains in improving decision-making.”
Welfare conditionality and sanctions were a favoured approach of former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, and also of the last Labour government. Meetings with so-called 'work coaches' form a major part of the Government's beleagured new Universal Credit welfare system.
There are some signs the Government may have backed away from the most controversial aspects of the policy in recent months.
Before his resignation Mr Duncan Smith introduce a “warning period” for sanctions, partially following the recommendations of a parliamentary committee that said the system was not working and putting vulnerable people at risk of destitution and harm.
Last week the new Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green scrapped reassessments for chronically-ill disabled people seeking to claim Employment Support Allowance (ESA) – affecting around 100,000 people.
Large swathes of the welfare system do still however rely on conditionality and testing and any push to unpick the approach will take a long time, however.
