Support for All in the UK Work Programme? Differential Payments, Same Old Problem

Abstract

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.

Intensity, moderation, and the pressures of expectation: Calculation and coercion in the street‐level practice of welfare conditionality

“…The differentiated treatment of street-level clients, interpreted as "creaming" and "parking," is often given as an illustrative example of both diminished discretion and the prevalence of calculative reason in street-level activation services (Carter & Whitworth, 2015;Fuertes & Lindsay, 2016;Greer et al, 2018;Rees, Whitworth, & Carter, 2014;Wiggan, 2015). The need to chase outcome targets exacerbates inherent pressures to focus resources on those service users who are most likely to produce short-term job outcomes ("creaming") at the expense of people with more difficulties finding paid work, who are neglected ("parking").…”

“…This dynamic is widely associated with a loss of discretion and either assumes or is explicitly attributed to the rational choices of street-level workers in response to the situational incentives-or "street-level calculus" (Brodkin, 2011)-produced by narrowly defined and highly consequential outcome targets. Attempts to design this dynamic out of the system by altering the contractual incentives-through differential pricing of different claimant groups-are argued to have exacerbated the problem by simply reproducing it within each claimant category (Carter & Whitworth, 2015;Rees et al, 2014).…”

Interrogating Institutional Change: Actors' Attitudes to Competition and Cooperation in Commissioning Health Services in England

“…There has been a somewhat unreflective extension of the notion of consumer choice taken from the private sector to social housing and education, despite big differences in the type of constraints characterizing the quasi-markets in each field (Greener and Powell 2009). On the supply side, the provision of many public services has been supplemented by or outsourced outright to private and third sector organizations, for example in education (Goodman and Burton 2012) or 'welfare to work' support (Rees et al 2014).…”

Effects of individualised follow‐up on activation programme participants' self‐sufficiency: A cluster‐randomised study

“…The market logic of the NPM discourse also includes processes of decentralisation and deregulation, where activation policies are organised by local service providers and service users are interpreted as consumers of these services (van Berkel & van Der Aa, 2012). However, these developments seem to have had a number of adverse effects, such as service providers 'creaming' those who are easy to serve and 'parking' those who are more difficult to serve (Rees, Whitworth, & Carter, 2014). Accordingly, the study by Brodkin (2011) demonstrated that front-line workers do not respond to increased performance-based requirements, but adjust to them in ways that policymakers did not anticipate.…”