Introduction

Social security governance and policies are not immune to wider political and economic ideas. Specifically, in Britain, employment policies aimed at disabled people have been subject to marketisation and performance management regimes that reflect neoliberalism and the New Public Management turn in public administration (Hughes, 2003; Carmel and Papadopoulos, 2009; Flynn, 2012), as well as being a means to achieve ‘efficiency savings’ in Whitehall (see, for instance, Gershon, 2004, p 38). In recent years, successive governments, through the responsible department, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), have implemented programmes that involve private and third sector organisations competitively tendering to deliver programmes targeted at working-age people, including disabled people (see, for example, DWP, 2006, 2007b, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2013c; Freud, 2007; Finn, 2009a; Damm, 2012). This shift in service provision has also happened in other countries, and is controversial (Davies, 2008; Finn, 2009b; Grover, 2009; Work and Pensions Committee, 2013).

These market-based programmes seek to assist disabled people in receipt of incapacity-related benefits1 to move into, or towards, ‘sustained’ paid work via a variety of (mainstream) employment programmes. Typically, however, these initiatives have only relatively small impacts on employment. This is not to deny that employment programmes have successfully placed some disabled people in employment (see Bambra et al, 2005), rather to argue that the people most in need of support are the least well served by these programmes. This occurs because the contracts have an incentive structure that rewards contractors for working with, and placing in employment, participants who are more job ready. Providers are then more likely to meet performance targets and, importantly for their finances, generate revenue income. Two examples of these programmes – the New Deal for Disabled People (NDDP) and Pathways to Work (PtW) – are presented in this chapter to illustrate the argument that the marketisation of such provision can disadvantage many disabled people in the labour market. The DWP commissioned evaluations of both programmes (see Stafford et al, 2007; Dorsett, 2008; Knight et al, 2013), and this chapter draws on the author's involvement in the evaluation of the NDDP and published work on PtW. These evaluations used quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine how the programmes worked and were implemented, and their impact on participants, notably their exits from benefits and moves into employment.