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Requiring The Long-Term Unemployed to Train: Is Benefit Conditionality Effective?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Heather Rolfe
Heather Rolfe*
Affiliation:
National Institute of Economic and Social Research
*
1E-mail: h.rolfe@niesr.ac.uk
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Abstract

Conditionality has increasingly been part of benefit entitlement and its effects have been examined in a number of ways. While the focus of previous research has been on general conditions such as job search and acceptance of job offers, this paper examines conditionality specifically in relation to participation in training. Using data from a qualitative evaluation of a government programme, the Skills Conditionality pilot, the paper uses two hypotheses to critically assess the effectiveness of conditionality as a benefits policy: that it is successful in increasing participation in training; and that it is harmful by reducing time for job search.

Keywords

Unemploymentqualitative evaluationconditionalitytrainingemployabilityI30I38Z18
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 219 , January 2012 , pp. R65 - R76
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank NIESR colleagues Richard Dorsett who led the quantitative evaluation of the Skills Conditionality pilot and Anitha George who worked on the qualitative evaluation. She would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their guidance. NIESR is grateful to the Department for Work and Pensions who commissioned the research on which this paper is based and to the research respondents whose experiences are presented in this paper. The author is responsible for the interpretation of data presented in the paper.

JEL Classifications: 130; 138; Z18

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