Human Services News

From MDRC:

This report presents findings on the implementation and early effects of Britain's Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) demonstration, which is being evaluated though a large-scale randomised control trial.

Aimed at helping low-income individuals sustain employment and progress in work, ERA offers a combination of job coaching and financial incentives to participants once they are working.

Across various types of people and places, it increased the receipt of services and training for working customers, increased participants' average earnings, and produced some reductions in their benefit receipt.

A centrepiece of those policies is the New Deal programme, which offers job placement help from a Personal Adviser and other pre-employment assistance to out-of-work recipients of benefits.

Members of the WTC group immediately enter the post-employment phase.

The control group got the provisions they were normally entitled to receive from Jobcentre Plus; for the two New Deal customer groups, these included regular New Deal pre-employment services.

As a result of its more deliberate focus on in-work assistance, ERA increased the rates of receiving in-work help or advice by 21 percentage points for NDLP customers, and by almost 11 percentage points for ND25+ customers.

For East Midlands WTC customers, who were already employed when they came to ERA, the increase generated by ERA in the proportion who got in-work help or advice was much larger.

Among the East Midlands WTC target group, 58 per cent of the programme group combined training or education with work during the first year, compared with about 45 per cent of the control group, for a statistically significant increase of almost 14 percentage points.

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