Recommendation 31

We asked the Department about the value for money of Access to Work, including how the cost compares with other government employment schemes and how it compares with other nations. The Department told us that, while it had not undertaken any quantitative assessment of the scheme’s effectiveness, it did have qualitative evidence.59 It said that the difficulty was that, to do a formal value-for-money assessment, it would need to have a control group to which it effectively denied Access to Work support so that it could create a comparison and see what the effect of the support was. The Department told us that its research had found there was effectively no ethical way to establish such a counterfactual and show what would have happened in the absence of the scheme.60