Recommendation 9

We asked how the Department’s evaluations of whether UC is more likely to get people into work compared with legacy benefits enabled it to estimate how much people contributed to the economy.15 The Department said it was now difficult to compare the labour market impact of UC with legacy benefits, as it had closed legacy benefits to new claims so there was no counterfactual.16 It asserted that it could use the findings from its evaluation of the impact of UC on lone parents to derive the figure of 200,000 extra entrants to the labour market set out in the UC business case. Specifically, it said that there would be eight million people on UC when it was fully rolled out, maybe half of whom would be in work; applying the impact of five percentage points to four million people would produce a figure of 200,000.17 We note, however, that in making this argument the Department chose to use the most positive of its evaluation findings and made a number of other assumptions.