Interventions to reduce income support dependence

The UK Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) has conducted a number of trials to help enhance the effectiveness of current aid programs for the unemployed. The resulting intervention involved two major steps: simplification of the process and a “commitment pack” – planning aid for the steps of finding the job. Over the course of running this intervention, over hundreds of thousands of people have gone through it. BIT has found that the processes based on behavioural insights resulted in a 1.7 percentage point increase in the proportion of people flowing off the benefits.