Project Director: Christina Beatty
Project Duration: 2013

Assessing the resilience of individuals and communities in the face of major welfare reform is both highly topical and urgent. Over 2.5m people of working age are currently out-of-work on disability benefits (mainly Incapacity Benefit and its successor Employment and Support Allowance) and face major changes to their entitlements. Over 800,000 may lose their disability benefits, and most of the remainder will for the first time be required to take steps to return to work. Places with large concentrations of claimants, or individuals with particular health problems or barriers to work, may be less resilient to adjust to the large scale welfare reform underway. This project brings together a team from CRESR and CHSCR using labour market and health expertise to investigate both the interventions which might bolster individual's resilience to the changes underway and the scale of the support which might be needed in local area's with high concentrations of incapacity claimants to be resilient to the effects of welfare reform.

The project team also included Kirsty Duncan and Sionnadh McLean (Sheffield Hallam University).