Getting Welfare to Work: Lessons from Britain’s ‘New Deal’

The re-emergence of long term unemployment and benefit dependency has posed new challenges for traditional welfare and employment assistance regimes. New strategies aimed at ‘activating’ benefit systems, ‘making work pay’ and improving the efficiency of labour market programs are being implemented. This article assesses the ‘employment first’ welfare state that has been created in Britain and reviews the evidence about the role and impact of the Labour Governments New Deal employment programmes. It then considers some implications that this assessment may have for countries currently ‘activating’ their benefit systems.