‘Creaming’ and ‘parking’ are endemic concerns within quasi-marketised welfare-to-work (WTW) systems internationally, and the UK's flagship Work Programme for the long-term unemployed is something of an international pioneer of WTW delivery, based on outsourcing, payment by results and provider flexibility. In the Work Programme design, providers’ incentives to ‘cream’ and ‘park’ differently positioned claimants are intended to be mitigated through the existence of nine payment groups (based on claimants' prior benefit type) into which different claimants are allocated and across which job outcome payments for providers differ. Evaluation evidence suggests however that ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’ practices remain common. This paper offers original quantitative insights into the extent of claimant variation within these payment groups, which, contrary to the government's intention, seem more likely to design in rather than design out ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’. In response, a statistical approach to differential payment setting is explored and is shown to be a viable and more effective way to design a set of alternative and empirically grounded payment groups, offering greater predictive power and value-for-money than is the case in the current Work Programme design.

The UK has been a high profile policy innovator in welfare-to-work

The aim of these studies was to provide reference data on intersubject variability and reproducibility of diffusion tensor imaging. Healthy volunteers underwent imaging on two occasions using the same 3T Siemens Verio magnetic resonance scanner. At each session two identical diffusion tensor sequences were obtained along with standard structural imaging. Fractional anisotropy, apparent diffusion coefficient, axial and radial diffusivity maps were created and regions of interest applied in normalised space. The baseline data from all 26 volunteers were used to calculate the intersubject variability, while within session and between session reproducibility were calculated from all the available data. The reproducibility of measurements were used to calculate the overall and within session 95% prediction interval for zero change. The within and between session reproducibility data were lower than the values for intersubject variability, and were different across the brain. The regional mean (range) coefficient of variation figures for within session reproducibility were 2.1 (0.9–5.5%), 1.2 (0.4–3.9%), 1.2 (0.4–3.8%) and 1.8 (0.4–4.3%) for fractional anisotropy, apparent diffusion coefficient, axial and radial diffusivity, and were lower than between session reproducibility measurements (2.4 (1.1–5.9%), 1.9 (0.7–5.7%), 1.7 (0.7–4.7%) and 2.4 (0.9–5.8%); p<0.001). The calculated overall and within session 95% prediction intervals for zero change were similar. This study provides additional reference data concerning intersubject variability and reproducibility of diffusion tensor imaging conducted within the same imaging session and different imaging sessions. These data can be utilised in interventional studies to quantify change within a single imaging session, or to assess the significance of change in longitudinal studies of brain injury and disease.

Well-being and employment activation have become central and intertwined policy priorities across advanced economies, with the mandation of unemployed claimants towards employability interventions (e.g. curriculum vitae preparation and interview skills). Compelled job search and job transitions are in part justified by the well-being gains that resulting employment is said to deliver. However, this dominant focus within the activation field on outcome well-being -the well-being improvement triggered by a transition to paid work -neglects how participation in activation schemes can itself affect well-being levels for unemployed people -what we term 'process wellbeing' effects. Combining theoretical literature with empirical work on the UK's large-scale quasi-marketized Work Programme activation scheme, we develop the limited existing academic discussion of process well-being effects, considering whether and how activation participation mediates the negative well-being effects of unemployment, irrespective of any employment outcomes. We further relate variation in such process well-being effects to the literature on activation typologies, in which 'thinner' work-first activation interventions are linked to weaker process well-being effects for participants compared to 'thicker' human capital development interventions. Confirming these expectations, our empirical work shows that Work Programme participants have, to date, experienced a largely 'thin' activation regime in which participants are both expected to, and empirically demonstrate, similar if not lower levels of process well-being than those who are openly unemployed. These concerning findings speak to all nations seeking to promote the well-being of unemployed people and particularly those perusing 'black box' activation schemes based around quasi-marketization, devolution and New Public Management.

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