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What tips the scales?: Understanding how people in the East Midlands make decisions about universal credit and work

    Cohort 2026 East Midlands Research Placement Project

    About The Project

    Universal Credit (UC) has been the most significant reform to the UK’s working‑age benefits system in decades which was designed to ensure work “pays”. However, the UC system is complicated with information about how to navigate it known to be difficult for claimants to digest, and to then use to make informed decisions on potential trade-offs for remaining on benefits or moving into work, without significant support.

    While financial incentives exist to move claimants into work, such as sanctions and conditionality, organisations like Citizens Advice argue that other systemic barriers like insecure work, health conditions, or caring responsibilities, also factor into how people make their decisions when trying to decide which scenario will leave them better off. This suggests that the economic trade‑off is not purely a calculation of net income but is intertwined with more nuanced lived-experiences and perceptions such as job quality, job stability, personal health, caring responsibilities, and more.

    This project will work with Framework, and potentially some of their service users, to develop an East Midlands-based understanding of how benefits claimants make use of existing information to interpret these trade‑offs, and where the current inaccessibility of UC information makes this decision-making more difficult and unreliable.

    Project Aims 

    The overall aims of the project are:

    1. The aim of this project is to develop evidence that can help Framework to improve support for their service users, and which can help EMCCA make evidence-based policy decisions to support people across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

    Project Team