Actual sanity in testing new benefits?

rogerblack

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/89/regulation/5/made

5.—(1) A selection for the purpose of regulation 4 is to be made by the Secretary of State on a random sampling basis from persons who, at the time of the selection, are qualifying claimants.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldhansrd/text/150122-gc0001.htm

Lord Fraud:

We aim to trial this first approach with more than 15,000 low-earning in-work universal credit claimants across the country, subject to us seeing positive early results. Testing on this scale is necessary for us to gather robust statistical evidence to demonstrate whether our interventions are effective at helping people to progress in work. Importantly, the larger numbers give us more granularity in the data, helping us to understand not only whether something like this works but how it works and for whom.
It is also important to trial across a different range of geographical areas, hence the requirement to be able to test in many different locations. Local labour markets vary immensely from area to area, so restricting trials to just one or two areas would give us a less clear indication of whether something would work well across the country. The first trial will be run as a randomised controlled trial, perhaps one of the most effective ways to test new approaches. It is certainly endorsed as the gold standard approach by many external experts.

This is testing of In Work conditionality requirements for the employed.
If you are earning under JSA+10 pounds - you may be required to take additional steps in order to seek better paid work, or lose entitlement to universal credit.

If this _doesn't_ help - at least the randomised controlled part will hopefully mean that spinning this fact will be much harder.