One of the earliest regeneration projects I was involved in was in Wester Hailes, Edinburgh in the early 1990s. One of the aims of New Life for Urban Scotland, a conservative policy, was raising household income. This was achieved locally by a very successful benefits take up campaign which involved then job centre and DSS staff training up local volunteers to raise awareness of the benefits people were entitled to, help them fill in the forms and follow up applications etc. I know this work was evaluated and written up at the time, if it's the kind of thing you're interested in it may be worth trying to track down reports etc., or contacting the staff involved in this. It pre-dates tax credits etc. but was an interesting process to be involved in, and one which drew on local community member and their social networks and brought people into a training programme who had had little or no contact with any formal learning in years.
Teresa
Dr Teresa Young
Drug Related Death Researcher
Commissioning & Modernisation
Blackpool PCT
01253 651245
To find out more about Drug Services in Blackpool, visit the BSafe Blackpool website at: www.BSafeBlackpool.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Social-Policy is run by SPA for all social policy specialists
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Stephen Sinclair
Sent: 22 August 2008 17:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Successful income maximisation and benefit/credit uptake
I would be grateful if anyone could direct me to examples of effective practice
in relation to maximising benefit and/or tax credit uptake; i.e. successful
examples of providing information, advice services, etc. which have increased
income received by eligible claimants. Any research or evaluation studies
examining the relative effectiveness of alternative practices, campaigns, joint
delivery, etc. would also be useful. In short, we want to know how best to
help people to claim rights to income which they are not currently accessing.
I'm primarily interested in transferable lessons for benefits and / or tax credits
in the UK, but if there is directly relevant information from other fields or
countries, that would be useful too.
Thanks in advance
Stephen
Dr. Stephen Sinclair
Deputy Director, Scottish Poverty Information Unit
K. 315, Buchanan House
Glasgow Caledonian University
Glasgow, G4 OBA
Tel: 0141 331 3666
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.povertyinformation.org/
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