Ms Fran Bennett:

I endorse everything Professor Patrick just said. I was thinking of the Child Poverty Action Group work with potential “second earners”, which was called Your Work Your Way. It might be worth looking at that as a specific example of what might help, in particular regarding activation for women and couple households.

I also want to say something about take-up. I have just done a review of recent evidence on take-up. It is published with open access so it is quite easy to get to and googling “Fran Bennett" and "take-up” would probably get you there. One of the things raised was that we currently talk a lot about automation as a way of trying to improve take-up. That would be worth looking at, although with a somewhat critical eye because of various issues that I raise in the article, although I will not go through those now. In particular, if you have a conditional benefit, it is rather difficult to see how you would have an automatic award of benefit because somebody has to agree to the conditions in order to get that benefit. It is also quite difficult for me to see how to do an automatic award for a couple because one has to follow each of the circumstances of each partner and also decide they are living together as “husband and wife” in order to do that.

There are a lot of take-up initiatives. There was a recent conference in Paris that discussed take-up in France and Europe, so it is a very big issue. France has 39 "zero non-take-up" territories that are experimenting with take-up initiatives at the moment. It would be worth having a look at those and I can give the committee a contact for that as well.

There is a lot going on. Automation tends to be looked at as the solution. I think it may be one solution among others but not necessarily a solution in and of itself.