Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Benefit Leavers Surveys began in 2002-2003. The series aims to provide data on the destinations of working-age benefit leavers. At present, information on destinations is collected for Job Seeker's Allowance (JSA) recipients, but not for other benefit leavers. This research therefore aims to provide the equivalent information for them via survey data collection.

The specific objectives of the research series are as follows:

to produce data that are comparable as possible with the future administrative solution (specifically, this involves the collection of information on immediate destination after leaving the benefit, details on hours and earnings where the destination is work, current activity at time of interview), and demographic information not already held administratively;

to provide data for a large and representative sample of leavers in particular client groups;

to provide input into the design of the administrative data collection exercise.

Main Topics:

Topics covered included: type of benefit received, reasons benefit no longer received, whether moved onto other benefit, whether started work or other disposal, employment and self-employment, details of pay, and ethnic group.

The data file also contains some sample and administrative variables (such as a unique serial number, and information on the region the respondent was resident in at the time of the survey) and some derived variables (such as hourly pay which has been calculated from earnings and from hours worked). There are also two weighting variables (of which 'capped weight' was the one used by researchers).