Understanding non-take-up of Pension Credit and evaluating strategies to effectively boost it

Background: £19 billion of benefits goes unclaimed each year. Pension Credit (PC), a benefit targeted at poorer pensioners, has particularly low take-up, with 40% of those eligible not claiming and missing out on £2,200 per year on average. A well established literature including correlational, quasi-experimental, and randomised controlled trial evidence clearly shows that income and benefit receipt improves health.

Non-take-up of PC is therefore likely to both worsen health and exacerbate inequalities. But little is known about why PC is so often unclaimed, and what can be done to increase take-up.

Aims and objectives: To understand the drivers behind non-take-up of PC and assess the impact of targeted letters; evaluate the broader economic and health implications; and co-create cost-effective strategies to boost take-up. Methods: This project is structured into five interlinked work packages (WPs).

- WP1 provides overarching project governance, maintaining close integration between other WPs, ensuring that the views of stakeholders and the public inform our research, and managing dissemination activities.

- WP2 will use unique administrative data on incomes and benefits, to explore the effectiveness of four different letters designed to target different barriers to take-up of PC (lack of information, stigma, trust in government and privacy). Individuals (n = 9,639) eligible for but not in receipt of PC were randomly allocated to receive one of the four letters.

This WP will quantify the effectiveness of these letters in boosting PC take-up and study variation by subgroup. It will also use a quasi-experimental approach to study how perception of benefit value affects take-up.

- WP3 will examine how take-up influences secondary outcomes that are critical for wellbeing - poverty, rent arrears, and council tax arrears. It will also quantify the health and economic circumstances of letter respondents relative to the rest of society, shedding light on how the intervention affects wider inequalities.

- WP4 will use the capabilities, opportunities and motivations model of behaviour change to provide insights into the lived experiences of a diverse range of letter recipients, with the goal of identifying the enablers and barriers to PC take-up.

- WP5 will consider the economic case for low-cost interventions to increase PC take-up. By collecting additional data on the health of letter recipients, this WP will quantify within-trial cost effectiveness. It will then consider the longer-term wider costs and benefits of the intervention from a societal perspective, capturing impacts on local authorities, the health and care system, and benefit claimants and their families.

Anticipated impact and dissemination: We expect this project to have a substantial impact on public policy. Key dissemination activities include: a) non-technical reports targeted at policymakers and the general public; b) reports specific to local authorities that participated in the trial, providing rapid insights; c) academic publications; d) workshops and presentations with policymakers and charity representatives; e) press releases and social media posts to publicise our research to a wider audience; f) annual updates to interview participants.

We will get input from stakeholders and our PPI co-applicant to ensure that our outputs are clear and maximally effective in enabling policymakers to implement the interventions we will co-create at scale.