Evaluation of the Prepaid Card Live Test

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance policy. DWP is responsible for understanding and dealing with the causes of poverty, and encouraging people to work.

The requirement is to undertake the qualitative evaluation of a small-scale project testing the feasibility of paying benefits to vulnerable claimants via prepaid cards. It will require a small-scale test of the use of prepaid card technology to administer benefit payments to claimants is taking place in Kent County Council. This requirement is to carry out a qualitative process evaluation of the test, in order to help determine the feasibility of paying benefits via prepaid cards.

Participation in the test is strictly voluntary and does not involve any enforced restrictions on how the claimant can spend their benefits. We are working with Kent County Council to deliver a ‘proof of concept’ small-scale test. Kent are already using prepaid cards and are interested in exploring how adding in benefit payments might affect their existing systems.

Participants will have their benefits paid onto a prepaid card and a support worker will assist with working out a budget and setting up payments. Participants can opt to block certain merchants if they wish to discourage particular types of spending and may opt for limits to be placed on the amount of cash they can withdraw from an ATM. The support worker will regularly review with the participant whether they are sticking to their agreed budget and how any restrictions applied are working for them.

If an individual makes repeated attempts to spend at a blocked merchant, or spends their weekly benefits very quickly, they would be offered further budgeting support by the support worker.

The aim of the test will be to understand:

• The key challenges and opportunities for using prepaid cards to make benefit payments, including technical aspects i.e. how they interact with DWP systems;
• How claimants use the cards;
• Whether it is feasible and desirable to conduct a formal trial of using prepaid cards to support vulnerable claimants.