About Us > What is the Community Allowance?
What is the Community Allowance?
The Community Allowance would enable community organisations to pay local unemployed people to do part time or sessional work that strengthens their community without it affecting their benefits. All that is needed is a change to the regulations.
The Community Allowance would enable a range of unemployed people on any benefit to undertake part time work that strengthens their neighbourhood without it affecting their benefit (including housing and council tax benefit and other benefits like free school meals and prescriptions). Participants would be allowed to register on the Community Allowance for a maximum of 52 weeks at a time.
The Community Allowance would be paid flexibly to suit an individual’s availability for work and/or the sessional work that is available; but maximum earnings on top of benefits over the year would be capped at £4,469 or the equivalent of up to 15 hours a week on the minimum wage. Participants would be paid the minimum wage or more depending on the kind of work available and their skill base.
In the autumn of 2009 the New Economics Foundation carried out a Social Return on Investment analysis of the Community Allowance and found that for every £1 spent £10.20 worth of social value would be generated.
We want to run a pilot programme in order to test the feasibility of the Community Allowance and to capture the learning so we can refine the proposal.
Read about the Community Allowance in more detail in our latest briefing.
If your organisation wants to back the proposals to establish the Community Allowance in the UK benefits system, contact us and we will add your organisation's name to the list of supporters on this website.
How was it developed?In 2002, the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, which was housed within the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, recruited 24 community activists from across the UK to advise the Government on neighbourhood renewal issues.
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