Pro Bono Economics worked with Breaking Barriers to understand the potential value for money of their employment support for refugees in the UK.

Breaking Barriers supports refugees and people from refugee backgrounds to find meaningful employment. Their work aims to help overcome barriers to employment faced by refugees such as low proficiency in English, uncertainty of employment processes and work culture in the UK, gaps in CVs, and employer misperceptions.  

Breaking Barriers collects data on the employment outcomes of their service users at the beginning and at the end of their time receiving support. In particular, they hold data on the number of people who moved from unemployed/inactive to employed and people who moved from part-time to full-time employees.  This project aimed to estimate the economic impacts arising from the change in these employment outcomes. This would include economic benefits of higher net income to the service users and benefits to government in the form of reduced Universal Credit spending and increased revenue through income tax and National Insurance. 

However, Breaking Barriers need to strengthen the evidence they have available on what would happen to beneficiaries in the absence of their support and how long these effects last in order to confidently measure their economic impact. Pro Bono Economics has advised Breaking Barriers on steps they can take to strengthen their evidence and therefore allow for potential economic evaluation in future.