Employment Instead of Benefit Receipt? Process and Outcomes of Reassessment of Dutch Disability Benefit Recipients

Abstract

In order to restrict the stock of disability benefit recipients in the Netherlands, a substantial re-assessment programme has been carried out on 340,000 persons receiving long term disability benefit. This article presents the background to this measure and describes its implementation and the assessment procedures applied. The analysis discusses the outcomes, regarding the newly-assessed degree of disability as well as client behaviour, such as the further dependency on benefits (e.g. ‘transfer’ to other benefit schemes) or return to the labour market of re-assessed (ex-)beneficiaries. The re-examinations substantially reduced the stock of disability benefit recipients but re-employment targets were not fully reached.