We are currently working hard on a research and campaign we call ‘The Readability Project’. It is looking at benefit letters and how easy they are for people to understand. We found so many local people have difficulty understanding these letters, they come into Citizens Advice for help with them.
Our project focuses on Universal Credit and PIP (Personal Independence Payment) in particular. Many people receive letters that they simply cannot understand perhaps due to complex vocabulary and too many numbers. But we also recognise that some clients fear to open the letters at all and simply ignore them.
We would like to make recommendations to make the information given to benefit claimants easier to understand.
readability project
Download The Full Report (PDF File): The Readability Project
Highlights From Our Readability Project
We recently completed our Readability research. Readability is defined as the ease with which a written text can be understood, and our project focused on how easy benefit letters are to read and understand. We investigated this issue analysing the text of sample benefit letters, and analysing the results from…