The study examines British public assistance (Supplementary Benefits) and other income maintenance programs for employables. These are viewed as one policy set to analyze their incentives and disincentives to see if the incentive structure is consonant with a goal of promoting work. Sanctions applied to recipients are also analyzed. Relatively high benefits are found to result in higher reliance on sanctions than on incentives. Training programs targeted at the welfare poor are more sanctions than effective training. Implications for the U. S. are: (1) training programs for welfare recipients can easily degenerate into ineffectiveness, except as sanctions; (2) the experimentation now possible under Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) is an opportunity to devise structures in which incentives and sanctions are consonant with the goal of promoting employment, and in which training programs for welfare recipients feed into and are part of the mainstream of general manpower policy, so that they can do an effective training job. The study contains a bibliography of British works and a reader's guide to British welfare programs. (Author)