PAC examines shortage of work coaches at jobcentres
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will hear from senior officials at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as part of its inquiry into jobcentres at 10am on Thursday 15 May.
Meeting details
Over half (57%) of jobcentres had to reduce their support for Universal Credit claimants from Sept ’23 to Nov ’24 due to a shortage of work coaches. The National Audit Office found in its recent report on supporting people to work through jobcentres that DWP has not had work coaches to meet the expected demand for jobcentre support in the past three years. There were shortfalls in five of its seven jobcentre regions across the UK in 2023-24.
A key DWP performance measure for jobcentres is the into-work rate – the proportion of people moving from being out of work, to being in work. For the 1.6m people whose UC claims are contingent on preparing for or looking for work, the into-work rate has declined in the past two years to below pre-pandemic levels. An NAO report found that this reduced during the pandemic from 8.8% in 2018-19 to 7.2% in 2020-21. It then increased to 9.7% in 2021-22, but declined in the following two years, to 8.2% in 2023-24.
In March, the DWP announced that it would be deploying 1,000 existing work coaches (of approximately 18,000) to support around 65,000 claimants of health and disability benefits to move into work. The Committee session will likely see questions around how DWP plans to build its capacity to provide this support, as well as what impact this redeployment will have on the support available for other UC claimants.