Work and Pensions Committee 

Oral evidence: Get Britain Working: Reforming Jobcentres, HC 653

Wednesday 23 April 2025

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 23 April 2025.

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Debbie Abrahams (Chair); Johanna Baxter; Damien Egan; Amanda Hack; Frank McNally; David Pinto-Duschinsky.

Questions 68 - 109

Witnesses

I: Liz Sewell, Director, Belina GRoW; Sam Reid, Research Manager, Migrant Help; Balbir Kaur Chatrik, Director of Policy and Communications, Centrepoint; and Abdi Mohamed, Head of Policy, Campaigns, and Public Affairs, Scope.

II: Andrew McGregor, Careers Forum Chair, UNISON; Martin Cavanagh, PCS President, PCS; and Angela Grant, PCS DWP President, PCS.

Written evidence from witnesses:

Belina Grow Community Interest Company (RJ0024)

Migrant Help (RJ0092)

Centrepoint (RJ0051)

Scope (RJ0078)

UNISON (RJ0077)

The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) (RJ0069)

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Liz Sewell, Sam Reid, Balbir Kaur Chatrik and Abdi Mohamed.

Q68            Chair: Welcome to evidence session 3 on the reforming jobcentres inquiry. It is a pleasure to welcome today’s panel. Could we start with you, Liz, and then do introductions around the panel?

Liz Sewell: Liz Sewell from Belina GRoW CIC. We are an organisation that supports women further from work to get ready for work.

Sam Reid: Hi, I am Sam Reid and I represent Migrant Help. We are a not-for-profit organisation that exists to protect people affected by displacement and exploitation.

Abdi Mohamed: Good morning. I am Abdi Mohamed, representing Scope. We are a disability and equality charity supporting and working with disabled people—16 million people in this country.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: Good morning. I am Balbir Kaur Chatrik from Centrepoint. At Centrepoint we work with homeless young people aged 16 to 25.

Q69            Chair: Fantastic. We all have some questions for you, and I will kick off. Could you describe the key barriers to the people with whom you work and support to getting into employment?

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: Time and approach. Job coaches do not have enough time to give to homeless young people. Many of the young people who we support have been through quite a lot of trauma, so we need time for them to work in a trauma-informed way. It is time just for young people to feel comfortable to be able to talk about what has happened to them in the past and where they want to go to in terms of their employment aspirations. Time and approach; the other one is knowledge of job cultures; and the third one, if I can just slip it in there, is partnerships.

Abdi Mohamed: For disabled people engaging with Jobcentre Plus, there are two particular things. There is the complete lack of personalised support for when they come into the jobcentre. Sometimes they feel that they are going in and it is a 10-minute appointment or a very top-line engagement rather than the proper engagement that they need to feel supported into proper jobs. That is the first one.

Second is the lack of trust. The DWP, and JCP more generally, for the longest time has represented a really uncomfortable place for disabled people—a place where they feel like they are being caught out while they are being supported. The underlying issues of trust still remain. However, we welcome some of the things that are being worked on, but they need to tackle the underlying issue of trust.

Sam Reid: For us, because we support a lot of migrants and people who are going through the process of seeking asylum, they are also people who generally then have no recourse to public funds. Therefore, like Liz, we find that some of our barriers tend to be the same: how people access that information in the first instance; the fact that they are told on their visas or if they have documentation it will say that they have no recourse to public funds. That makes them automatically think that they cannot access any services within the UK. One of our challenges is how we separate that information on what no recourse to public funds actually means, what is the statutory entitlement and how they can access information depending on their situations.

For example, a person on a work visa, if they paid into the system and they lose their employment, based on their eligibility there is the potential for them to be able to gain access to employment support, as well as helping them find another role. However, lots of people are not aware of that. For them it is, “We can’t access any support. Perhaps there is a charity that can support us with that”. That is one of the challenges that we find.

In terms of people who are seeking asylum, those who have the right to work—for example, they have been in the UK, their claim has been submitted for a year and through no fault of their own they have not received a decision—are able to look for work, which is great. However, the challenge is that because they have been in the UK for a long period of time—up to a year—they cannot access ESOL courses until they have been in the UK for six months. We find that we have an awful lot of barriers that depend on what people’s circumstances are in terms of no recourse to public funds. They will have different barriers.

Liz Sewell: For women, clearly the key practical barriers are childcare and flexible work, which we are all aware of and I will not go into too much detail on that. We know that the Government are looking at how they can do both of those in terms of the childcare strategy and workers’ rights.

Building on what my colleagues have said, when you are looking at people who are trying to get back into work, they often have more than one problem. They might be somebody with a disability who is a woman and a migrant, and maybe a young person, too. Therefore, when we are looking at barriers we are looking at practical barriers, but we are also looking at three key things. First is that people do not have awareness of what is available. We work with a lot of migrant women. If you were not born in this country and educated in this country, you do not necessarily know how the system works. You do not know how to get into training. Therefore, there is a general issue on awareness.

Secondly, there is confidence. The first layer of confidence is your own personal confidence: “How do I feel about getting back to work?” However, the second layer of that is, “Do I have confidence that there will be a job for me, that there will be a place? I need flexible work. I can only work 16 hours a week. Do I have confidence in that?” That is a real barrier and it is about how we develop that. For me it is about hearts and minds as well as about what you have to do.

Finally, it is about reciprocity: if we are looking to get back to work, what practical support can be offered? Again, reinforcing the points that people have made, the system at the moment is not working. If it was, we would not be here. Sanctions and a 10-minute appointment every other week or once a month is not delivering for either the Government or the individual. Therefore, for us it is about engagement and about how you engage that individual person to think about getting ready for work.

Chair: Thank you so much.

Q70            Frank McNally: Thank you very much and good morning. Thank you for joining us today. I have a few questions and I will start with Abdi and Liz, and I have a question for Sam and Balbir as well. Abdi and Liz, building on the Chair’s question on the effectiveness of jobcentres and supporting those furthest from the labour market, you highlighted in your submissions that jobcentres are not effective with the groups that you described in your answers. What have you found to be most effective for engaging these groups and supporting them into work?

Liz Sewell: It is tough working in a jobcentre; you have a very short amount of time to work with a lot of people—no disrespect for what those people are doing. However, 25% of working-age women are economically inactive. That means a lot of those will be carers—carers for children or carers for adults. That means that you have a lot of women, far more than men, who are not even able to access Jobcentre Plus.

I would like to mention one historical programme that really did deliver, which was the new deal for lone parents, a voluntary programme that was one of the most successful programmes that jobcentre ever ran. It was successful for the individuals who used it and very popular with the staff. The reason for that was because they had agency. They were working with people who wanted to work. It was a voluntary programme, set alongside other sanctioned programmes. They had agency. They could buy people clothes. I think sometimes they gave people driving lessons or whatever was needed. In a sense what was really sad about new deal for lone parents—and we have a relic of it left—was that it was so good that they made it compulsory, and when it became compulsory it became a work-focused interview, which is much more of a tick-box, “Have you come in for your work-focused interview?” and everybody has to do it. Therefore, if we are looking at what jobcentres do, we need to give those staff agency. However, I do not think that, necessarily, jobcentres are always the best places to provide support.

It is interesting what the employability organisations such as Ingeus, Shaw Trust and Get Set do. They go out and find local partners because they are on payment-by-results programmes and they know that they need to work with local organisations that have specialist understanding. Jobcentre would do well to look at what the employability organisations have done to provide those specialist services. What we know works is building that confidence, giving that awareness and providing practical support. There is the issue of time. A lot of programmes are a year. If you are a long way from work, a year is not enough, so we need to be thinking about people having longer.

Abdi Mohamed: From a disability perspective, Scope runs employment services that are voluntary and tailored for disabled people. We take time to engage with the same person who comes to ask for our support. Rather than a 10-minute slot, we have an hour’s slot with them. From the get-go we talk to them and understand what their aspirations are, rather than giving them a number of jobs, and have them to pick one and go and apply. It is about understanding and listening to them and them being able to tell us what their aspirations are. Ultimately, if we get them into a job that they are happy with and engage with, they are likely to last longer in that job. It is building on that and working with them through the progress, from helping them identify their aspirations right through to some of the CV building and confidence building, and the very practical parts of it.

We know our services work and 71% of disabled people we work with are still in employment 26 weeks—six months—after, which is a stronger outcome than the DWP has, because the person has a tailored approach. It is about making sure that we give that time to the disabled person to help them and building on that: when they are offered the job, working with the employer to understand their disability. It is not just parting ways once they have a better job; it is from the beginning right through to when they are placed within the job. If they need access to work or whatever support they need, it is supporting them, because it has to be a partnership between the employer and the employee. Scope is here to facilitate that. For us to improve these services, it is very much about the tailored approach, which is proven to work and it does work.

Q71            Frank McNally: Sam, in your submission, and you touched on it a bit in your first answer, you mentioned that people with no recourse to public funds will still access jobcentres for employment support, but they will not receive benefits. What can the Government learn from their experience of jobcentre support?

Sam Reid: We think that it is about looking at all groups of migrants. For example, by the end of 2024, 38,905 people, or asylum cases, received a grant of protection. So of December, or 1 January 2025, you have about 39,000 adding to the employment market. Therefore, instead of these cohorts of people being able to just get running with looking for employment, they are further behind in being able to find work, understand the system and get the support that is needed because there is not tailored support for people who are coming to the UK as economic migrants, those who are granted the right to stay in the UK as a result of their asylum or those who have the right in the UK after six months. There is a lot that we feel could be done to help improve those chances, whether it be from integration when they first come in or specific packages for migrants in the UK to get them up to speed on how things work in the UK.

I would like to add that Migrant Help, as part of the reducing exploitation programme, worked together with the Just Good Work partnership. It created a really good app, which is available to migrants and covers lots of different countries, not just working in the UK. It tells you what your employment rights are. It gives you organisations should you feel that your rights are not being supported—if you feel that you are being exploited. It gives you the contact details for the Greater London Authority and the modern slavery helpline. It is a case of trying to let people who are new to the UK know what their employment rights are, because, as Liz said, if you do not grow up in the UK you do not know that, for example, you should be getting paid at particular times and you should receive a payslip. It is all about helping to reduce that exploitation. We feel that that is something that will benefit a lot of vulnerable people.

Q72            Frank McNally: Balbir, in your submission you touched on the lack of awareness of staff with specific regards to homelessness. We recognise the challenge of homelessness—certainly in my area it is a continuous and growing concern. What difference would that increased awareness make for those who are presenting at jobcentres?

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: There are a couple of things there. One is that there is a lack of knowledge in some jobcentres—some are great—about the interaction between benefits and being in supported accommodation. Something that we have long called for with other organisations is making work pay. We are supportive of the getting into work White Paper, removing the barriers to young people being able to work. If you are in supported accommodation now, you get to keep less of your money than if you are living next door, the same age, working with the same employer. The amount that is disregarded is much less and you get less money.

What we want to do with homeless young people, when they are in our hostels, is to create a work ethic. That benefit is a disincentive to young people working. We have to remove that because when they are with us, with a work ethic, we can support them so that when they leave the hostels they are in work and they remain in work. Some jobcentres know about this so they will not be pushing young people to take any job. Others do not know about it and they are putting young people into a difficult position where they are less well off if they are working. That is not the start that we want young people to have at the start of their working lives. It just does not make sense.

That is one bit of knowledge, but the other bit in terms of homeless young people is thinking that not everybody has a mobile phone, and not everybody has credit on it. We had Amy, who was fleeing domestic violence. She had an appointment with her job coach but she could not get to it. She could not let them know because she did not have a phone, so she was sanctioned, which does not make sense. Therefore, it is being aware of the situation that homeless young people are in.

Q73            David Pinto-Duschinsky: I want to thank you for mentioning the new deal. I worked on it many years go and I agree with you that it was a fantastic programme.

Already a lot of conversation has begun to home in on one of the central trade-offs between work coaches and staff supporting people on the one hand, and checking compliance on the other. The White Paper said that checking work-related requirements will move from the foreground to the background of the customer-work coach relationship. How can work coaches strike the balance between the need to monitor on the one hand, and simultaneously being a trusted coach and trusted ally to people going through the system?

Liz Sewell: The problem is that when you are very dependent on that amount of money, that will always be at the forefront of your mind as a person going into the jobcentre. As a direct result of that, it can make those things much more difficult. I think that maybe we need to separate out some of the functions on benefit checks. However, if we fundamentally look at what we are doing at the moment, what we sanction people on is turning up and whether they have applied for a job. This is not a very good way of helping people get ready for work.

I think that what we need to do is to think about this idea of reciprocity. I understand that people get benefits, but they see that as being something that they need to live on. We do not sanction people and take their benefits away if their children do not go to school. We do not take their benefits away if they have a problem with their housing. However, with this one small thing about whether you have applied for a job and turned up, it seems to me to make no sense that you can lose such a large amount of money for those two things.

Therefore, we need to turn it around into the jobcentre being somewhere that is more to do with its name—that can help you get a job. The focus should be on that, and you need to have different programmes running alongside it, such as group work. If you look at all the organisations that work with employability—Successful Mums, Women’s Work Lab—they do group work because that allows you to develop a community and an understanding, and think about work when you are not focused on that one individual and looking at their benefits and their sanctions. You are able to get a lot more out from what people need and what you can do for them in a much shorter amount of time. It is something like that, where people can develop that.

On how technology can help, could we not do a lot of the benefit stuff using AI, and then look at what we can do using technology? Things like apps are good. We developed our own app because we want people to get information. I do understand that some people do not have a phone, but almost everybody has a phone. The jobcentre can get into people’s heads by being able to provide information in different ways—we put out a jobs bulletin every week so people can see that there are jobs for them, and we are giving them information every day. It is about making that connection and building community groups. It is that work that delivers rather than sanctions and a meeting.

David Pinto-Duschinsky: Great. What do others think?

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: I think that it is about making sure that job coaches have enough time with young people. I do get it; it is something for something. In a way, we would be saying to young people, “That is what happens in life.” However, if we want to get young people into careers—not just a job—and if we want to raise their employment aspirations and want a high-skilled economy, we need to help them think about the longer term, not just about tomorrow. This is young people at the beginning of their career journey. Yes, there will be benefits; however, take time to talk to the young person. What are their career aspirations? Talk them through how they get there. Many of the young people we work with have not had a stable family background where they might be talking to their parents and their parents say, “Oh, yes, you want to do this, this is how you might ...”. They have not had those conversations around the dinner table. They need some time with the work coach to talk them through their career aspirations and how they might get there, which is good for them but also obviously good for the economy.

Q74            David Pinto-Duschinsky: Can I follow up on one point and then put it to Sam and Abdi? You mentioned time. Work coaches are often very time constrained. How would you fit that richer interaction into a smaller timeframe? Are there things that we can be doing to save time, so to speak, and to lift pressure from work coaches to allow them to have these deeper interactions?

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: You could use partners. Centrepoint, for example, gets partners to do some of this work. In our case, they are homeless young people they know and trust. Get them to do some of the job search, CV writing and interview skills with them. We have instances where job coaches will not even talk to Centrepoint staff. That just does not make sense for anybody, because you want to engage the young person at home as well as at the jobcentre, so we need to be working in partnership together.

Abdi Mohamed: Building on both your points, there is something that work coaches can do, which is to be trained in disability. We have 600-plus jobcentres across the country and not every single jobcentre has a dedicated person who is fully trained to engage with disabled people. Granted, they do not have an hour to do what Scope will do but maybe they have half of that. The first few interactions are key for engagement with anybody. If they go in and they are able to understand and are filled with empathy and compassion to understand what the disability is, you are beginning to bridge that and you are beginning to build some of that trust.

In the first few interactions, a lot of disabled people we speak to are put off by work coaches. A joint bit of work that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Scope did find that 11% of disabled people we spoke to felt that work coaches did not have their best interests at heart. If we are going to build that trust and be a bit more time efficient, it is about having people who are upskilled and supported. As part of “Get Britain Working”, I know that there is a coaching academy, and a key to that should be some of the training.

Q75            David Pinto-Duschinsky: Can I pick up on a point you made, Abdi, and put it to Sam as well? Do you think, especially when facing people with complex needs, a work coach model that is a generalist model works, or would the disability employment adviser and lone parent adviser model be a better road to go down and be something that we should be looking at?

Abdi Mohamed: I do not think that the general support model does work. We have seen it in our services when we compared it like for like with the DWP’s model. There will be people who need a bit more support because of their complex needs or their disability, and that engagement and proper support—the more wraparound support—can be more time intensive but in the longer term it pays off for the economy and for the individual as well. There needs to be an understanding that one size does not fit all and engaging properly and early to understand that would be helpful.

Sam Reid: Part of the way that we came up with the feedback as part of our call for evidence that we submitted was that we involved our lived experience panel. They are people who have experience of the services that we offer and experience of the jobcentres. A big thing for us as an organisation to improve our services is that we involve them in co-production projects—projects that we work with them on in UK health services, the NHS engagement service partnership and the Scottish Government. It is about using their lived experience, getting them to analyse and look at services that they use daily to be able to help us identify where the challenges are and where their voice is not being considered. In terms of the groups that we support, as well as along this table, I do not think that there is any involvement from DWP in these different groups—disabled, people seeking asylum with the right to work, migrants of whatever category, British nationals—to see what it is that they want from the jobcentre.

One of the things that we came up with was an assessment. Instead of it being completed by the jobcentre it is done in partnership with individuals, and individuals are empowered. It might be looking at the Scottish flexible work system. It has a programme in place—it is not accepting any referrals at the moment—looking at people’s interests and hobbies to see what makes that person rounded, to see what qualifications they have and whether there are any gaps in their skills. It is looking at all that but putting the power back on the individual client rather than it sitting with the jobcentre. Therefore, that person feels empowered to help themselves get back into work.

We think that this could work for people who are far removed from the market as well as those who are very close it, who have maybe just registered with the jobcentre, just to give them that gap to show that they have been out of work for maybe a month or two months but they are able to help themselves in terms of searching online. The hub service will look at including digital inclusion, digital support, access to technology and access to data, because that is key for people with no recourse to public funds. While they may have access to a telephone, unless they have a strong wi-fi connection, they will never be able to complete any forms or support themselves, because a lot of the services have now moved online.

Q76            David Pinto-Duschinsky: Thanks, that is very helpful. We have talked a lot about DWP and a lot about customers, recipients and vulnerable claimants, but we have not talked about the third leg of the stool, which is employers. What else should work coaches be doing that they are not doing at the moment to help build those links with employers, to not just coach people but to get them in and sustain them in work?

Sam Reid: At the moment we have good links with our local jobcentre. We are based nationwide. Our talent acquisition adviser has built up some good relationships with local jobcentres. Initially, it started off as 10 minutes that she was invited in to speak to different groups of people to talk about Migrant Help, the services that we offer and potential job opportunities. This became a more regular thing and she is hoping that it will now get to the point where the jobcentre can act as a recruitment agency, where they will have an idea of the skillset of the clients within their groups or the people who are assigned to them within their cases so that they can then be shortlisted or presented to us for an interview. The agreement is that if you feel that you have relevant clients with the relevant skillset, they will be guaranteed an interview and hopefully that can be built on with other organisations. It is a case of saying, “We’re looking for particular roles in helping you plan for the future”.

However, one thing that it did not add is that one thing that is key, going back to the bit about compliance and whether that can still sit with the work coaches. For us, there needs to be a cultural shift in terms of staff who work within the jobcentres. A lot of times when we were having the conversations with the people who fed into our evidence sessions, it came back that they felt that there was personal bias in that, generally, people who are claiming benefits are almost seen to be not part of society because, for whatever reason, they are being prejudged. However, we feel that a cultural shift that will get work coaches to look at people as individuals regardless their situation and their circumstances will be useful so that people are treated with the dignity and respect that anyone would deserve or require.

David Pinto-Duschinsky: Thank you. I am conscious of time.

Liz Sewell: I have a tiny point there. That is a fantastic central role for the jobcentre to work directly with employers and to support all the organisations in the area to feed into that. For us all, when you are working with individuals and you are relatively small organisations, it is much more difficult with employers. You are right that they are an essential part of it and jobcentres could do that role.

Q77            Amanda Hack: We have covered a bit of this already and it has been a useful discussion so far. Your representative organisations’ person-centred approach to employability would look quite different. We talked about it a little bit. Where do you think the similarities could be in a person-centred approach across homelessness, disabled people, migrant help and women? Are there any commonalities between addressing those barriers in a person-centred approach? I know that sounds a bit of an odd one, but it is how we support progress going forward via jobcentres and how that looks.

Liz Sewell: We need to have specialist advisers. We need to have, in jobcentres, people who understand. We need to have the assessment. People need to be seen as who they are, not turning up as a benefit claimant. They need to be seen for who they are, and your point about early support is important.

What is even more important is to have a strategy for dealing with each of these groups. If I could give you an example, the GLA is looking at how it upskills people in London. One of the things that it has done is accept that it will be difficult for it to do that, so it has created a project called community outreach where it funds relatively smaller organisations to go out and find people and to work with them and bring them into training. It is not delivering it, but it has a strategic approach to delivery and it has been effective. Each person as a generalist dealing with all these people is almost impossible to do, so specialist support but also a strategy.

Sam Reid: I would add that the involvement of all those different cohorts does not need to be a huge-scale project, but if you are not involving the voices of all the different people we represent, it will never be a programme that will meet the needs of the people because you have not asked those people what their requirements are.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: I come back to time, which I think is essential—time to actually listen. You have heard similar things from us all. It is having that time to listen to the employment aspirations, whoever that individual is. We are not asking for lots and lots of job coaches for each individual group, because that is not realistic, but time, understanding and knowledge are critical. They can get the knowledge from organisations like us.

Abdi Mohamed: I completely agree with my colleagues. Building on top of that, while it might not be the whole process to allow for the full amount of time, I keep going back to that early bit about building a relationship and building that trust. There is a massive deficit in jobcentres and DWP more generally for disabled people. It is about that early support and building that relationship—I agree that it is impossible to have individual coaches for everybody—because if you give that person time, respect and understanding, listening early to understand what their aspirations are, then you are able to help them achieve that. That really is important.

Q78            Amanda Hack: Earlier in the panel Balbir mentioned pressure to take any job, and the other conversations on supported housing and the benefit penalty is well versed. That is a real concern. What difference do you think it would make to remove some of that pressure to take any job and create careers? I represent a rural seat so there are additional barriers. Any particular connection to rurality and how different the labour market is in rural locations from an urban location would be helpful.

Liz Sewell: Abdi’s point about retention is important, because any job does not work for a lot of people. I do believe in work, but any job does not work. Again, I would say that we all have very high retention rates. That is because we are looking at putting people into a job that suits them. That is understanding their motivation and what they want to do. The reason that is so important is that everybody here is representing people who face a lot of problems. If you put all that effort in to get a job and then it does not work for you, you are pushed back. When I was at Gingerbread we found that for lone parents and single parents, if you tried hard and it failed, you would think, “Well, it doesn’t work.” Therefore, it is about looking for the right thing. We have a very comprehensive, no cherry-picking, 77% or 78% retention rate of people in work because we got them into the right job, but it takes time, energy and support.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: Yes, because in the long run getting young people in the job they want to do—the right job—will save time and resources. That is important, as I said, particularly at the beginning of their working lives.

Can I talk about employers a bit as well? The other thing is that when a job coach refers a young person to any job, employers are saying to us that those are not the young people they want. They do not last long in that job. That means in the future, employers have told us that they are less likely to use the jobcentre. That does not benefit anybody—not the young person and not the employer.

Q79            Frank McNally: Throughout the sessions that we have been undertaking in this inquiry there has been a great amount of discussion on some of the cultural and structural challenges within jobcentres. I am keen to ask you about the physical environment within jobcentres. We know that they can be intimidating and that there can be a lack of privacy. All these issues come up time and time again. What changes would you like to see within the buildings—within the physical space—that you think would make a difference to your service users?

Sam Reid: The people we support who use the jobcentres like the idea of a central hub where it is a large enough space, with space or rooms for private conversations. We also support survivors of modern slavery. When we go out, we wear the lanyard and on it one of our advisers had that she was an MSPEC adviser. In the jobcentre, one of the work coaches commented to her client who she was with, “Are you a victim of modern slavery?” It was great that there were no people around, but to give that context, if there was a person who was a victim of domestic abuse, nobody in the jobcentre would ask, “Are you a victim of domestic abuse?” It is about being able to have private conversations and having that support for coaches so that they know they have the training to be able to address people and potential circumstances that they should be going through, and that there is access to digital technology, the opportunity to interact with different cohorts and it is not just aimed at specific groups on different days or different times, because there is great opportunity through peer learning.

There are other organisations that are brought in to support with the whole person—debt management, knowing how to budget—because a lot of these skills people might not have. It is not just important to help people to find jobs, to do the CVs, how to do a covering letter, application forms and that kind of thing, but it is providing the additional life skills support that is needed, along with opportunities for training to potentially help them. For example, if you are going to run a mother and baby session, could there be another training session or another provider that could be brought in to deliver some information to that mother and baby unit as well?

It can be a great space that can be less intimidating if it is carefully thought; therefore, you do not need that security guard at the front door, and the hi-vis vest. Where people are treated with that respect, it becomes a safe space and people can expect to spend a couple of hours there. Potentially, childcare as well, aiming for those with young children so that they can focus on a session, we think would be useful. It is trying to involve as many services as possible.

Abdi Mohamed: Building on that, it could be a great space and a safe space if you can get access to the building. There still continues to be real problems with the JCP estate in its totality in that accessibility issues continue to be a barrier for disabled people. No doubt you all as MPs here have constituents who might have been sanctioned because they did not turn up to their appointment. However, their appointment happens to be on the second floor of a building where there is one lift, for example, and that lift is not working. There are still very much problems for disabled people in accessing the building, and not just the physical parts of it but when it comes to neurodivergent disabled people and how they are being supported. If you cannot actually get into the building, or if you cannot feel comfortable within the building, there is no chance of you feeling that it is a safe place or it is a great place for you to flourish. There continues to be very much physical barriers.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: I want to flip it on its head. For those Jobcentre Plus offices, we want a lot of people to be saying, “I want to go there”. What is it that will attract them in there? We work with a couple of jobcentres and they have come to Centrepoint to say, “We’re going to do a jobs fair for young people. Tell us how we attract young people in here”. They come to us and ask us. They will talk to the young people we work with and the young people will say, “Start it at this time. These are the activities.” What we should be saying, I think, is that we would like young people who are looking for jobs to be queuing around the block to get into the jobcentre because that is a place where you get the help you need.

Liz Sewell: I am going to flip it one stage further. Let’s keep flipping it here. There is a concern. I was in a jobcentre on Monday—a lovely jobcentre with lovely people—but there is a silence ethic in there. There was a quite young baby crying, and it was quite a nice noise, but it is not fair on that mum and it is not fair on the advisers having to deal with that. As well as having excellent hubs, which we do need, we need to engage in the community. We need to go out to where people are.

We work in schools. Jobs 22 did a wonderful programme to fund a community outreach, and we work in Shama Women’s Centre. That is where women are—women go there already—and it is a fantastic place. There are places that you can go that are set up for women or parents with kids, and they are better places. If you want to reach out to people who do not use the jobcentre, going to where they are is better and you will reach more people than only having in-house places.

Sam Reid: Where you mentioned rural communities, you could have the same. Every small village will have that one focal point and that space could be used as that area two days a week or as is needed, therefore not excluding rural communities.

Q80            Frank McNally: We did a recent visit to Glasgow and Manchester, and we visited a fantastic jobcentre in Manchester. We also took evidence from the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He spoke quite passionately about the integration of services and, ultimately, the co-location of services as well. I suppose your point is that that could be at various areas within communities. Do you think there are specific barriers to that co-location of public services? Do you think people are just locked in their silos? What are the barriers for creating that one-stop shop, that hub model?

Liz Sewell: You have to do it, because everybody here represents people who have complex needs. If you are homeless, you need help to get a house as well as to get a job. If you are a mum, you need help to find childcare as well as get a job. If you are a migrant person, you need to understand how the system works. Again, if you look at the employability organisations, they are doing that already. We are working with each other, creating those partnerships, and it is essential. I think that we would all say that partnership is essential.

Sam Reid: We were doing some research and we went to Oasis in Cardiff, I think—either Cardiff or Swansea. They run a community centre that is supporting the whole community. Their people are empowered. You had lots of people who are refugees who were going there, completely different nationalities, as well as people seeking asylum. It was also the school holidays and people were using it as a drop-in centre. Migrant Help and other organisations were there providing support in other side rooms. People were there playing games, they were talking. You had different sections just for women because they segregated themselves, and they were having knitting lessons or just talking generally. You also had some people from the community who were cooking the meals so that everybody who was there got a meal. You saw how all these different nationalities and different cultures came together. To be honest, that was one of the best vegetarian meals I have ever had. If you could go to these community centres and see how they are already existing, it is great proof that these hubs would not need much more to add on to support the people in their communities.

Abdi Mohamed: There is also something about not re-creating the wheel. There are local NHS trusts and different parts of Government that do that really well. One point of entry, where somebody will come in and are supported by different services and do not have to go to different buildings and different departments, is a great idea and it is person-centred. It is, “I might need help with housing or with childcare and filling in all these forms.” There are loads of different places. On local government, you spoke about Manchester. It does it well and it has learnt its lessons. It is incumbent on the DWP to learn and take and steal from the best bits and re-create services that work.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: In terms of young people, we have youth hubs. They are working. You have young people who can talk about jobs, employment, training, but they can also get health advice and counselling if they need it. That really does work for young people.

Frank McNally: Thank you. I am conscious of time, Chair.

Q81            Johanna Baxter: We have touched on a lot of this already. What do you think makes the best partnerships between local organisations and jobcentres? What makes those partnerships work?

Sam Reid: It is about understanding and having those initial conversations as to what an organisation is about, and future planning for potential opportunities that will be coming up. I know that there is the intention to continue that with local authorities, identifying new start-ups or organisations within specific areas. It is more about future planning, seeing what roles are coming up or how sectors are going to develop. That is a key way—having that ongoing conversation.

Abdi Mohamed: There is something about ensuring that you are working with partners, building that conversation. It is understanding that we are not here to be the surveillance for the DWP and it is the respect that we are here, and we want a person-centred approach. That is not then feeding back to the jobcentre or to the DWP, “This person didn’t do that,” because we have taken a long time to build trust with disabled people and other organisations have done the same with their support. It needs to be a respect—a two-way communication that we are not here to be your surveillance. That will fundamentally destroy the trust that we have spent a long time building.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: It is about mutual respect for Jobcentre Plus staff and for our staff as well, almost like seeing the view from each other’s hill, because we do have constraints. It is looking at where we can work together for the best interests of young people. That is where it works best for us and for the young person.

Liz Sewell: I have two things. When you look at organisations like this, we are going to be here. Our funding goes up, our funding goes down, but we carry on because we are very passionate about what we do. We believe in what we do and we have developed evidence for how the things that we do work. There can be a bit of a hierarchical relationship. We are seen as the smaller partner. Jobcentre Plus has the funding and when it chooses to fund things, it very much decides what will be funded. I think that there could be a real opportunity for organisations like us to be able to bid in for things that we think work, because we have good evidence for knowing how things can be successful. I go back to the community outreach programme. It has the funding; it has the outcome; you go to them with your approach. There is something there about our approaches being recognised by jobcentres.

Q82            Johanna Baxter: I am conscious that as a smaller organisation you might have come across a number of barriers in engaging with the jobcentre in the past. Can you talk to us a bit about those?

Liz Sewell: Yes, it is a bit like guerrilla warfare. It is centre by centre. You will find somebody. It is a lot like in employability and with employers as well. Some people get it and some people do not. You build relationships. In Kingston we have a fantastic relationship with a jobcentre adviser there. She does not have money to give us but she connects people. It is this thing about the jobcentre is there—it is going to be there for a long time. It is building that relationship. She puts people in touch with each other who can help each other. When you are small you need that. It is not always about money; it is about that connection and understanding and it is that partnership about what the jobcentre’s role is. They are going to be there for a long time, developing that.

Q83            Johanna Baxter: I wonder how we spread that good practice so that it is not just dependent on a particular individual in one jobcentre or another. My colleague talked earlier about the lessons that we heard from the Mayor of Greater Manchester. It is definitely not just co-location, but how do we make sure that your interaction with Kingston jobcentre can be as good as your interaction with another jobcentre and is not just dependent on that one individual who you have built up relationships with?

Liz Sewell: It is about creating a culture that recognises that as something positive. It would be about jobcentres praising people, giving awards, certificates, building up that this is something we do, this is something we recognise.

Abdi Mohamed: As the direction moves to devolution, it is an exciting opportunity to have more of those relationships and empower those local people to have that two-way communication and build those special relationships. However, I think that at a national level there still needs to be some strong guidance from DWP, ensuring that there is some standardised ways of doing things, because while it might work in one part of the country or a city, there are still principles—ensuring there is proper training for disabled people, and the key things that DWP can do nationally that then emboldens and empowers them at a local level to move away from a centralised way of doing it. It is an exciting opportunity.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: This is quite granular, but it could be objectives that people have, job cultures, what their objectives are. A key one is partnership work: you demonstrate to me and give me some examples of partnership work, where it has worked and where it has not and what you have done. That will focus individuals’ minds and maybe their managers’ minds as well.

Sam Reid: I would add training, because where the relationships work in particular jobcentres and where our talent acquisition adviser has said the same, she has been able to have those connections because those people are particularly passionate about the role that they do. It is not that work coaches do not enjoy their roles. Maybe they might have lost the focus or the reason why they are doing that role. It is a case of going back to basics, getting the work coaches to go through some training, look at the culture and have that conversation to get them to re-evaluate why they are there. Our outcome is to try to get as many people into employment as possible because, at the end of the day, that is our goal and that is also the work of the jobcentres.

Johanna Baxter: Thank you. I am sorry to labour it. Culture is such a difficult thing to change from the top. We are trying to get all those best practice lessons.

Chair: Thank you. We have two questions left, 10 minutes to go.

Q84            David Pinto-Duschinsky: I will be very brief. We have talked about training very briefly. How might jobcentres better support people to retrain and develop and how, within that, do you think careers advice could be best tailored to people? Could you keep your answers short?

Liz Sewell: It should be encouraged for people to train. Training should be part of that return to work. It should not be discouraged for people to train. The longer that you have been out of work, the more likelihood that you need to train. It should be part of what people are asked to do.

Sam Reid: I do not think that training should just sit with the jobcentre. The feedback that we got is that it should be throughout a person’s life. People are encouraged through school. You start thinking about, as was mentioned earlier, what career you want. It could potentially result in a bit of a policy shift where, if you do not go down the academic route, potentially you could go into a trade, and there is nothing wrong with a trade. It is possibly reframing people’s perceptions of different careers and maybe putting into place specific programmes. We think that that would work very well.

Abdi Mohamed: It is about listening to the disabled person or to the customer and understanding the training that they want, the aspiration of where they want to get to and then helping them to develop that training. Bringing it together would be a good idea. It is through one door and being supported in doing that. Being able to be upskilled in health and safety or whatever is a chance for them to upskill and be supported into that job. The key here is listening to the claimant or to the disabled person to ensure that they are not being sent on just a random course; that they have said they want to do one thing but they are being sent on something else because there is no space.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: Relevant, good quality training that will lead somewhere. We are hopeful through the youth guarantee that that training will be offered to young people.

Q85            David Pinto-Duschinsky: That leads to my second question. Clearly, the training journey and the support journey should not, ideally, finish when somebody gets a job. What in-work support would you like to see from jobcentres to support people and to help them move on in the labour market? Because the best way we can tackle poverty is not just getting a job but a good job and rising to an even better job.

Liz Sewell: There are 600,000 women on in-work universal credit compared to 300,000 men, so we need to have a strategy. The reason for that is that a lot of them are working part time. We need to be realistic that for a lot of those women part-time working is going to be best. The best way to increase your wages is to change jobs. That is not necessarily the best way for those women at that point, so we need to have a more structured approach to how we support those women to get trained and to develop their abilities to get a better job, a better paying job. It is thinking about their personal needs.

Sam Reid: To add to that, it would be a case of a person who is in work, that conversation has been had as to where they want to go. If it is a case where a lot of women and some of our people who are single parents are only able to work during certain times—I have lost my train of thought.

Liz Sewell: That is what they need to do.

Sam Reid: Yes, that they have that conversation. If it is two years down the line, they still have that light touch, but when they are ready to go into full-time employment, that support is then ready for them to tap back into. That would apply to all people seeking asylum or migrants and so forth.

Abdi Mohamed: Link it to, once they are in that job, the retention and staying in that job and progression into work. If the future job that you want is linked to a driving licence, it is helping and supporting them. The upskilling is crucial in helping to make sure they understand this is about your next one, what you want to do after this, and then the career progression is something that makes it easier to do.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: We have to encourage employers to make sure that they think about lifetime training, particularly for young people. You have to involve employers as well as Jobcentre Plus.

David Pinto-Duschinsky: Brilliant. Thank you all so much.

Q86            Damien Egan: I will build on that as a question because I am keen to ask about availability of English lessons. It is particularly relevant, as Sam and Liz, you talked about working with a lot of foreign nationals. We were out on that jobcentre that Frank was talking about in Manchester, a fantastic visit. A lot of the customers at the jobcentre are foreign nationals, and a lot were using translation services. Ironically, the English lessons that would get people off the translation services and help them into work are not available. I would like to get your perspective on that and to understand how important you think getting people’s English up to speed is.

Sam Reid: We feel that it is important because it also helps with integration into local communities, to help people settle in the UK and future plan, be part of society while waiting for asylum claims to be processed and, when they have the right to work, whether they are a person’s spouse on a work visa and so forth. We feel that it is key. The fact that depending on a person’s circumstances they may not be able to access ESOL classes until they have been in the UK for six months is also a challenge, because if a person was able to get those lessons from the very beginning that would help make them ready all along the line.

Liz Sewell: If I could draw on our work in Leicester last year—the garment trade in Leicester has fallen apart because, in reality, the minimum wage has made it very difficult to make it cost effective to make garments here. There are a lot of women in Leicester who have lived in the UK for a very long time and have worked for a long time, but they cannot get a job now because they had never learnt English. They have a lot to offer but without English it is very difficult to get a job, and the same for anybody. We encourage them with ESOL. We provide an online programme for people to develop their English, called DailyStep.

I think AI has a big role to play here now. We have been piloting a project working with the Tamil community in Croydon called Empowering Tamil Families. We have gone in and shown them how you can get a job description, put it into ChatGPT, and it will turn it into Tamil. You can look at your CV and you can say, “This is who I am”, speak it into your phone, “ChatGPT, can you write me a CV? Can you look at my transferable skills?” The further away you are from work—and not speaking English is a long way from work—AI has a lot to offer you. It is something we are looking at to see how people can develop that. So, ESOL, but also looking at how technology can help.

Damien Egan: We will all be doing it for our questions.

Liz Sewell: Exactly.

Q87            Damien Egan: Have you seen good examples of the availability of English lessons? That six months where people will not have anything when they have come, that is the time when someone should be put into full-time English lessons.

Liz Sewell: So much of what you offer depends on a particular thing that you fit into: “You need to wait for six months, or three years; you have not been on that programme for a year”. This is where people find it so frustrating, especially if they do want something. We work with a lot of migrant women; they do want to work—they have a lot to offer—but they are restricted from doing it because of these particular rules that come in. It is not person centred, it is not holistic; it is about the “We have come up with some rules because they fit our targets” culture again, when if we looked at what that person needed we would say, “You are not going to go anywhere until you speak English and that is what we will do first.”

Q88            Damien Egan: Is there anyone in that space that is doing a particularly good job that we might want to look to?

Liz Sewell: In terms of, sorry?

Damien Egan: Are there any organisations out there, voluntary groups, that are doing this work in certain parts of the country?

Liz Sewell: People are doing it very ad hoc. I think that is the problem; there should be a national programme to ensure people speak English. It is fundamental. What we find is that you have a woman in a community and she gets a job, she starts to become a community leader, and she helps other people navigate the system. It can be a good community builder.

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: For young people it is essential because there they are living in a hostel at Centrepoint and they cannot communicate with other people. Then they do not necessarily understand the culture, which is important. However, with young people it is a bit easier to get access to English lessons because of their age, obviously, but it is critical.

Q89            Damien Egan: Do you work with a lot of people who will not be speaking English?

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: Yes, we do. Integration in the hostel—never mind outside—is critical.

Q90            Damien Egan: In terms of the universal services that are available, what difference would a universal service at a jobcentre that anybody could access make to the people you work with?

Balbir Kaur Chatrik: It would certainly be less stigmatising. As I was saying earlier on, jobcentres should be a place where people want to go, “I will get a good service there, get some training or help thinking about what job I want to do. I will get access to jobs and employers”. If it is universal, it is much less stigmatising.

Sam Reid: It is knowing that is a safe place to go where the information you get given will be correct for your situation. Because sometimes what happens—with the feedback that we got from our participants and our service users—was that they get feedback from a particular work coach but then they get completely conflicting information from their local council in terms of entitlements. It is a case of making sure that information is relevant, correct and accessible to the relevant groups.

Liz Sewell: People do not know if they are economically inactive or unemployed and they do not understand why they can or cannot. One of the things that we say to people—it is a shorthand but a sad shorthand—is, “Do you have to go to the jobcentre?” It should be, “Do you get to go to the jobcentre?” That is what we need to turn it into, something that is a service for people, that they do get something from it.

Abdi Mohamed: I think it could be a great idea but, as always in everything, the devil is in the detail. If you are building a new service or a universal service, what we would push for is the co-production—the people who are using it being at the heart of building that service. It feels almost weird that they are not doing that properly in the sense that if I go into the jobcentre I am probably best placed to tell you what I want the service to look like. That is key. As long as it is person-centred, and the time and the space that we have spoken so much about is given, we think it could be a good thing.

Chair: Fantastic, thank you so much. That concludes our questions to you. Thank you so much, Liz, Sam, Abdi and Balbir, for an informative session.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Andrew McGregor, Martin Cavanagh and Angela Grant.

Q91            Chair: A very warm welcome to our second panel of this reforming jobcentres inquiry. This is the final session before we meet Ministers. It is a pleasure to welcome our panel here today. Angela, could we start with you and then we will go down the panel?

Angela Grant: I am Angela Grant. I am the President of the DWP group within PCS. I have worked for DWP for just on 20 years now. I work for the child maintenance service—that is my day job—where we are pushing to eradicate child poverty, which is going off the scale at the moment. However, I have a wider view right across the Department. I have a lot of input with all our members in every single directorate.

Martin Cavanagh: Good morning. I am Martin Cavanagh. I am the National President for PCS, but I have over 30 years of experience working with members within the Department for Work and Pensions, jobcentres, benefit centres and so on.

Andrew McGregor: Good morning, Chair. My name is Andrew McGregor. I am the Chair of the UNISON Forum on Careers Guidance. UNISON is the only trade union that has such a forum. In my day job, I am a careers adviser. I do not work for UNISON, but for a third sector organisation based in the north-west of England. I have worked with young people and adults for 25 years. I have worked on a National Careers Service contract. I have worked as a careers adviser. I have worked with adults and I will be going back and working in a school on a Friday. I work with both young people and adults as a careers adviser, qualified to level 6, and that is my day job.

Chair: Thank you. For the interests of transparency, members on the Select Committee will declare our union membership.

David Pinto-Duschinsky: I would like to declare membership of UNISON and GMB.

Amanda Hack: GMB.

Frank McNally: Unite and USDAW.

Damien Egan: UNISON and USDAW.

Chair: UNISON and Unite.

Johanna Baxter: I am a member of the GMB and the CWU, but I should also declare that immediately before entering this place I worked for UNISON and a long time ago I also worked for PCS.

Q92            Chair: There we go, so completely transparent about our membership there. We all have some questions, and I will kick off. Can you start with describing the impact on your members of the announcement of the merger of Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service?

Martin Cavanagh: In terms of PCS members, a lot of uncertainty. Clearly, our members who work in the jobcentres are central Government employees; they work directly to central Government. Because there is a lack of detail as yet of the full implications for any potential merger, there is a concern about what that means for their role, their civil service status, whether or not there is indeed a job for them in the new service, and whether or not the work that they have always strived to do will be doable in any new service. There is a real concern about localising services to such a degree that it will cut right back on staffing levels and staffing numbers, and will become a bit of a postcode lottery. That is a big issue—real uncertainty.

Chair: Thank you. Andrew, do you want to add your comments there?

Andrew McGregor: Again, uncertainty, concern over job security, concern over things like TUPE transfers. In the National Careers Service people are employed by a great plurality of organisations. They work underneath a prime contractor and then often they will subcontract to that prime contractor, so there are concerns over things like funding. The employer can be medium sized or very small, so those employers need certainty and they are worried, but there are also concerns over things like deprofessionalisation: will the merger mean that careers advisers lose their identity and become subsumed into a work-focused as opposed to a career-focused service? I would summarise it as worry over the future, concern over funding, concern who the employer will be, and concern over job role.

Chair: Angela, did you want to add to that?

Angela Grant: I do not know if there is anything I need to add to that. The uncertainty is the biggest thing for our members at the moment. There is no detail. It is dropping something in without giving any understanding of what it might mean. That uncertainty is key for us.

Q93            Chair: My next question—if we could start with you, Andrew—is how the Government can ensure that the careers advice remains a distinct, skilled profession within a new jobs and careers service; something that you have hinted at in your introduction as well. What are your concerns around that and what should the Government be doing?

Andrew McGregor: The Government need to recognise that the National Careers Service is a separate entity first, and that what it brings to the employer market is distinct and different from the role of work coach. National Careers Service advisers are professionally qualified. They need to be qualified—we would argue—at level 6 as opposed to level 4, and many are. Other concerns are whether they would be generally deprofessionalised, but there is a need for a separate identity within a job and careers centre.

A National Careers Service adviser would need a room to interview people. They would need a 45-minute interview slot. They would need correct resources. They would need a National Careers Service badge and a separate desk. They do not want to be having the same colour badge as a job coach, for example. They need to have all the branding of a separate identity, and behind that identity and branding they need the resources. They need a National Careers Service website. They need access to technology and training. A key thing that organisations like the Careers Development Institute are concerned about is how National Careers Service advisers will be trained going forward in a new national identity, because at the moment they are trained and qualified through the organisations that employ them. I have already identified that there is a multiplicity of those organisations. How under one new umbrella do you keep the professionalism and keep that separate training and brand? I think it can be done and it can be done without too much cost.

Chair: Martin, what are your views?

Martin Cavanagh: We would support that view. There is a real danger among our members—there is so much uncertainty about what the new service will look like. We heard our colleagues—especially the colleague on the end before—talk about the culture a lot. It is fair to say that the culture that our members experience in the jobcentres is probably very different from the one that Andrew’s members experience in the National Careers Service. Which one will become the prevailing culture in any new service, or would it be a hybrid of the two? It would not work. There is a real concern that the jobcentre network will lose its identity, not from a presentational perspective but in terms of what it is there for and what it is about. I know we will come on in the other questions about whether it is the work coaches or whether it is the culture and Government policy and so on, but on the need to keep that separate identity, our members are telling us that they share that view.

Angela Grant: It is important for us to understand the difference, though, between a work coach and a careers adviser under the model that we have now, because our work coaches would give anything to have 45 minutes to sit with somebody to try to get somebody back into work, to investigate, to be sort of intrusive, to understand what that person is bringing, what their skills are. They have 10 minutes, and it is a conveyer belt of working. If we could bring that model into our jobcentres it would be fantastic. I believe our work coaches would want that, but they would not want to lose their identity as jobcentre work coaches to be pulled into the National Careers Service. There is a lot that we can talk about on that but we cannot do it here, because we have not got enough time. Those are the main things for us: they are two totally separate roles.

Chair: So it is different cultures, different identities in different services that are provided as well and how we bring those together.

Angela Grant: Totally, yes.

Q94            Chair: I wondered what involvement you have had so far in the development of the new jobs and career service and how you would see this role developing. Who wants to kick off on that?

Angela Grant: We have not had any. We have had no consultation. Nobody has been near PCS to talk to us about anything. We have written to the DWP Minister to ask for a meeting. Immediately when she took office we asked for a meeting. We had a very short meeting with the Minister for Transformation; but for that, there has been no consultation with the union, which is why we welcome being invited to this Select Committee. Off the back of our submission you have invited us to answer some questions. You want to ask questions, and that is good for us because we need to have that involvement. Yes, we are grateful and thankful that you have brought us here today.

Martin Cavanagh: The real disappointment for us on that is that our members know what it is like on both sides of the desk, because more and more now our members have to claim benefits as well as administer the benefit system. That is not necessarily work coaches; it might be a universal credit service centre worker who has to claim universal credit and, therefore, may have to attend a jobcentre for interview. Our members understand the system and they understand what needs to be done, but also, importantly, they know what the pitfalls and problems are. To not come to the union whose membership administers and runs the benefit system, was hugely disappointing for us. Obviously, we have the opportunity now. We have responded to the White Paper, and we are intending to respond to the Green Paper as well on disability benefit reform, but yes, it was a huge disappointment.

Andrew McGregor: There is a key need to involve the PCS with trade unions like UNISON. We are the voice of careers advisers but I would want you to involve organisations like the Careers Development Policy Group, and the Careers Development Institute, to get the careers element part right. Careers guidance can have a real impact economically. It can promote the skills agenda to get Britain working. To keep Britain working you need effective careers guidance and, yes, a trade union like UNISON. We can give a real input to that, but we work in partnership with the other professional organisations like the CDPG and the CDI, and picking their brains and getting it right in a multilateral approach like that will help bring about a better service that serves the needs of the economy.

Q95            David Pinto-Duschinsky: One of the issues that comes up repeatedly is about the balance between monitoring, compliance, and providing support. Martin and Angela, in your submission you say that the jobcentre service should move away from arbitrary engagement targets and sanctions. Given that we have to police benefits in some way, what would you like to see in place of sanctions if people do not meet their commitments?

Angela Grant: That was a key part of the submission for us—that we should be moving away from punishing people who are now having to receive benefit. We have so many people becoming homeless because of sanction. I think the DWP itself, when it investigated, found that it does not work to get people back into work, so why are we still now putting sanctions in place?

What would we want to see in place of sanction? It is a wide spectrum and there is a lot of debate on this, but we should not be punishing anybody and that is the key. What would you put in place? I do not think we have a policy on this so it is very difficult for me to speak for PCS, but when we are looking at anybody who is late, anybody who has an accident, anybody who has a childcare issue, or as we have heard, a disabled person who cannot get to a jobcentre, why would we need to put something in place for those people? We should not have to. We should just have to say, “Pick up the phone, tell us you cannot make it, and we will rearrange your appointment.” I do not feel that we should have to replace sanctions with anything else. I do understand that there is a place for anybody who does not want to engage with the jobcentre, and what do we do with that? For me—and this is a personal thing, this is not PCS; as I say, we do not have a policy—why would we not have more of a “three strikes and you’re out”? Give somebody a chance to attend, not just say—

David Pinto-Duschinsky: So you would maintain sanctions then?

Angela Grant: I would not. I do not believe that we should—

David Pinto-Duschinsky: But with three strikes, what does “you’re out” mean then?

Angela Grant: Three strikes and then we have to put something in place to make sure we are visiting homes, knocking on the door for somebody. We have visiting officers in DWP. We have lost a lot of our visiting officers, so how do we know why that person is not attending? When I say three strikes and you’re out, I am not saying that is to implement a sanction. What I am saying is there is something for us to investigate in that. I do not believe in sanctions in any way, shape or form.

If somebody has not turned up for three appointments I believe that they are offboarded from the Department. I do not know if you have any questions on offboarding but that is where the DWP has put somebody into work or they disappear from the books. They are offboarded. What has happened to that person? Are they at home? Have they become homeless? Are they at home ill? We do not know, do we? I think the offboarding comes into place more than putting a sanction in place for anybody. I think offboarding is something we need to look at as well because that is a very dangerous thing to leave somebody offboarded without knowing where they are.

David Pinto-Duschinsky: Thank you, Angela. Martin, do you have anything to add on this?

Martin Cavanagh: Select Committee after Select Committee has debated sanctions over the last decade or more, and I think every single one has shown that sanctions do not work as an incentive to get people into work. The reason—and I think Angela has covered it—is that primarily the way sanctions have operated, certainly for the last decade, is more of a cultural thing. Let’s be frank: the culture is to try to get people off benefits as quickly as you can. It is not about providing support. It is not about trying to get people into meaningful employment so that they can develop their careers and have a long career in the workplace. It is about trying to see, as quickly as we can, how we catch somebody out and how we get them off the benefit books. That is how the sanctions regime has become operated. That is the culture that is expected. I will say it is the culture expected by Government, and if it is expected by Government it will be expected by Ministers and, therefore, it will be expected by the senior departmental figures and departmental managers. That is a far cry from the service that Andrew would want to see.

When we say what else could we have, we know and we understand that it comes back to this time issue. If our work coaches were given the ability to provide a bespoke, individualised service to benefit claimants we genuinely believe your sanctions would go through the floor. They would disappear because you are able to see who is trying to dodge the system and who has genuinely fallen foul of the system. We do not have that time; work coaches do not have that time. I was very taken with a number of the comments from the first session where work coaches have lost their identity, work coaches have lost their focus. Work coaches have not lost their identity and they have not lost their focus; they are frustrated and they have lost the ability because they are not given the ability. They are not given that time to provide that care and the individualised service.

Q96            David Pinto-Duschinsky: Building on that, how should DWP determine who does and does not have an in-person interview? You talked before, Angela, about the conveyor belt as part of a moderation programme, almost. Then again, back to that question; given that, how should it be determined, in your view?

Angela Grant: I think we have proven through the pandemic how in-person interviews are not always necessary and when the Department gave work coaches empowerment so they could decide who should be brought in to the jobcentre for interview and who would have a telephone interview. Our work coaches are very well trained and skilled in understanding who needs to attend and who does not need to attend. Certainly, anybody who has a disability should not be forced into a jobcentre. Again, we heard our colleagues earlier speaking about the accessibility or the lack of accessibility in some of our jobcentres. We should not be demanding for anybody who has a disability to be attending a jobcentre if they can have a video interview, if they can have a phone call at home. We should not be demanding anybody with a disability comes into a jobcentre under any health journey under any health journey because they are sick, because people with disabilities are not sick. They should not have to present with doctor’s notes and all those things. Our work coaches are very highly skilled in understanding if somebody needs to be in person or can have a telephone interview.

Q97            David Pinto-Duschinsky: I will ask a follow-up question on that, and I am interested in your views, too, Martin. Some commentators and analysis suggest the reduction in face-to-face interviews has contributed to much lower off-flow rates from benefits—basically they are not as rigorous, and there are issues with them. How would you respond to that?

Angela Grant: I do not know if I agree. For home telephony interviews I have not heard that figure. That is quite new to me.

Martin Cavanagh: We will happily supplement the evidence we give today in writing and we will take that away. On the substantive question, what is sometimes a lack of understanding is that our work coaches understand the client base but they understand their communities that they serve. Our work coaches live either in or near the communities that they serve. They understand whether somebody needs a face-to-face appointment or how often they need one. They understand whether or not an individual is better off having a telephone interview. However, they are not given the autonomy to make that choice. We see what we call a tick and turn—I do not know if that has come up—where literally people are told, “Attend the jobcentre at X time on X day”. They turn up and they do not even get to see a work coach. They go, “You are reporting, right, fine, thank you, see you again same time next week”. It is appalling and unnecessary, and that is because the work coaches do not have the autonomy to make those choices.

Angela mentioned the pandemic. We were inundated with our work coaches telling us during the pandemic, “This is the first time”, in 20 years some of them had worked there, “that we are finally being allowed to provide the supportive service that we always wanted to give and we can do it on the telephone”. Yes, they were still open, they were still open face to face, despite the dangers. They came into work every single day during the pandemic and they were providing that face-to-face service where it was necessary, but they found ways of providing an excellent first-class service and they were lauded for it. What has changed?

David Pinto-Duschinsky: Thank you so much.

Q98            Johanna Baxter: We have talked a lot about the pressures that work coaches are under. How can the Government free up their time and capacity to provide that personalised support that they want to provide?

Martin Cavanagh: There are two things, fundamentally. One is that we need an increase in work coaches. I think the National Audit Office report recently said that last year between April and September we were 2,100 short on work coaches. We believe that is a conservative estimate. We believe the figure is higher. Our understanding is that we currently have somewhere in the region just short of 25,000 work coaches throughout the UK. That is implementing a system that is literally churning appointments. If you gave us the correct staff, if the funding was there to give us the correct amount of staff and work coaches can be given that empowerment, we believe that would free up so much time.

For example, if you have a work coach who is instructed that they have to see one individual claimant every single Tuesday at 11 am for the next 10 weeks, when that work coach knows that they might see them on the first Tuesday but they might not need to see them again for another three weeks or another five or six weeks, that frees up that slot. That frees up that time for that work coach to do other cases and to maybe work on finding the employment from that first interview. At the moment, they are literally going from one appointment to another, so it is freeing up that time as well. Fundamentally, we do not have enough people working in the jobcentres.

Q99            Johanna Baxter: I totally take the point about trying to get rid of that conveyer belt approach and making sure that work coaches have that time, but if you are saying 2,100 is an underestimate, what do you think the real figure is in terms of the number of staff who would need to be recruited to give work coaches the time to provide that support?

Martin Cavanagh: PCS has long held the view that for the work coach role we would need a minimum of 30,000. That is moveable because obviously that will depend on where we are at with unemployment rates. It would depend on stages in the economy or flat line of the economy. There is a whole load of factors that come to trying to work out exactly how many work coaches you need, but we believe to provide the current service and free up the time for work coaches to provide a more bespoke service we would need a minimum of 30,000. That is around about 6,000 more than we have now.

Angela Grant: We also need to stop this jobcentre closure programme that is running at the moment because we need more jobcentres, not less, and we are seeing a mass closure of jobcentres. I will give my branch where I work on the Wirral as an example. When I started we had five jobcentres in our district. You asked a question about the rural area; one is going back into the Wirral, which is farmland and goes into quite a rural community. We now have three jobcentres and two of those that were closed were in those further out areas, so anybody from that community has to now travel further to get to a jobcentre and that is not helpful.

Going back to sanctions, if somebody has to travel, whatever their own circumstances, they cannot get to a jobcentre and they do not turn up, then they are sanctioned. Our members are told to sanction somebody if they do not turn up. Why would we not give somebody the opportunity to come up on the next appointment, or come up on the next appointment, and if they do not turn up for those three appointments then we think, “Have they gone into work? Is there something that we need to know?” We have to understand that. We cannot do the job without the staff and without the officers. We have to have jobcentres in every single community, otherwise we cannot deliver a service.

Martin Cavanagh: Angela gave the example of the Wirral. There was a jobcentre in Hoylake in the Wirral, which was a small jobcentre. However, the cluster of jobcentres used that office as the office to send people with mental health issues and serious mental health concerns because it was a quieter and calmer environment. That was a beneficial service that they provided. It was one of the first jobcentres to shut. People who needed that more bespoke, quiet service were all of a sudden thrown into the mix of the bigger jobcentres and all that comes with it.

Q100       Johanna Baxter: I will come on to the career service in a moment, but what do you think the Government could do to make the work coach role a more attractive profession? If you are saying we need to recruit an extra 6,000 work coaches, what is it that the Government could do to make that an attractive profession for people to go into?

Angela Grant: Remove the stigma. Remove the stigma from our jobcentres and from our members. Stop talking this rhetoric about scroungers and shirkers. Why would employers want to come to our jobcentres to dip in that pool, where there is so much skill and ability in our client base, if those who are looking for work are badged as shakers and skivers? Why would employers want to come and why would anybody want to work in the jobcentre? To be badged in that way and then to look at the fact that our executive officers—work coaches are executive officers—are bordering minimum wage, our AO staff, the admin grade, are now on the national living wage, and our EO staff are pennies above the national living wage.

If you can go to work in Aldi without the stigma, and without the pressure, why would you want to come and work in DWP as a work coach? We have to fix that. If we want to have a service that works, Government have to fix that. We have to remove all the bad practices and the rhetoric that came from the previous Administration and we have to do better. If we do not do better we will never have a better service.

Q101       Johanna Baxter: Do you think your members get sufficient training in their roles to provide that person-focused support to claimants at the moment? Or is it the numbers, the caseload, that is the issue?

Angela Grant: I think we always need more training. I do not think there is ever enough training. Our members are trained in their role. I heard the colleagues earlier talking about how sometimes there is a bias within the jobcentres. What we need, as well as the work coach training, is to ensure that every work coach is having proper public sector equality duty training from day one. If we do not have that, biases will happen. DWP is a microcosm of society and we have people from all different walks of life working in our jobcentres. We have good and we have not so good sometimes. They are PCS members, they are trade union members, and we can do the work as a trade union trying to put our training in place, but it is not for the union to be putting that training in place for work coaches. It should be Government.

This is why we talk about this being centrally managed. It terrifies the life out of me that this might move into local government under the metro Mayor remit, because that does give us a postcode lottery: who has what training, who has what funding. Work coaches in this area might be trained differently to work coaches in another area because there is not enough funding to put the training in place. I heard a young lass before about how we can get that best practice right across the board. The best way to do that is to run it centrally to make sure that everybody is receiving the same from central Government and from a central base. So, yes, a long way of answering that question.

Q102       Johanna Baxter: I guess the challenge there is making sure you have those national standards but tailoring services to the challenges of each local area. It is getting that balance right.

Angela Grant: It is important to have the local input. We have talked about employers. Our work coaches know what employers are in what area and they reach out to employers. I think one of the earlier colleagues said something about the work coaches need to do better engaging with employers. We try. We try to engage with employers. If they do not want to engage, what do we do? We have our jobs fairs; we invite people in.

I went to an office once, as an example, and there was a jobs fair. There was an Army truck outside and I came in and said, “What is this?” They said, “It is a jobs fair”. The only people who had turned up were the Army to recruit. It was not an employer. That was on the Wirral. You think, why are our employers not coming in? Again, it is back to the stigma. I have spoken to accountants and they have said, “People do not want jobs” and I said, “Of course they do, the jobcentre is full of people”. I said, “Have you been to the jobcentre?” They go, “Why would we go to the jobcentre?” There is a stigma attached and we have to remove that stigma.

Q103       Johanna Baxter: Yes, and there are examples of good work that is happening to break that down, certainly. My local jobcentre in Paisley is doing incredible work on that. If I can turn to the career service, the Committee previously heard that the funding only covered one in-person session for people referred to the service. Is it realistic for a new jobs and career service to be a universal service and still provide quality careers advice under that model?

Andrew McGregor: You need to fund more than one session. The sessions have to be for people who are both at a distance from the labour market and close to the labour market and in the labour market. If you want a successful economy, you have to promote skills. Skills can be promoted through effective careers guidance, and if I am employed, I do not want to go to a website. I want to see a careers adviser because a careers adviser can properly analyse my skills and come up with an action plan to help me move forward.

That needs funding for a universal service, but you would be amazed at the barriers that people face who are not in disadvantaged groups. I have helped people who are very senior staff who were made redundant and found it very hard to get back into work. I can think of people who I have helped who needed six or more sessions, and that was a senior manager, but everybody took it for granted he could get back into the labour market himself without any help. Often that one session might be focused on a CV, and we are not the national CV service, we are the National Careers Service. We do not just do CVs, thank you very much. I can change somebody’s life with one session; I can do an awful lot more with three or more sessions. That is what is possible, that is what can be done, that is what is needed and that is what will make an economic impact. Academics like Professor Tristram Hooley have done the research. They have shown that effective careers guidance can have an economic impact.

Please, put steps in place so that not just the real deserving socioeconomic groups that you heard earlier this morning get help, but there is a universal service so the local government worker who wants to change job into the health service, the health and social care worker who wants to move out of health and social care, the leisure and tourism worker who wants to change and will go into business administration, those normal people who are working part time or full time can be helped through effective careers guidance, but that needs more than one session.

Q104       Johanna Baxter: I think in your submission you had said that there was too much generalisation and not enough specialist support. How would you address that? Should there be more specialist advisers like disability and employment advisers and the like?

Andrew McGregor: Yes, many careers advisers can cover many different groups. As a National Careers Service adviser, myself and my colleagues could often cover a wide range of different occupations, but there is still a need for some specialism. For example, there is a need for specialism for people with disabilities, health conditions, because the skills there, the careers guidance emphasis is different. People who are working—including people who are professionals—can often need help and they can often fall out of the labour market, and the skills involved as a careers adviser working with the higher end groups are different.

Not every jobcentre needs a specialist. You can refer a person who is a professional or has higher skills to the local regional specialists. There are methods that you can do it. Most careers advisers can deal with a wide range of economic groups, but I would definitely argue there is a need for specialisms as well. I have been the only careers adviser who could work with certain adult client groups across significant geographical areas, and that again can have economic impact. If a careers adviser with the right specialist skills is available—and that can be for a working person or a non-working person—they can change their lives through a skilled careers intervention.

Q105       Chair: Can I just interject? I appreciate that you are focusing on the particular cohort when Jo was asking about specialist advice. What about sector-based specific advice?

Andrew McGregor: Yes, that is definitely relevant. You have to have a mix. You have to have a careers adviser who can cover a wide range of occupations. There are careers advisers who are specialists in, say, SEND issues, but there are also careers advisers who cover the health sector. I am particularly thinking about higher occupational groups; I would argue there is a need there. The straight answer to your question is, yes, there needs to be sector-based specialisms.

Chair: I think about life sciences in Merseyside. That is a massive industry from entry level all the way up to—

Andrew McGregor: Yes, and we mentioned Hoylake. I live in New Brighton on Merseyside and at one point I covered Hoylake jobcentre. I worked alongside the job coaches and I saw the fabulous work they did and the pressure they were under. I thought, “I am very glad I am not working as a job coach”. I would far prefer to work as a careers adviser. We need to recognise the valuable work that job coaches have done and the pressure that they have been under.

Martin Cavanagh: That wasn’t planned, by the way.

Q106       Johanna Baxter: It is a small world. Finally, what opportunities for training would you like to see for careers advisers in the new jobs and career service?

Andrew McGregor: Careers advisers often working on the National Careers Service contracts are qualified to level 4. UNISON would argue that to train them to level 6 gives them a deeper level of knowledge, skills and understanding. It enables them to better work at things like labour market information. It gives them a more person-centred skill base. I would argue the minimum qualification for a careers adviser should be level 6. National Careers Service advisers have been doing a fantastic job qualified at level 4, but at level 4 there is an emphasis on employability. As a level 6 adviser I can go into much greater depth and understanding. I can draw on a greater knowledge base, but I have to be trained at that. I am concerned that there is a shortage, for example, in rural areas as to how you train a level 6 adviser.

In Scotland you have Skills Development Scotland and a very deep skills base and training system that is arguably an exemplar in the UK. Careers Wales has an excellent system. In England it is such a patchwork quilt and we either need to properly qualify on regional careers training for careers advisers where organisations—for example, like the one I work for—can tender into, or we have a national system that lays out quality guidelines and you work with professional organisations, people like the Careers Development Institute, to come up with professional standards that exist already and you have a national training programme for careers advisers at level 6 so that you have the proper level of skills to make a difference and contribute towards the economy through training.

Johanna Baxter: That was helpful, thank you.

Angela Grant: Can I come in on the training? Sorry, there was something that I did omit to say and it was about the length of time that we have for training. I am writing a note to Martin, “Nursery; do you remember this?” and Martin is like, “No”. I have been told by a lot of members who were in jobcentres before that when they had training they went in for a good few months of training and then they went into what they called a nursery. I do not know if that is the proper name or that is what they said, a nursery, I suppose like a bit of a probation period on the training, but they were still in training while they were there. The fact that the training time has been reduced down so far, there is no time to embed before we are thrown out into the workplace. It is important that as well as making sure we have the adequate training, we have the time for new recruits to come in and train properly.

Chair: If you are able to provide any more follow-up information on that, that would be very helpful.

Angela Grant: Definitely, we will get you something.

Chair: Now I am handing over to Amanda Hack. We have to move on, sorry.

Q107       Amanda Hack: We have heard an awful lot today. Thank you so much for your contribution so far about the environment within a jobcentre. I visited my own and we have visited ones in Manchester and Glasgow as well, and all are quite different. We also heard from the previous panel around co-location and whether or not different community hubs and venues might work. With that in mind, looking at co-location, particularly with the jobcentre and the career service, but also with the approach maybe of introducing more third sector organisations, what concerns do you think that might raise with your members, knowing we have a lot of uncertainty already?

Martin Cavanagh: For PCS members, their experience of co-locations is very mixed. There are some that have not worked, and I think the reason that they have not worked comes back to the culture of the jobcentre. You move then into a one-stop shop or a co-location site and the expectation of those service users who come into that co-location site is very different depending on what they are coming into that co-location site for. If you are coming in to get your benefit sorted because you have been sanctioned and you are on the breadline and you do not have any money, you will come in there with a very different response than somebody coming in to try to find out about community-based areas or some advice around council tax or whatever it is. It is a very different environment.

Our members’ experience is that the inner-city co-locations have been hotspots for incidents and not enough security. We have concerns about proper safety regulation and so on, and it is not because the people who are coming in to do the DWP bit are inherently bad. They have certain frustrations and they have a lived experience that is not a good one for them at the moment. The importance of the environment, therefore, is critical. There is often too much emphasis on if you sort the environment out and make it look nicer it will solve all the problems. It will not. You can have something that looks like an army barracks or you can have something that looks like the most pleasant doctor’s surgery you will ever be in, but if what you are going in there for is a problematic issue for you in your life, you want to understand that the service that you will get and the help and support you will get is what you need at that moment in time.

The environment is important, there is no doubt about that, and certainly we have good examples of working together with local authorities and with the third sector. A lot of the time there is a misunderstanding that work coaches have this mentality that is very focused on the person in front of them and that is it, get out in 10 minutes, but there is a lot of good outreach work. Jobcentres go into the communities. It is a real shame, again in the Merseyside area, that the Toxteth jobcentre was closed. It served the local community. They had a community centre right next door to them and the work coaches used to come out of the jobcentre and see people in the community centre right next door. They did it because that was a better environment for the claimant than it was to go into that jobcentre environment, and it was closed. All of a sudden it is a trek from there to Liverpool city centre.

There is good experience of co-locations, but probably a better experience is genuine outreach work where jobcentre coaches can go into more relaxed environments, community hubs in particular. All our members tell us that does give a good service because it puts the emphasis on the support for the individual and they feel as if they are in their environment rather than being forced to go somewhere else that is seen as hostile. I can imagine that if I got a letter these days, if I found myself unlucky and out of work or disabled or whatever, saying, “You have to report to a jobcentre” knowing the environment it is, I would not look forward to it.

Q108       Amanda Hack: From a careers service point of view obviously there is that challenge of co-location with Jobcentre Plus colleagues, but also maybe with the third sector. What is the sense with the career service?

Andrew McGregor: Often in a jobcentre, the National Careers Service adviser is in the desk in the corner. That is no disrespect to my PCS colleagues, it is the way it is. There is no confidentiality and no proper way of working, and things like that need to change. I would argue that the National Careers Service also needs to do outreach work in the community, in libraries, in places where it is now, with training providers that offer swaps. National Careers Service is not just in the jobcentre, and the new jobs and careers service has an outreach component so that NCS advisers are also working with employers. They are seeing employed people on employer premises.

With co-location you also have the issue of physical space. You have to share your space. You cannot have every community organisation in on the same day because jobcentres are small spaces under lots of pressure. There is a great deal of pressure on jobcentre staff to be friendly and welcoming and to sort all the physical issues out of having visitors in who are providing a service. You have to think of space, but National Careers Service advisers need to be based in jobs and careers centres but also be in the community. The obvious place is libraries and community centres. I have colleagues in the NCS who go through a whole variety of different settings and that needs to be kept so that you can stay close to the community and get the best possible service to clients.

Q109       Amanda Hack: Thank you. Moving on, we have received lots of submissions with regard to the presence of security colleagues in Jobcentre Plus and that that may create an unpleasant environment for some claimants. What do you think is needed to try to get a better balance between the environment, and what people go in for might not necessarily be a positive one for them, and create a more welcoming and positive environment for other claimants who might need that?

Martin Cavanagh: I am sure Angela will want to come in on this. The security guards who work in jobcentres have a difficult job to do. Without any doubt, if it was not for the security presence in jobcentres, what is already a massive increase in serious violence incidents in our jobcentres would be far worse than it already is. That is the first thing to say. We also understand and our members have also been very clear with us that they get how intimidating that can look. If you were to turn up to a jobcentre and your first interaction is with a security guard who is dressed as if they were a prison officer, for example, then is that a welcoming environment for somebody to come into if they want to find work or talk about benefits or whatever? No, it is not. It is a real Catch-22 for us right now because our ideal scenario is for us to be able to have a much softer frontline security presence and they are literally there in the background to be called upon when and if needed.

Experience has dictated over the years that because of the environment and because people quite often come into a jobcentre expecting a hostile environment, therefore, they are geared for that. That is their mindset when they come into the jobcentre, certainly if something has gone wrong with their benefit or they cannot find work and there is a frustration. We get—and our members understand—that people get frustrated, and frustrations come out sometimes. Security guards are imperative then. We have to try to strike that balance between that becoming intimidating and a blocker for people feeling welcome to come into the jobcentres.

There is no easy answer to it because if I was working in the National Careers Service now and I thought this new service was going to be put in this new environment that has not got the security that coming to a frontline jobcentre does, and we will all be chucked into that mix, I would be thinking, “Oh my God, what am I going to walk into every day?”. Our members do. They are used to the security presence, so it is a very fine balance, but we understand it. We are not blind to it, certainly not. We understand that we have to find a way.

The idea is now we find a way to have a softer presence, but it comes back to the culture, and it comes back to the benefit system that you run. It is a benefit system because we want to see people given support and coached into work and into a career and careers, but while the emphasis is, “Take any old job to get you off the benefit books” it is that that creates the hostility. It is not the security guards. It is not even how they look. It is that environment, and the environment and culture is all part of that. People will have a premeditated view of what to expect before they go in there. I am not saying that incidents do not kick off in there because they clearly do, but that is borne out of frustration.

Angela Grant: To follow on from what Martin has said there, the timing of interviews is also a problem because if an interview runs over and then the next one runs over and somebody is sitting waiting, they have their own frustrations because they are waiting for payment or they have gone to the bank and their money is not in and they are waiting. We have fast-track incidents that are reported to us in DWP and they are the serious incidents. They are not all the incidents, they are just the serious incidents. DWP is telling us the fast-track incidents are not as many as they were. That might be the case, but the actual levels of violence are massively increasing in our jobcentres. We can give you some examples that are terrifying. Not even in the jobcentre, somebody had their car set on fire on their front lawn because they are a work coach in the DWP. A baby was threatened in a pram because somebody is frustrated.

We see these and we are creating a dossier of fast-track incidents to present to the Department and to the Minister if we can, to show how difficult it is for our jobcentre workers and for our security guards. Our security guards are having to put their bodies in between our members and this violence that is escalating. As Martin says, this is borne out of frustration. This is not somebody saying, “I feel like going to have a kick-off on the jobcentre today. I will go down and threaten them with a gun or a knife”. These things are happening because of what has happened with the benefit system.

Anyone who hears me speak says it is a benefit system but there is no benefit in it for anybody, because to be on the poverty line and to have to—because universal credit now covers housing benefit as well, so if you cannot pay your rent because your rent is so high, you have to take the money out of your benefit to put towards your rent. You are living in poverty, so if your money does not go in you might not have eaten for weeks and you want to go to the jobcentre. Your money is not in the bank so you go in, the frustrations are there and the flash points are happening.

Talking about the environment, as Martin said about turning up on the doorstep of a jobcentre, you see these uniforms that are facing you. That in itself can be quite intimidating and I think there might be something maybe—and we have talked about raising this within PCS—looking at how we can soften the appearance, maybe speak to the security provider. Let’s bring them in-house, insourcing, and that is key for us as well. If we can insource our security guards, we can then look at their uniform and how they present. There is something for us to look at there, I think.

Chair: Unfortunately, time has run away with us. There is another question that we have about how we would measure the success of the new jobs and careers service, but I am going to invite you to write to us on that if you would. I just want to say a big thank you to you all for coming along and reacquainting yourselves. It has been lovely to take your evidence. Thank you very much.