Work coach shortage: DWP’s seeming complacency highlighted in PAC Jobcentres report
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Government seems complacent at the potential impact of a reduction
in support for benefit claimants. In a new report on jobcentres,
the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been left unconvinced by
the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) assurances that a
shortfall of work coaches, who play a critical role working with
people claiming Universal Credit, has and will continue to have a
minimal impact. There have not been enough work coaches to meet the
need for support in...Request free
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Government seems complacent at the potential impact of a reduction in support for benefit claimants. In a new report on jobcentres, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been left unconvinced by the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) assurances that a shortfall of work coaches, who play a critical role working with people claiming Universal Credit, has and will continue to have a minimal impact. There have not been enough work coaches to meet the need for support in recent years. In the first six months of 2024-25, DWP had 2,100 (10.9%) fewer coaches than it estimated it needed. To help deal with this, it allowed jobcentres to reduce support for claimants when coaches' caseloads got too high, including shortening initial meetings with claimants to 30mins. More than half of jobcentres have said they are doing this. DWP acknowledged to the PAC that plans to redeploy 1,000 coaches in 2025-26 to provide intensive support for people with health conditions and disabilities will reduce available support further. The DWP told the PAC's inquiry that it should not be concerned about the reductions in support because it has focused the reductions on the things that it thinks make the least difference to the primary outcome of getting people into work. However, the into-work rate is declining (from 9.7% in 2021-22 to 8.2% in 2023-24), and third-sector organisations raised concerns with the PAC's inquiry about the quality and consistency of the support offered. The PAC was not convinced by the DWP's assurances, and is seeking an evaluation of the impact of its measures to reduce support before any permanent changes are made. Government's long-term ambition is to achieve an employment rate of 80%. The PAC's report warns that this is likely to be very challenging, and DWP acknowledged to its inquiry that it is clearly a stretching aspiration. Achieving such a rate would represent a considerable increase - from May 2018 to October 2024, the employment rate fluctuated between 74.3% and 76.4%. To help reach its 80% ambition, the Autumn Budget in 2024 allocated £55m investment into a new jobs and careers service, bringing together jobcentres with the National Careers Service in England. The report finds that it is unclear how this £55m is being spent. The DWP did not indicate to the PAC's inquiry how much of the £55m has so far been committed, and how much is left to be allocated. Noting that it is now several months into the financial year, the PAC's report stresses the importance of the DWP quickly working out how to make best use of the funding, rather than making rushed decisions at the last minute. The report also finds that the DWP has not evaluated the effectiveness of its approach to supporting claimants into work for a decade. Tests are ongoing for services to be delivered through alternative means, by using video and other channels rather than face-to-face communication, and reducing the frequency of work coaches' engagement with claimants. In light of these changes, the PAC is calling for a published evaluation of the impact of DWP's reforms to the employment support system. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “The support provided by work coaches in jobcentres is critical to help people find employment and progress in work. It would necessarily follow that reducing the levels or changing the nature of support provided, in particular limiting the length of initial interviews with claimants, which have to include all the verification as well as advice, would have an impact on how that service was delivered. DWP's apparently complacent assurances to the contrary held no water with this Committee. We are seeing a continuing decline in into-work rates, and government itself accepts that its plans to provide intensive support to help disabled people and those with health conditions into work will make the work-coach shortfall even more challenging to manage. “DWP has not had the funding for the work coaches who are trying to provide support in the here and now, while being allocated £55m to test out new approaches. At the time of our report it was not entirely clear how this money was being spent. Government's ambition for 80% employment is a stretching one, and this Committee is supportive of the principle of ambitious change where required for reform. But we are here to scrutinise how policy is delivered. Our report suggests the approach taken by government to achieve this radical shift and help individual claimants access the jobs market is currently in a muddle.”
PAC report conclusions and recommendations The Department seems complacent about the impact that the reduction in support caused by the shortage of work coaches may be having on claimants. The Department has not had enough work coaches to meet the need for support in recent years. In the first six months of 2024-25, for example, it had 2,100 (10.9%) fewer work coaches than it estimated it needed. To help deal with the shortfall, the Department allows jobcentres to reduce the support they provide for claimants when the caseload of their work coaches is too high. In September 2023, it introduced a local flexibility framework which sets out measures that jobcentres can implement, such as shortening the initial meeting with claimants from 50 to 30 minutes. More than half (57%) of jobcentres have used the framework at some point to manage their workload. The Department says we should not be concerned about the reductions in support because it has minimised the impact on claimants by focusing the reductions on the things that it thinks make the least difference to outcomes, primarily getting people into work. We note, however, that the into-work rate declined from 9.7% in 2021-22 to 8.2% in 2023-24, and third-sector organisations raised concerns with us about the quality and consistency of the support offered to claimants. The Department is considering making some of the measures in the framework permanent changes. Recommendation 1. The Department should evaluate the impact on claimants of jobcentres implementing measures from its local flexibility framework, and share the results with the Committee, before making any of the measures permanent changes. We are concerned that the Department will continue to not have enough work coaches to meet the growing demand for support. The shortage of work coaches has been caused by the Department securing inadequate funding from HM Treasury and by recruitment and retention challenges. Looking ahead, the demand for work coach support is expected to continue to increase and claimants' needs are expected to become more complex. The proposals for reform set out in the November 2024 white paper and the March 2025 green paper have significant implications for jobcentres. They include setting up a new jobs and careers service as a universal service not just support for benefit recipients, and providing tailored employment, health and skills support for claimants with a work-limiting health condition or disability. The Department envisages a ‘pyramid' of support where many people will be able to access and self-serve using digital services, what it called a ‘jobcentre in your pocket'. It foresees that this will help to free up jobcentre resources to provide face-to-face support to those who need it. However, the Department acknowledges that redeploying 1,000 work coaches in 2025-26, to provide intensive support to around 65,000 people with health conditions and disabilities, will reduce the support available for other Universal Credit claimants. Recommendation 2. The Department should develop a workforce plan within twelve months and as part of its work to design and set up the new jobs and careers service. The plan should include details of the steps that the Department will take to make sure it has enough work coaches to provide face-to-face support to people who need it. The Department does not publish data on work coach numbers or into-work rates, which means it is not clear how well local jobcentres are supporting claimants to work. The Department publishes data on its Stat-Xplore platform relating to the number of claimants in each Universal Credit labour market category at jobcentre level. It does not, however, publish data on work coach numbers compared with need or on jobcentre performance in helping people move into work. The NAO report presented work coach data for the Department's seven regions and performance data for the regions and for the 37 districts. These data show substantial variation between different parts of the country. For example, from December 2023 to November 2024, the district into-work rate ranged from 5.5% in Birmingham and Solihull to 10.8% in Northern Scotland. There is also variation in the shortfall of work coaches at jobcentre level, and the Department seeks to manage the impact of the variation by having jobcentres with more work coaches support those with fewer. Recommendation 3. The Department should set out how it will increase transparency around jobcentres, for example by regularly publishing jobcentre level data on its Stat-Xplore platform, including data on work coach numbers against need and into-work rates. This regular reporting should start before the end of 2025. The Department has not evaluated the effectiveness of its approach to supporting claimants to work for a decade. The Department does not have an up-to-date evidence base from which to assess the suitability of its current approach to supporting claimants to work. Its most recent evaluation is from 2015, before Universal Credit was rolled out. The Department considers it to be challenging to develop a new evidence base using randomised control trials, which it describes as the gold standard, bearing in mind how long it takes to carry out the trials and get the results. It is currently assessing alternative arrangements for delivering its services, where possible using randomised control trials. Specifically, it is testing using video and other channels rather than face-to-face communication, and reducing the frequency of work coaches' engagement with claimants. It expects the results of these trials to be available between June 2025 and November 2026. The Department is also comparing and contrasting the evidence that it gathers over shorter time periods - for example, it is using its core support model in one place and a different approach in another place thereby creating groups of claimants that it can compare. It wants to get test results quickly in order to help develop the new jobs and careers service. Recommendation 4. The Department should, within six months, publish its strategy for evaluating the impact of its reforms to the employment support system and for refreshing its evidence base regularly. It is not fully clear how the Department is spending the £55 million allocated for 2025-26 to test elements of the new jobs and careers service. In the 2024 Autumn Budget, the Government allocated £55 million for the Department to invest in developing and testing elements of the jobs and careers service in 2025-26. The Department is spending some of this money on a coaching academy to upskill its work coaches, on 'pathfinder projects' in some parts of the country and on developing digital services, but has not yet allocated all of the £55 million. The Department says that funding is available for good proposals coming forward from different parts of the organisation. But it did not indicate how much of the £55 million has so far been committed and how much is left to be allocated. We are now several months into the financial year so it is important that the Department works out quickly how to make best use of the funding, rather than making rushed decisions at the last minute. Recommendation 5. Alongside its Treasury Minute response, the Department should write to us setting out how much of the £55 million has been committed and what its plans are for using the remainder of the money. Achieving an employment rate of 80% is likely to be very challenging. The Government's long-term ambition is to achieve an employment rate of 80%. This would represent a considerable increase - from May 2018 to October 2024, the employment rate fluctuated between 74.3% and 76.4%. The Department says that in some local areas the 80% employment rate is already being achieved. Its focus will be on those areas with a much lower employment rate, and the characteristics of the individuals in those areas. In April 2025, the Department published eight metrics focusing on places and groups with employment rates of less than 80%, which it will use to track performance in the context of the reforms set out in the 2024 white paper. For example, there is a metric about reducing the gap between the median employment rate and the bottom 10% in terms of localities, plus other metrics that are about characteristics, such as bringing down the health-related inactivity rate and reducing the proportion of young people not in education, training or employment. The Department has said it will publish data on these metrics annually, starting in October 2025. Recommendation 6. The Department should, within six months:
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