The Department for Work and Pensions will need to employ at least 6,000 more work coaches to fix the job centre system, senior officials from the PCS union have claimed.
Speaking to parliament’s Work and Pensions Committee for its inquiry on reforming job centres, PCS president Martin Cavanagh and the union’s DWP Group president Angela Grant also warned that the government must end the stigma around the service and offer better pay if it is to make the work coach role more attractive.
The committee launched the inquiry in response to the government’s Get Britain Working white paper, which set out an intention to to reform job centres and merge the National Career Service with Jobcentre Plus.
At Wednesday’s session, Cavanagh warned that work coaches are not being given enough time to provide an individualised service and said the department needs to radically add to their ranks.
He said the department’s estimate that it had 2,100 fewer work coaches than it needed in the first six months of 2024-25 was “conservative” and that PCS believes around 6,000 more are needed above the current numbers.
Cavanagh said there are currently “just short of 25,000 work coaches” in the UK and that this is “implementing a system which is literally churning appointments”. He said the government needs to increase this to a minimum of 30,000 and add “probably around about 6,000 more than we’ve got now” to get to the right level.
“Now that would be movable, because obviously that would depend on where we're at with unemployment rates,” he added. “It'll depend on whether or not we have surges in the economy, or flatlining of the economy.”
Cavanagh said expanding the size of the workforce, combined with giving work coaches more empowerment to decide how often claimants need to come in, would free up the time for work coaches to provide a more bespoke service.
“For example, if you've got a work coach that is instructed that they have to see one individual claimant every single Tuesday at 11am for the next 10 weeks – that work coach knows that they might see them on the first Tuesday, they might not need to see them again for three weeks, or another five weeks, or another six weeks. That frees up that time for that work coach to do other cases or maybe work on finding employment for that first [claimant].
“At the moment, they're literally going from one interview to another.”
Cavanagh and Grant, who have worked at the DWP for 30 and 20 years respectively, also called for an end to the department’s job centre closure programme, saying more job centres are needed, not less.
Cavanagh said one of the first closures, a small job centre in Wirral, had been used to help people with mental health issues and serious mental health concerns, because it was a quieter, calmer environment. “People who needed that more bespoke, quiet service were all of a sudden thrown into the mix of the biggest job centres and all that comes with it,” he said.
‘Why become a work coach when you could work in Aldi without the stigma and pressure’
Asked how the department can attract the extra work coaches it needs, Grant said the government needs to “remove the stigma from our job centres and from our members”.
“Stop talking this rhetoric about scroungers and shirkers,” she said. “Why would employers want to come [in] and why would anybody want to work in a job centre.
“To be badged in that way, and … [be earning] pennies above the national living wage. If you could go to work in Aldi without the stigma and without the pressure, why would you want to work in DWP as a work coach? We have to fix that if we want to have a service that works.
“We have to remove all of the bad practices and the rhetoric that came from the previous administration, and we have to do better. If we don't do better, we will never have a better service.”
Merger causing ‘a lot of uncertainty’
The PCS representatives were also asked about the impact the announcement of the merger of Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service has had on DWP officials.
Cavanagh said it had caused “a lot of uncertainty” because of the lack of detail provided on the implications.
“There is a concern about what that means for their role, about their civil service status, about 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 is going to de doable in any new service,” he said.
Grant added that it “terrifies” her that the service might be localised under the metro-mayor remit as this would create a “postcode lottery”.
“Who has what training? Who has what funding? The best way to [get best practice right across the board] is to run it centrally, to make sure that everybody is receiving the same funding from central government and from a central base,” she said
Cavanagh and Grant said work coaches are also concerned about the possibility of job centre work coaches “losing their identity” through a merger.
“Which will become the prevailing culture in any new service? Or actually, would it be a hybrid? Would it be a mixture of the two?” Cavanagh asked.
“They would not want to lose their identity as job centre work coaches to be pulled into the national Careers Service,” Grant added. “They are two totally separate cultures, different services that are provided.”
Andrew McGregor, chair of the Careers Forum at Unison, said the same applied to National Careers Service advisers, who he said “need to have all the branding of a separate identity and behind that identity and branding they need the resources”.