PCS has announced further strike action at a Department for Work and Pensions office in Lincoln which has been earmarked for closure.
Staff at the service centre, which is run by DWP within the City of Lincoln Council's City Hall, yesterday completed two weeks of strike action.
PCS has now announced that its members at the Lincoln office will strike again from 1 December until 2 January 2026 in protest at the closure.
More than 80 officials are currently at serious risk of redundancy as a result of the planned closure in May 2026, according to PCS. The union said the majority of these staff are low paid AOs with very little prospect of being able to relocate into other DWP or other civil service jobs.
PCS said its members made a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how much the DWP were paying Lincoln City Council in rent, and that it calculated that the amount of compensation it would take to make staff in Lincoln voluntarily redundant would cost the DWP as much as it would to pay for the rental on the premises for more than 16 years.
The union has also previously warned that the decision to close the site “may be the tip of the office-closure iceberg in DWP, with thousands of members working in other so-called 'transitional sites' facing a similar prospect to their colleagues in Lincoln”.
PCS said the DWP has insisted in meetings with PCS that the decision cannot be reversed.
A DWP spokesperson said: “The closure of Lincoln City Hall Service and Support Centre will have no impact on Lincoln Jobcentre, which remains fully operational, nor on the vital services we deliver to customers.
“We continue to engage with trade union representatives to support colleagues, with redeployment opportunities wherever possible.”