MPs should not be concerned about the shortage of work coaches as the Department for Work and Pensions is handling it by reducing activities that have the least impact on its priorities, Sir Peter Schofield has said.
The DWP estimated last year that it had 2,100 fewer work coaches than it needed in the first six months of 2024-25, while civil service union PCS believes the department needs around 6,000 more than its current numbers.
Schofield told MPs on the Public Accounts Committee that the DWP is managing job centre work coach shortages by scaling back some interventions.
Labour MP Chris Kane asked Schofield: “How concerned should we be that over half of job centres have had to reduce their support for universal credit claimants due to the shortage of work coaches?”
Schofield said in his response: "I do not think that we should be concerned because, where there are not enough work coaches, we have reduced the frequency of interventions on the things that we think make the least difference to outcomes, primarily the outcomes about getting people into work."
He added: “We will never ever have exactly the right number of work coaches in any one place."
Through its national framework for local flexibility, the department aims to give local leaders the flexibility to make the right decisions in their areas according to their position in terms of work coach numbers and demand, within a framework that provides consistency and minimises the negative impact of not having enough work coaches.
Barbara Bennett, who was appointed chief executive and director general of the under-development Jobs and Careers Service in March 2025, told MPs that the impact that the reduction in support has had on claimants has been minimised, because the flexibility framework has enabled the preservation of “the core support that we give”.
“The flexibility framework has deliberately been created so that, for those who need intensive work search support of 10 minutes or 20 minutes, et cetera, that has been preserved,” she said. “We have deliberately looked at those things that are not needed.”
The framework sets out five levels of changes that job centres can introduce to manage work coaches’ workload pressures, to be initiated in order, starting with Level 1: shortening the first meeting with a claimant from 50 to 30 minutes.
Schofield said he believes 30 minutes is “sufficient to enable us to have a decent conversation with a new claimant about what their needs, their skills, their ambitions and the opportunities are”. “We do not think that that is going to make a significant difference at all to outcomes,” he added.
He added: “Where a conversation needs longer, we will allow [for it to be] longer and often adjust the diary of the work coach to be able to do that.”
Level 5 involves moving all claimants in the intensive work search category to a fortnightly meeting after 13 weeks, rather than a weekly meeting for some of them.
Schofield told PAC he believes work coaches “can still have the quality conversations on a regular basis and achieve the same outcomes even if we have to move to a Level 5 position on the ladder”.
DWP suspended the Level 4 measure – “Pause some additional work coach support for people with health conditions and disabilities who claim Employment and Support Allowance” – in May 2024 because it had little impact on reducing work coaches’ workload.
Another way the department has been trying to aid work coaches' workloads has been through collaboration between job centres. “We are really keen to make sure that, where there is a shortfall, there are other jobcentres helping,” Bennett said.
“We have asked the teams in Scotland to support the teams in a few of our southern and London job centres on non-core activities that can be done virtually. That helps us to smooth the resource temporarily, but also means that we have the opportunity to learn as well. From a leadership perspective, we have just moved one of our teams, for example, in Liverpool, to be able to support the team in Birmingham, so some of the activities that have worked in Liverpool are translating across to Birmingham.”
The department is also currently holding two randomised trials to test alternative ways of delivering services, which will conclude next year. One allows work coaches to choose the channel of communication for their weekly meetings with claimants (face-to-face, video or telephone) and the other reduces the frequency of appointments for intensive work search claimants in the first 13 weeks from weekly to three-weekly.
Schofield said this is part of an attempt to make the framework “less rigid” so that its resources go further as it moves to the new national Jobs and Careers Service. A focus on more flexibility may also address some of the concerns of the PCS union, which has called for work coaches to be given more empowerment to decide how often claimants need to come in.
The perm sec also outlined the planned timeline for rolling out the jobs and careers service at the PAC session. He said DWP plans to move to phase two in 2026-27, when it will start to integrate the National Careers Service with the job centre operation. In phase three, scheduled for 2027-28, the perm sec said the plan is to have “a fully online job centre in your pocket, a digital offering that brings everything together, with a completed roll-out in 2028”.