Jobcentres: Staffing Levels

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, our jobcentres provide a professional, targeted service. DWP recently conducted a thorough review of jobcentre activity, to look at ways in which we can respond to demand without having a negative impact on outcomes for claimants, or indeed on benefit expenditure or fraud and error. After the review, the department introduced a series of operational changes, the aim of which was to maintain consistency in jobcentres across the country.

However, consistency is not the same as uniformity. It cannot be sensible to have the same regime for a 20 year-old who has not worked ever since leaving school, a 40 year-old who is recovering from a serious illness, and a 60 year-old who is working in a job but not earning quite enough to escape from the demands of the jobcentre. So we are exploring ways to adapt the length, frequency and channels for appointments so they are better tailored to the needs of the individual. That way, we will be able to protect the interventions that are most effective but also try to make sure that we direct the resources where they are most needed. We now have additional work coaches working specifically on our programmes to support people with health conditions and disabilities, and we have committed to spending £1 billion by the end of the decade, investing in those very customers.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, during my time as an MP, I made a point of trying to visit local jobcentres every year on a very regular basis. One of my consistent observations was that, all too often, local offices were never properly involved in designing services to address local priorities. So, is it not time we got away from this one-size-fits-all, Whitehall-led mentality?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I suspect that the noble Lord has been reading our Get Britain Working plan—that is the only explanation for that comment. That is exactly what we want to do, and he is so right on this. We have been saying from the beginning that one size does not fit all, and that in employment interventions we are looking to work closely with local leaders, so we are running a series of trailblazers around the country, working with local mayoral authorities and local government.

Every labour market is different. The noble Lord is quite right that we do not have a single labour market in Britain; we have a series of different labour markets, with different challenges, populations and employment patterns, and our job is to make sure that we respond to those needs. For example, we have eight youth trailblazers running around the country, from Teesside to the south-west, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, the East and West Midlands and London, to look at what works. We will learn from that and will then help people to make the right decisions for their people.