Jobcentres: Staffing Levels

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the staffing levels within Job Centres.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)]

My Lords, DWP monitors demand for jobcentre support on an ongoing basis and has well-established workforce planning systems to make sure that we have the right people in the right place at the right time. These systems help us to prioritise jobcentre activities where needed, protecting our most effective interventions and making sure that we maintain a constant focus on getting people into work, while remaining within funding limits and providing value for money.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

I thank the Minister for her response. A recent BBC article suggested that capacity has been created in jobcentres only by reducing the number and length of appointments. One work coach they spoke to said that having only 10 minutes with clients means

“you’re just being a benefits policeman”,

and some work coaches feel that they are not able to provide the necessary support, in particular to help disabled people into work. Are the Government confident of being able to improve the employment rate for people with disabilities?

[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.