Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people in receipt of (a) Jobseeker’s Allowance and (b) Employment and Support Allowance in the (i) work-related activity and (ii) support groups were (A) in and (B) not in work in each month for which data is available since April 2013.
Answered by Jo Churchill
The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 15 May 2024 to Question 24903 on Poverty, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of updating the baseline year for absolute poverty.
Answered by Jo Churchill
There are currently no plans to update the baseline year for absolute poverty.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether he plans to update the baseline year for absolute poverty.
Answered by Jo Churchill
There are currently no plans to update the baseline for absolute poverty.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Jobcentre sites are temporarily closed.
Answered by Paul Maynard
As of 30 April 2024, there are 6 Jobcentres that are temporarily closed.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much funding his Department has provided for the renovation of Jobcentre sites in each financial year since 2020.
Answered by Jo Churchill
Funding allocations for renovation of the DWP Estate are not disaggregated between back office and Jobcentre sites Therefore, it is not possible to separately identify Jobcentre renovation costs.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of staff in his Department's took a leave of absence due to mental ill health by (a) gender, (b) age and (c) UK region between1 May 2023 and 11 April 2024.
Answered by Paul Maynard
Please see the attached document for the total number of people who have worked in DWP and taken at least one leave of absence at some point between 1st May 2023 and 31st March 2024. It includes those who left the department during this period. Figures for April 2024 are not yet available.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to help broaden access to work experience for disadvantaged young people.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Shadow Secretary of State for Education
Work experience is an important aspect of the support pupils receive to follow rewarding learning and training pathways which lead to fulfilling careers.
The department works with The Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) to support secondary schools to provide pupils with multiple interactions with employers from year 7 to year 13 in line with Gatsby Benchmark 6, Experiences of the Workplace. The department has asked CEC to drive this agenda forward at pace to increase workplace opportunities, targeting pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, in response to evidence that these pupils are less likely to access work experience opportunities than their peers. In the latest annual data, 64% of institutions fully achieved the experiences of the workplace benchmark, which is a 12% increase from the year before.
The CEC Careers Hub network has been asked to use a proportion of their Hub Delivery Fund to stimulate meaningful employer-led activities to increase the quantity and quality of opportunities for young people to engage in encounters of the workplace with a focus on alternative provision, special educational needs and disabilities and Pupil Referral Units across all year groups.
In addition, £1.9 million has been invested to support Careers Hubs to offer workplace experiences for up to 15,000 economically disadvantaged young people, including virtual workplace experience pilots for more than 1,000 schools in coastal and rural communities, providing access to wider national networks of employers outside their local community.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Carer’s Allowance overpayments have been referred to HM Courts and Tribunals Service since February 2022.
Answered by Paul Maynard
Since February 2022, there have been 119 cases accepted for prosecution for benefit fraud that were so serious they met the threshold for prosecution by The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) where Carer’s Allowance was the primary overpayment.
Note that this this figure only represents those cases accepted by CPS and does not indicate prosecution outcome. Data is for the period 1/2/2022 to 17/4/2024.
The data has been sourced from internal DWP management information, which is intended only to help the Department to manage its business. It is not intended for publication and has not been subject to the same quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Carer’s Allowance cases were flagged as potentially in need of investigation by the VEPs system in the 2023-24 financial year; and of these, how many (a) were and (b) were not investigated.
Answered by Paul Maynard
The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to paragraph 3.18 of the National Audit Office report entitled Investigation into overpayments of Carer’s Allowance, published on 26 April 2019, what changes were made to the business rules of the Verify Earnings and Pensions Service that revised downwards the number of alerts that were forecast to be generated from 380,000 to 75,000.
Answered by Paul Maynard
A review of rules has provided a streamlined approach to the identification of VEP rules, enabling alignment with the latest HMRC data that feeds into DWP Real Time Earnings (RTE) system.
Examples of improvements include benefit specific rules, such as details of fluctuations in income, one off payments and irregular payments revision.
The Department is constantly reviewing available resources against priorities.