Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what procedure her Department followed to convert the temporary, fixed term contracts of work coaches who were hired during the covid-19 outbreak, to permanent contracts.

DWP EO fixed-term colleagues, which included colleagues in Work Coach roles, were invited to apply for permanence via ring-fenced internal campaigns.

To manage overall volumes, we split the overall exercise into 37 campaigns, one per District, using the same standards. As context, in considering where subsequent offers could be made, we did also consider roles in the wider geographic vicinity and where appropriate across nearby Districts.

Colleagues were invited to submit written examples of their work and achievements against Civil Service behaviours with an additional online work-based judgement test. This provided opportunity for colleagues to provide evidence of their knowledge and experience that were assessed, using DWP agreed standards, by our recruitment partner and audited by our own trained DWP business assessors from across the Department throughout to ensure standards aligned and were consistent.