Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what support she is providing to Forres Job Centre to further assist unemployed people.

Through our Plan for Jobs, the Department is providing broad ranging support for all jobseekers. Currently, support includes the Kickstart scheme, Job Finding Support, Sector Based Work Academy Programmes and Job Entry Targeted Support in Scotland.

In addition, the government is investing an additional £150 million into the Flexible Support Fund, which will increase the capacity of the Rapid Response Service, supporting people through redundancy and providing additional local support to claimants by removing barriers to work such as travel expenses for attending interviews and child care.

Our Jobcentre Work Coaches provide support on finding a job, help with retraining or skills advice, CV, job applications and access to the new vacancies we record every day, as well as signposting to our Jobhelp website.

To date, in Scotland, the Department has recruited 823 Work Coaches since March 2020, bringing the total number of Work Coaches in Scotland to 2,255. Within the Morayshire Cluster (Forres, Elgin and Buckie Jobcentres) six new Work Coaches have joined team with a further six due to start shortly.

The Morayshire Cluster works closely with the Moray Pathways which is a consortium of partners and providers across Moray offering customers skills, training, employment support. We deliver a multi-agency service to support our younger customers move forward towards employment from the Moray Community Hub.