Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her Department's policies of the findings of the Autonomy Institute's report, entitled Transforming Employment and Support Infrastructure, published in February 2025.

The findings from the Autonomy Institute's report, entitled ‘Transforming Employment and Support Infrastructure’, demonstrates the importance of reforming Jobcentres and the difference this can make to citizens.

Through the Get Britain Working White Paper published in November 2024, the government set out our vision to reform Jobcentre Plus and create a new service across Great Britain that will enable everyone to access employment support, aligned more effectively with skills and careers. We recognise that people are individuals with different support needs, and we want everyone who wants it to be able to access tailored support, not just those on benefits.

We are taking a test and learn approach to developing the new service and are committed to working with users of the new service, and organisations representing their needs, throughout the design process to ensure the new service is inclusive, accessible, and works for everyone.

We want to shift the focus of the customer-work coach relationship away from compliance and box-ticking around these requirements to make room for more constructive, personalised, career-focused conversations. As we set out in the White Paper, we have committed to develop the work coach profession and the careers adviser profession in England. Further building our work coaches’ capabilities is essential to delivering our ambition for the new service. We will launch a coaching academy that will upskill our teams and ensure they can deliver the high-quality, personalised, action-oriented coaching conversations.