Found: Dedicated cross-government casework teams, made up of Home Office Liaison Officers and Department for

Found: To address this increased demand, the Government committed to re-deploying 10,000 Department for Work

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many full-time equivalent staff worked in his Department’s Counter Fraud, Compliance and Debt unit in each of the last ten years for which figures are available.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

Please see the Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) numbers for Counter Fraud Compliance & Debt (CFCD) and its predecessor Counter Fraud & Compliance (CFC). To ensure compliance with GDPR, seven years of data is the maximum that we hold.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking to help improve (a) the quality of recruitment and (b) staff retention levels within his Department.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

DWP is committed to improving its recruitment processes and improving candidate experience. The Resourcing Centre of Expertise has an ongoing work programme to ensure policy, guidance and tools support the business to fill high volumes of vacancies across a wide range of professions, grades, functions and locations. DWP work closely with recruitment suppliers, candidates and vacancy holders to identify ways to improve our processes and the quality of our recruitment outcomes.

DWP actively takes steps to promote and raise awareness of careers opportunities to increase attraction of diverse talent from the widest possible range of geographical, social, diversity and career backgrounds by:

• Developing and launching corporate branding materials to support external recruitment activity and promote career opportunities in DWP to appeal to a broad range of applicants from entry level through to career changers and returners to the labour market. The branding provides consistent corporate attraction materials for DWP recruitment and is used on a range of social media, digital platforms and in outreach activities.
• Promoting the DWP Employee Value Proposition (EVP) to the external labour market and widen the reach of DWP recruitment campaigns by promoting opportunities and employee stories on LinkedIn and the Civil Service Careers website.
• Piloting use of diverse jobs boards which targets applicants with protected characteristics.
• Delivering national communications campaigns for volume recruitment of critical Work Coach and Universal Credit Review roles.

Within the Civil Service Success Profiles framework, DWP use high quality selection tools which are centrally evaluated such as Civil Service online tests and video interviewing. Processes have been developed to increase the diversity of panel members and tested different approaches to evaluate their impact on diverse outcomes, inclusive candidate experience, and quality of hire.

The DWP People Strategy specifically sets out to ensure we offer fulfilling, rewarding careers that attract and retain motivated people. Most recently DWP have been implementing measures to increase retention by:

• Using our people performance one to ones to increase awareness of partial retirement options, promoting options for part time employees to change their working pattern and using survey data to understand what is driving attrition trends and continue to create an environment where colleagues are highly motivated and retained.
• By directly targeting all colleagues noted as leaving we have successfully increased the response rate to our leavers survey. We have revised the questions to provide more relevant insight and spoken to other Government Departments to learn from best practice.
• Currently running a 3 month exit interview pilot in part of our operations to further build understanding of the reasons people are leaving the Department. As this will only be a proportion of the leavers that notify us during this period we will triangulate this data with other sources and additional business insight to ensure that we have a holistic picture upon which further action can be taken.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many vacancies there are within his Department; and what recent estimate he has made of the number of full-time equivalent staff that will be employed by his Department by the end of 2024.

Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

DWP have ambitious recruitment plans over 2023/24 and are filling approximately 4,400 posts a quarter, through internal and external recruitment to manage attrition and also grow key priority areas to respond to changing demand and commitments.

DWP has yet to sign off workforce plans for the period to end 2024, which forms part of the financial year 2024/25. DWP awaits further guidance from HMT on future Civil Service headcount levels following the chancellor’s announcement in October 2023, and will then be in a position to give an accurate estimate of FTEs employed in DWP by end 2024.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many staff are employed in his Department's Economic, Serious and Organised Crime team as of 13 October 2023.

Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

Staffing figures are recorded at the end of each calendar month. As at 30^th September 2023, the total full-time equivalent (FTE) in our Economic, Serious and Organised Crime team (ESOC) is 720.45.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people are employed by his Department to determine the outcome of Personal Independence Payment claims as of 5 September 2023.

Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)

The latest information of the number of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff who are in paid employment and undertake decisions on Personal Independence Payment claims is in the table below:

Source: derived from the department’s Activity Based Model (ABM).

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people are employed by his Department to determine the outcome of work capability assessments as of 5 September 2023.

Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)

The latest information of the number of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff who are in paid employment and undertake decisions on Work Capability Assessments is in the table below:

Source: Derived from the department’s Activity Based Model (ABM). Figures have been rounded to the nearest 10 and may not sum to the total due to the rounding.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what information his Department holds on the number of assessors employed by contractors to carry out (a) Personal Independence Payment and (b) work capability assessments in the latest period for which data is available.

Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)

As of 31 July 2023, the number of health professionals (HPs) employed by Capita and Independent Assessment Services to carry out Personal Independence Payment assessments was 3,900.

The number of HPs employed by Centre for Health and Disability Assessments (CHDA) was 1,400. HPs employed by CHDA undertake assessments across both Universal Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, and Incapacity Benefits Reassessments, as well as some smaller non-Work Capability Assessment benefits.

The above figures also include clinical support leads, who may also complete assessments from time to time.

Please note: -

Volumes have been rounded to the nearest 100.

All the above data is derived from contractual management information produced by the assessment providers.

The above data is derived from unpublished management information, which is collected for internal departmental use only, and has not been quality assured to Official Statistics Publication standards.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether an Access to Work scheme has been implemented in their Department.

Answered by Will Quince

As of 1 April 2022, civil servants are no longer eligible for Access to Work support, this is in accordance with the guidance from the Department for Work and Pensions which is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/access-to-work-staff-guide/access-to-work-staff-guide

Access to Work is a demand-led, personalised discretionary grant which contributes to the disability-related extra costs of working faced by disabled people and those with a health condition in the workplace that are beyond standard reasonable adjustments. It does not replace an employer’s duty under the Equality Act to make reasonable adjustments.

In 2006, the Department for Work and Pensions took over responsibility for providing adjustments that would previously have been funded through Access to Work for civil servants working in their Department. This removed the need for the Department for Work and Pensions staff to apply for Access to Work. In April 2022, all Government Departments followed suit and assumed responsibility for providing such adjustments for their staff. We support our staff through a comprehensive Workplace Adjustments policy.

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Found: Letter dated 11/01/2024 from Viscount Younger of Leckie to Lord Scriven regarding what percentage of Department

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