Half of job centres reducing support over shortages

More than half of job centres are reducing support for people claiming Universal Credit due to a shortage of work coaches, according to a report from the public spending watchdog.

The National Audit Office said reasons for cutbacks included a lack of funding and challenges in recruiting and retaining staff.

It comes as the number of claimants being categorised as requiring support has risen from 2.6 million to 3 million in the space of a year.

The government said it was redeploying 1,000 work coaches to help, but a charity campaigning to end poverty said the shortage undermined plans announced in the chancellor's Spring Statement to get more disabled people into work.

Iain Porter, senior policy adviser at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said the government's promise to boost employment had been used to "justify the biggest cuts to disability benefits in recent memory".

"The government must urgently explain how it plans to support disabled people into work while these work coach shortages remain," he said.

Published on Monday, the report said there were 2,100 fewer work coaches - who can offer advice and refer claimants for jobs - employed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in England, Wales and Scotland than it estimated were needed.

It said that some 57% of job centres had used flexibilities allowed by the DWP to reduce support for claimants when caseloads are too high between September 2023 and November 2024.

Changes to income rules meant an extra 400,000 people qualified for such support in the year to October.

The number of claimants moving into work each month has also fallen over the past two years.

In the Spring Statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves said reforms to the "broken" benefits system would save around £4.8 billion by the end of the decade, and £1 billion would be invested "to provide guaranteed, personalised employment support to help people back into work".

The DWP said it was redeploying staff to help to sick and disabled people into work, and was modernising job centres with new digital tools.

A spokesperson said: "Our job centres are full of brilliant work coaches - but they are held back by a system that is too focused on ticking boxes and monitoring benefits instead of genuinely supporting people back into work.

"That is why we are redeploying 1,000 work coaches to help deliver intensive employment support to sick and disabled people, modernising job centres with new digital tools, and improving access to free up work coaches' time as we bring the network together with the National Careers Service."