Restart is one of a range of measures introduced by the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) to support people to get and keep a job in the wake of the impact of COVID-19 on the UK’s labour market. Restart went live in July 2021 and operates across England and Wales. It focuses on helping …
| Title | HC No. | Published | Items | Response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forty-Second Report - The Restart Scheme for long-term unem… | HC 733 | 22 Mar 2023 | 26 | Responded |
In the remaining 43% of instances a claimant was not referred, this is because the claimant was no longer eligible by the time they were considered by the work coach. This could be, for example, because they had found work or because they no longer needed to search for work …
We asked the Department whether it could have had any better information or better data to predict demand, and it told us that it was keen to learn from its experience of Restart about how to predict demand, and later spoke about how some of its data mining work may …
Discussing mental health, the Department did tell us about a number of initiatives arising from a joint Department for Work & Pensions and Department of Health & Social Care unit which looks to target some of the mental health challenges claimants face. The Department told us that it had “paid …
The Department used its experience of delivering and evaluating the Work Programme, a similar previous scheme which ran between 2011 and 2017, to help it to design and set up Restart.31 The Department’s evaluation of the Work Programme showed that, on average, scheme participants spent 46 additional days in work …
So far more Restart participants have moved into sustained jobs than the Department had expected, but this is in the context of historically low unemployment and high vacancies. The Department will not know the impact of Restart in increasing the number of people moving into sustained work until it has …
From 2010–11, when it was responding to the last economic crash, to 2020–21, the Department reduced its expenditure on employment support from £2.9 bn to £300 million per year.35 The Department told us that when it was designing Restart, it believed that “well over 2 million” people would be eligible …
However, shortly after launching Restart, the Department realised that had it had significantly overestimated the demand, partly because it expected there to be more eligible participants, and partly because it expected more of those eligible participants to be found suitable to start on the scheme.39 To increase the numbers of …
The Department set out in the Restart business case that it expected to pay around £1,800 per participant but, following the renegotiations, it now expects to pay around £2,429 per participant. The Work Programme, which ran from 2011 to 2017, cost around £1,760 per participant in 2021–22 prices.46 The Department …
Although the Department signed contracts with eight prime providers to deliver Restart across 12 contract areas in England and Wales the prime providers can, and do, subcontract much of the scheme delivery to other providers.48 In total, there are 77 providers involved in the delivery of Restart. Providers have their …
| Date | Witnesses | |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Dec 2022 | Angus Gray · Department for Work & Pensions, Mark Leigh · Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Peter Schofield · Department for Work and Pensions, Preeta Ramachandran · Department for Work & Pensions | View ↗ |
| Date | Direction | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Jan 2023 | — | Correspondence from Peter Schofield CB, Permanent Secretary, Department for Wor… |