Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 6
6
Accepted
Many claimants have complex barriers that prevent them from finding work, and some of these...
Recommendation
Many claimants have complex barriers that prevent them from finding work, and some of these barriers may be better addressed through other means than an employment support scheme such as Restart. The Department’s work coaches must decide whether people from a system generated list of claimants are eligible and suitable for Restart. Work coaches decided not to refer 57% of the claimants on such lists. For the majority of these people, work coaches did not refer them to Restart because they felt they were unsuitable for the programme, most often 8 The Restart Scheme for long-term unemployed people because they had ‘complex barriers’ which can include homelessness, childcare needs and physical and mental health issues. The Department has identified mental health issues as a particular barrier that many claimants must overcome to move into work. We are concerned about whether this represents ‘cost shunting’ to the Department, where failures in public services such as long waiting times for mental health appointments are effectively passed onto the Department to deal with as part of its efforts to get people into work, with neither the appropriate funding nor expertise to manage these challenges. The Department expects to publish a new White Paper on health and work early in 2023, and that part of this will include how the Department can work more closely with the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) and others to help people stay in work, and the Department also told us that it is working with DHSC on mental health provision. Recommendation 6: The Department should set out, in its Treasury Minute response: • Its understanding of how complex barriers such as mental health problems and homelessness, which might not traditionally sit with the Department, impact on people’s ability to find work and the associated cost of this to society and the exchequer. • How it will develop and use its knowledge of claimants to help government as a whole to take a joined up and effe
Government Response Summary
The government set out its plan to improve support to those with complex barriers relating to health and disability in the White Paper Transforming Support: The Health and Disability White Paper published on 15 March 2023. The department also works across government to build support for claimants facing other complex needs.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented The government set out its plan to improve support to those with complex barriers relating to health and disability in the White Paper Transforming Support: The Health and Disability White Paper published on 15 March 2023 The White Paper recognises the need to ensure join up across public services and with employers, to ensure that people receive the most appropriate support to release their potential. An example is the work through the Joint Work and Health Directorate, with Department for Health and Social Care, to extend the Employment Advisers in NHS Talking Therapies services to support more people with mental health issues (paragraph 65 of the White Paper). The department also works across government to build support for claimants facing other complex needs, for example with: • Ministry of Justice, on their Prisons Strategy White Paper. This includes testing ways of starting Universal Credit claims and the claimant commitment in prison • Department for Education to support care leavers as they move out of the care system • Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities on their rough sleeping strategy, to introduce homelessness leads in every jobcentre.