Recommendation 16

We questioned the Department on the challenges it may face in implementing its strategy. The Department told us that it will achieve the planned increase in frontline counter-fraud staff to 9,500 full-time equivalents by July 2022. It explained that its plan to review over two million Universal Credit cases will require a further 2,000 staff, which it was “building up gradually” and it expected to take until April 2024 to be fully resourced.27 We asked the Department what steps it was taking to ensure that it could recruit the staff that it needed given the current employment market. The Department recognised that “it is a tight labour market” but that it expected its jobs to be “incredibly attractive … [and] … add huge value” as well as being interesting and of benefit to society.28 We asked the Department how the Government’s planned reduction of civil service headcount by 90,000 staff would impact its strategy. It told us it could not say more until the Government had made a decision about how it will distribute the planned reductions.29