Recommendation 3

We are concerned that the Department does not know why the unemployment impact of the pandemic has hit groups such as young people from minority ethnic backgrounds harder. In March 2021, the Office for National Statistics produced striking statistics showing unemployment for young black people aged 16–24 had 6 DWP Employment support increased from 24.5% in the period October-December 2019 to 41.6% over the same period in 2020, while unemployment for young white people increased from 10.1% to 12.4%. The Department could not readily explain this shocking inequality. The Department has relatively few programmes targeted directly at people from minority ethnic communities, and instead expects work coaches and providers to tailor their national programmes to individuals. Shortcomings in the Department’s data on diversity and disadvantage among Universal Credit claimants presents a potential barrier to evaluating the effectiveness of its schemes for different groups robustly. The Department also lacks unemployment data on other disadvantaged groups such as homeless people and rough sleepers, and people with issues related to drug and alcohol addiction, and it does not have data ‘flags’ to identify disadvantaged people within the benefit system. Recommendation: The Department must obtain good-quality diversity data for all claimants and ensure that its evaluations of all of its employment support programmes include an assessment of the impact for different groups, whether employment support schemes are reaching and working for everyone, and ensuring that no groups are left behind. The Department should work with the Office for National Statistics to provide more regular statistics on the claimant count and unemployment rates broken down by ethnicity and age. We expect an update on this work when the Department next appears before us in September.