Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 7
7
The quality of claimants’ experience with the Department and whether they receive the right support...
Conclusion
The quality of claimants’ experience with the Department and whether they receive the right support will depend on the Department’s ability to integrate the additional 13,500 new work coaches into its organisation and manage their performance effectively. The Department’s employment support is mainly accessible to people on benefits via their jobcentre work coaches. Work coaches have considerable discretion to tailor their support to individual claimants, and they need a range of skills and a lot of knowledge to match claimants to the right employment support package. This can even include checking a claimant’s business idea and referring them to a mentor for the New Enterprise Allowance scheme, which can provide money and support to help people start their own business. The National Audit Office has previously found that the Department cannot know if it is providing a consistent service over time, or between jobcentres, and that the Department does not systematically gather feedback from claimants on the quality of service they receive. Embedding a very large number of new work coaches and ensuring they offer consistently high-quality services to claimants will be extremely challenging in such a system. Recommendations: The Department should commit to undertaking and publishing a full evaluation by the end of 2022 of how well its work coaches provide employment support and how consistently they apply their judgement. The Department should gather and use systematic feedback on claimant’s satisfaction with their work coaches, the service at the jobcentre, and how the jobcentre could be improved. DWP Employment support 9 1 The Department’s response to the pandemic
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government
Not Addressed
7.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendations. Target implementation date: December 2022 7.2 The department systematically gathers feedback on customer satisfaction through its Customer Experience Survey, which it carries out annually. This measures customers’ satisfaction and experiences with the services of the department. 7.3 COVID-19 prevented the completion of fieldwork for the 2019-20 Customer Experience Survey, meaning there is no annual level data to report for that year. The 2020-21 Customer Experience Survey report is near completion, and the department is expecting the results to be published in Spring 2022. 7.4 Published results from previous Customer Experience Surveys have shown around seven in ten claimants who used Jobcentre Plus services reported that they were satisfied with the help to find employment. 7.5 As reported in the department’s 2020-21 Annual Report and Accounts, 89% of benefit customers said they were satisfied with the department’s services based on the first three quarters of the Customer Experience Survey. 7.6 The department has work underway, in terms of further evaluation of how effectively work coaches provide employment support. Part of the focus of this work is on developing the evidence base on how the core regime is and has been delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic. The department also has plans to explore the wider support offer through programmes introduced as part of the Plan for Jobs ‘as a system’ to inform the department’s future delivery strategy. 7.7 As well as looking at the whole system, several pieces of research are being undertaken to support understanding of the effectiveness of individual policies, such as work search reviews and employment programmes offered through Jobcentre Plus. Timescales for these pieces of work are still to be finalised but findings are expected to start becoming available throughout 2022.