Recommendation 16

The Department told us that a real advantage of delivering employment support through its work coaches is the flexibility that those work coaches have to identify and draw on the right tools to help the claimant. The Department’s approach relies on work coaches’ ability to provide the right service to claimants, and is not designed to ensure absolute consistency across every interaction with a customer.45 However, the National Audit Office has previously found that this means the Department cannot know if it is providing a consistent service over time, or between jobcentres, and the Social Security Advisory Committee has said that the Department should develop a more rigorous approach to ensuring that work coaches apply discretion fairly and systematically.46 The National Audit Office has also highlighted that the Department does not systematically gather feedback from claimants on the quality of its services.47 The Department responded to the surge in benefit claimants early in the pandemic by hiring an additional 13,500 work coaches. Ensuring that these new work coaches can offer a consistently high-quality services to claimants will be extremely challenging in a system built around individual discretion.48 Priority given to getting people into work