Recommendation 15

We asked the Department why it had not published performance data at jobcentre level as we had requested. The Department said that the challenge of presenting data at jobcentre level was that the geography of a jobcentre could be relatively small and the position could be distorted by someone leaving a jobcentre or a major employer suddenly going out of business. It argued that the danger in giving data for some 640 jobcentres was that it would probably have to provide a commentary to explain the particular circumstances of each jobcentre, and that a lot of resources would go into doing that. The Department also said that the level of assurance over the quality of the data diminished when one went down to jobcentre level so its preference was to report data that had been aggregated.22 20 Committee of Public Accounts, Jobcentres, Thirty-Sixth Report of Session 2024–25, HC 823, 2 July 2025, p 5 and 14 21 Qq 2-3; DWP, Get Britain Working: Labour Market Insights, 30 October 2025 22 Q 15 11 2 Customer service, cyber security and legacy IT Introduction