Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 15
60th Report - DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025
Published 9 Jan 2026
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025 All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
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
From: Public Accounts Committee, 60th Report - DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025 (HC 1447), 9 January 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 1 April 2026 (deadline 9 March 2026).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with four of the Committee's five areas of recommendation and disagrees with the recommendation to publish regular jobcentre-level performance data.
- On integrating skills into the Jobs and Careers Service, the government agrees, naming "a key milestone" as bringing the National Careers Service together with Jobcentre Plus from 1 October 2026, with an update due in Spring 2026.
- On the shorter first work coach meeting, the government agrees and says it "will be undertaking a qualitative research project" to gather claimant insight, including feedback on the length and content of the meeting.
- The government disagrees with publishing jobcentre-level data, saying its view "remains that the right level to monitor performance is at a district and local authority level", and points to its quarterly Labour Market Insights publication.
- On PIP claim times, the government agrees and says it "will however write to the Committee to provide the information available as requested, by the end of March 2026".