Recommendation 27

The NAO has reported that in 2027–28 alone DWP expects 2.5 million Universal Credit cases to be reviewed by some 5,900 staff. For comparison, in 2022–23 DWP reviewed around 3,600 Universal Credit claims to produce its fraud and error statistics.61 We challenged DWP to explain whether it has enough people to deliver the project and how it will achieve this ambitious scaling up. DWP told us that it has recruited around 1,700 people since launching TCR in January 2022 and is currently running a “massive” recruitment process. It stressed that it is on track and that it knows how long it takes to recruit the people it needs. It also told us that instead of delivering TCR entirely through civil servants as initially planned, it instead aims to recruit around 3,600 people from the public sector and to outsource the remainder, some 40% of the 5,900 people it needs, to private sector contractors.62