Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many social care providers have signed up to provide placements as part of the kickstart scheme.

I refer the Honourable Member to the answer given for PQ 87676 for a recent breakdown of Kickstart jobs made available and started by sector. This shows that as of 5^th December 2021, 4,740 Kickstart jobs within the social care sector were made available for young people to apply to and that 1,840 Kickstart jobs had been started by young people.

Kickstart jobs are categorised by the nature of the role rather than the sector of the employer. This means for example, that an administrative job within the social care sector would be categorised as ‘administrative’, rather than ‘social care’. Therefore, it’s likely that there are a number of other jobs with social care providers that have been categorised within other sectors.

We do not centrally collate information regarding jobs filled or advertised in the social care sector. To gather this would require each Kickstart application to be reviewed to ascertain the principle activities of each employer, which would incur disproportionate costs.

Kickstart jobs are additional and must not displace existing opportunities within the wider labour market. We continue to support employers to fill available jobs including those within the care sector for the remainder of the Kickstart Scheme.

More widely, DWP are working with the social care industry, and the Department of Health and Social Care, to provide our Work Coaches with the knowledge they need to identify suitable candidates and to develop relationships with social care employers in their local areas. As a result, local jobcentres are now directly connecting with employers in their area, to discuss their recruitment needs.

Although care is taken when processing and analysing Kickstart applications, referrals and starts, the data collected might be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system which has been developed quickly. The management information presented here has not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics, but is provided in the interests of transparency. Work is ongoing to improve the quality of information available for the programme.