Jobcentres: Staff
(asked on 6th October 2017) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many work coaches have been employed in jobcentres in each of the last three years; and what the ratio of work coaches to claimants has been in each of those years.
The information is in the tables.
Date | Number of Legacy Work Coaches Employed in Jobcentres | Ratio of Claimants to Legacy Work Coaches |
February 2015 | 11,158 | 346.0 to 1 |
February 2016 | 8,844 | 411.9 to 1 |
February 2017 | 11,970 | 290.0 to 1 |
Date | Number of Universal Credit Work Coaches Employed in Jobcentres | Ratio of Claimants to Universal Credit Work Coaches |
April 2015 | 557 | 90.2 to 1 |
April 2016 | 2,350 | 108.8 to 1 |
April 2017 | 3,696 | 140.6 to 1 |
Notes
Legacy Work Coaches
- Source of information for the number of Work Coaches: The Department’s Activity Based Management Models. The numbers of Work Coaches are expressed as Full Time Equivalents. Full Time Equivalent is the way the Department presents a total count of employees based on contracted hours worked in proportion to those hours of full time staff. Full Time Equivalent is the way staffing figures are presented in Departmental reports and workforce plans.
- Legacy Work Coaches support Employment and Support Allowance, Jobseekers Allowance and Income Support claimants.
- Please note that the data supplied is derived from unpublished management information which was collected for internal Departmental use only and has not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. The data should therefore be treated with caution.
- Source of information for the number Employment and Support Allowance, Jobseekers Allowance and Income Support claimants to enable the calculation of the ratio of Work coaches to claimants: nomis (Office for National Statistics), a service providing detailed and up-to-date UK labour market statistics from official sources. The information on the numbers of people claiming these benefits is refreshed on a quarterly basis and the most recent quarter available is for February 2017.
Universal Credit Work Coaches
- The actual levels of deployment to roles including work coach is measured by manual inputs to the ABM system, indicating a % distribution of an individual’s time across a number of activity labels.
- This is measured month on month but in order to provide an indication of the relationship between work coach numbers and claimant caseload, a base month for each of the last 3 years has been selected for this response.
- For April 2017, the activity recorded in ABM against the various activity names associated with “work coach” not including “assistant work coach” translated to 3695.91 full time equivalent (FTE) staff across the month.
- The official statistical release for April 2017 reported a combined claimant caseload of 519.6k as of 13th April, including some 190k people in employment. That produces a work coach to claimant ratio of 140.6.
- Similar information is presented in the attached table for April 2016 and April 2015 but this would need to be viewed with caution and against a number of caveats. A like for like comparison with April 2017 should not be attempted for example, given that the work coach role and the ABM definitions which defined work coach activity and processes at any given time will have changed quite significantly over time. Work activity would also have been distributed variably across legacy and UC activity names to reflect the mix of work undertaken by work coaches at the time.