Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what information her Department holds on the number of reports of abuse and harassment of staff at jobcentres by location over the last five years.

DWP takes any form of abuse and harassment of its staff by customers and claimants very seriously and has robust controls in place to mitigate the risk of Unacceptable Customer Behaviour (UCB), nonetheless there will be occasions when it does unfortunately occur. We encourage our people to report each and every instance of unacceptable behaviour and we do take action against the perpetrator, with measures proportionate to the seriousness of the incident.

Information collected includes:

• Details of Customer/Claimant details
• Events leading to Incident and location of incident
• Incident Category (Actual, Attempted, Verbal Assault, Threat, Written and Other)
• Incident Type (depending on category) but can include Face to Face, Telephone, Object Thrown. If Verbal Abuse / Threat then Abuse type (Ageist, Cultural, Disability, Emotional, Gender, Personal, Racist, Sexual) may also be recorded
• A narrative of the incident