Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether the employment support package in the Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper, published on 18 March 2025, will create improved employment outcomes in line with her Department's Additional Work Coach Support Impact Evaluation.

We announced in the Pathways to Work Green Paper that we would establish a new guarantee of work, health and skills support for all disabled people and people with health conditions claiming out of work benefits backed up by new money every year, building to £1 billion per year by 2030.

The Department has extensive evidence on what works and this will inform the design of our new Pathways to Work support guarantee. This includes evidence from our Additional Work Coach Support offer. When we offered Additional Work Coach Support to people in the limited capability for work and work related activity group (LCWRA) in UC, those who took part were a third more likely to be in work 12 months later. They were also twice as likely to take up more intensive externally delivered support.

We are considering evidence from a wide range of other initiatives, for example Work Choice, a specialist employment programme for disabled people and those with health conditions, that showed people receiving tailored support were 40% more likely to be in work eight years later.

We will be developing more detailed assessments of the potential impacts of the employment measures proposed in the Green Paper as these are developed in detail. The Office for Budget Responsibility has also stated that it intends to assess the labour supply impacts of the Green Paper measures in their Autumn forecast.

As the Green Paper notes, we are also keen to engage widely on the design of this guarantee and the components needed to deliver it. To get this right, we will be seeking input from a wide range of stakeholders including devolved governments, local health systems, local government and Mayoral Strategic Authorities, private and voluntary sector providers, employers and potential users. We will confirm further details in due course after we have completed our consultation process.

This is on top of existing programmes already supporting disabled people and people with health conditions into work.