Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent progress her Department has made in ensuring that job centres improve the support available to (a) people looking for work and (b) employers seeking to recruit staff.

As we set out in the Get Britain Working White Paper, we are reforming Jobcentre Plus and creating a new service across Great Britain that will enable everyone to access support to find good, meaningful work, and support to help them to progress in work, including through an enhanced focus on skills and careers. The new service will be for anyone who wants to look for work, wants help to increase their earnings, or who wants help to change their career or re-train.

We are taking a test and learn approach to develop the new service. In our initial Pathfinder based in Wakefield, we are testing our new Get Britain Working Coaching Academy. This Academy will further train our Jobcentre colleagues to support individuals in achieving their employment aspirations. We are also testing changes to the claimant commitment appointments, to explore how we can focus work coach conversations on more personalised and tailored employment support based on their individual needs and move away from a one size fits all approach.

The new service must also work for employers. Our vision is for a service that all employers want to engage with, as they know it is a place where they can find high-quality, highly motivated future employees.

As part of our commitment to enhance our employer offer, we have set up a dedicated recruitment team to provide recruitment support and single account management. We have boosted the number of Sector-based Work Academy Programme’s from 80k to 100k in 25/26 across a range of priority and high vacancy sectors. For example, we are working with UKHospitality to launch a hospitality SWAPs pilot in 26 areas in need of jobs and opportunity, including 13 coastal towns such as Scarborough and Blackpool. We are committed to working across Government and with industries such as construction, health and social care and clean energy to help address workforce shortages.

We will continue to work with employers as we design the new Jobs and Careers Service to ensure we design a service that can better support employers to meet their recruitment needs.