The future(s) of DWP

Last month, Liz Kendall, the new Work and Pensions secretary, gave a landmark speech about the future of DWP. 

She promised the department would move from a focus on administering benefits and implementing Universal Credit to one more focused on employment support. She highlighted the increasing number of people unable to work through ill health and disability and otherwise economically inactive, the numbers caught in low paid, low quality work and insecure work, resulting in in-work poverty, and growing numbers of young people NEET. 

Part of the problem, she said, is DWP’s focus on monitoring UC, checking compliance and managing claims, rather than being a public employment service. More attention is needed on the wider issues that affect someone’s ability to work e.g. childcare, travel, health and skills, and to join up support and make it fit for local areas. DWP will, she said, “shift from being a department for welfare to being the department for work”. 

She gave some indications of the steps that will be taken to achieve this: the National Careers Service and JobCentre Plus will be brought together to provide more careers advice for those in contact with the JobCentre; more powers will be devolved to local areas to design and deliver locally-appropriate employment support, including more integration with health services; “new technologies and AI” will be used to support people to find work and progress; and a new youth guarantee will be introduced, giving everyone aged 18-21 help to find training, an apprenticeship or a job. 

DWP’s new role was outline as being a “driver of innovation, experimentation and learning… a capacity builder, working alongside local areas… and a guardian and champion of quality, outcomes and user voice and value for money”. 

She did also stress that there would still be “obligations to engage with support, look for work and to take jobs when they are offered”. 

A lot of these pledges pick up policy ideas which have been shared over the last few years by think tanks and experts in employment support and social security. 

The Institute for Employment Studies’ commission on the future of employment support suggests a focus on getting more people into better quality work; helping those at greatest disadvantage in the labour market; making more support available to more people who want it; shifting from benefits compliance to a focus on what people can and want to do; joining up careers advice with employment support as well as skills provision; and more devolved powers to enable better joining up of support. I imagine they are treating the announcements in the speech as a big win! 

The LGA and others have been arguing for more devolution of employment support for many years, and advocacy groups like CPAG have consistently made the case for greater recognition of barriers to work such as childcare costs. 

So, the steps outlined in the speech are welcome and I believe will make a difference, in time, to people’s experience of interacting with DWP / JCP, and the outcomes the department can support. However, they feel like the bare minimum in terms of really changing the culture of the department and embracing new ways of working with people. 

The biggest gap / red flag is the statement about obligations. We’ve known for years that benefit conditionality not only doesn’t result in more or better job outcomes, for many it is actively harmful, pushing them away from support into debt, crime or poor health. Recent research by NEF makes the argument yet again that conditionality needs to be reformed, away from the current punitive and controlling model. They found that while there is some public appetite for a level of requirements to be placed on benefit claimants, there is plenty of scope to focus more on support, using conditions and sanctions as a last resort rather than a defining part of the relationship between claimants and JCP. 

JRF also argue that a move away from punitive conditions to more support-based approaches would improve job outcomes, and IPPR suggest JCP should focus more on job quality than simply the number of job outcomes.

Demos has been working on proposals for modernising employment support for a number of years. They suggest there might be up to 10 million people who want employment or careers advice but have not accessed any public services to receive it, 2 million of whom are out of work and would like a job. At the moment, if you’re not in receipt of an employment-related DWP benefit, the JobCentre can’t provide you with employment support. Demos propose that DWP and NCS provision (or some other national service) should be opened up to provide employment support to anyone who wants it. JRF also suggest those not on benefits who want employment support should be able to access it.

There is some provision for those not on ‘active’ benefits, often provided by the voluntary sector, however it normally comes with its own eligibility criteria, does not operate on a big scale, and is under threat from funding uncertainty.

While there might be something in the autumn budget about benefit rates, the mood music from Rachel Reeves does not inspire much hope that they will be uprated to anything which really reflects the basic costs of living. Polling for Trust for London shows public support for increasing benefit rates to a level of ‘adequacy’ to cover basic needs, and IPPR also argue for an uplift to better cover the actual costs of living.

The last point of particular interest to me is the commitment to use more tech and AI. Under the previous government the use of automation, including AI, intensified. As well as a big focus on identifying fraud, earlier this year the DWP launched a new genAI system designed to help JCP Work Coaches support their clients more effectively. How effective that will be remains to be seen.

Some influential types have made grand promises for what AI can do within DWP.  I actually think their diagnosis of the problems is pretty good in some cases, but the fact that this report was written in collaboration with a commercial AI company should give us pause in accepting the recommendations, which mainly consist of “use some AI”. 

While I agree there is more potential to use technology to support DWP staff and jobseekers, we need to take a much more considered approach , acknowledge the significant limitations in what AI can actually do, and the harms that are already evidenced. 

The role of technology in social security and employment support is something I’ve written about in an essay coming out in September - watch this space.

Finally, Kendall’s speech was notably light on how employers could and should support better job outcomes; hopefully there will be more to come on this in the near future. Just focusing on the supply side (people) and not on demand (employers) won’t fix anyone’s problems. 

So, generally there are things to feel positive about in the speech and headlines for the future of DWP, but there’s potential to go so much further into real innovation, quality and outcomes, and an approach that prioritises people-focused outcomes.