I know how to make the DWP better and get more people into work – but they’re just not listening

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is a broken organisation. There is so much wrong in employment support and it could be much better, but there are serious knowledge gaps in the DWP – as well as a refusal to listen and act.

We need to check if there is sufficient competence and desire in the organisation. Does the DWP get to choose whether they get more people into work or not? Does it get to choose whether they act, deny or ignore information given to them?

Inaction has consequences. As the founder of an employability and recruitment solutions consultancy, Recro, I’ve been raising serious issues and areas where DWP need to improve for years, especially around employment support, including how to help them to change and become an organisation that learns from what works, replicates and scales.

• Sunak’s call to end ‘sick note culture’ and reform benefits is ‘demonising’ disabled and sick people
• Long-term sickness cannot be fixed by tightening ‘harsh’ disability benefits system, experts warn

Isn’t this what they are there to do? And while I get broad agreement from insiders in the DWP, radio silence follows. Then somebody moves jobs, or a minister is swapped out, and it starts again.

When I founded Recro in 2009, I saw there was a gap in the market. The key ingredients I believed to be mission critical factors to get the long-term unemployed into sustainable employment were missing.

Over the years we’ve worked with thousands of long-term unemployed people as well as those affected by Covid-19 and have been hugely successful at changing their lives, getting them back on track and helping them back into work. Anywhere else this would be proof of concept and evidence.

But DWP aren’t interested. Our raison d’etre is to help people get the life and career they want.

Most people we meet in Jobcentres are very frustrated and if they’ve been unemployed for a while, have often had experience of poor-quality employment programmes which didn’t help them get a job.

Few work coaches I’ve asked can point to a programme they have seen that consistently gets the long term unemployed in the work. Talk about conditioning, Pavlov would have a field day!

Many people have often given up, they feel hopeless and can’t see how they can get a job. They feel lost and have lost their sense of purpose. They don’t have the tools, they don’t understand recruitment and it feels like they are drifting further from the shore and getting increasingly tired. This increases stress and anxiety which has a negative impact on their health. I’d argue this applies to jobseekers and many of those trying to help them.

The figures bear this out with 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness. Research shows that emotional stress will give you physical symptoms but find me the expert on this in DWP. They don’t exist, and playing hot-potato catch to the NHS is disingenuous at best.

So what’s gone wrong and where are the blockages which stop DWP giving jobseekers access to the highest quality employment support back into work?

Jobcentres are dictated to by the DWP policy and strategy directorate. Their “ask” then goes to the procurement team to take to market and buy.

The quickest route to market for Jobcentres is for operational staff write specifications for requirements – despite having no training, access to performance data or any expertise in psychology, neuroscience or recruitment.

The risks and flaws are obvious, but nobody has clear responsibility to course correct.

I can’t think or another organisation in any sector which would not check how what they bought went and genuinely learn lessons, but DWP don’t admit that.

They’ve got themselves stuck in a situation with a very unsophisticated model and they are not offering the high-quality programmes which jobseekers and employers need.

I’ve long argued that you need to build confidence, motivation, aspiration and self-esteem among jobseekers, and you need to understand how recruitment works. That is what is needed within DWP to help change the organisation.

We facilitate a journey which starts with acknowledging where you are and what’s the problem, then dealing with the business of reality and taking personal accountability and responsibility.

If DWP was focused on helping jobseekers have access to the best possible employment support into work, that would change the culture of the organisation, which in turn would significantly help employers wrestling with over 900,000 vacancies.

Labour want to devolve employment support. But what will the same civil servants in DWP do differently?

The country is in enough pain. A proportion is no doubt caused directly or indirectly by DWP and its failure to offer the right level of high-quality employment support which gets people back into work.

And at what point should comparisons be made between the Post Office scandal and the continued inaction, resistance and obfuscation of the largest government department which impacts the majority of lives in the UK?

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? We want to hear from you. Get in touch and tell us more.