A lack of Jobcentre staff is hampering ministers’ ability to get people back to work, Whitehall insiders fear.
Between October 2021 and last October, the number of work coaches fell by more than a quarter from 21,470 to 15,249, according to figures uncovered by Labour.
Ministers increased the amount of coaches to help people back into work in the wake of the Covid pandemic, but the numbers have fallen back. On Thursday, unions said people were leaving Jobcentre because of poor pay and high workloads.
The Government is considering a range of measures to reverse a rise in the number of people who are not looking for a job.
Ideas include allowing people to keep their disability payments even when they return to work and exempting the over-50s from income tax – but experts warned on Thursday that the plans would be “risky” and would cost billions.
A spokesman for the PCS union, which represents Jobcentre workers, said: “If the Government was serious about addressing the problems within the benefit system, it would pay our members more.
“People working in Jobcentres are leaving because the pay is low and the workload is high. They are hard to replace for the same reasons.”
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: “Ministers urgently need to wake up to the scale of the labour market challenges facing this country. With overall employment lower than pre-pandemic and warnings that unemployment is now set to climb, it beggars belief that ministers are cutting Jobcentre staff numbers.”
On Thursday, one expert said he did not believe the ideas being considered to get people back into work would make a “significant difference”.
Tony Wilson, a director at the Institute for Employment Studies, told Times Radio it would be a “challenge” to make the disability benefits idea work because “people just don’t get enough access to decent support”.
“The idea around exempting income tax is quite risky actually, because a lot of people do go into work all the time,” he said. “Exempting all of them for income tax, you’d be paying literally billions of income tax and you’d be paying people who have jobs anyway. mThat money would be better spent elsewhere in helping people go back to work.”
Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank, said he did not believe benefit changes would have much of an impact on people returning to work.
He told the BBC’s Today programme the Covid pandemic had had a major impact on sickness levels, but added: “People shouldn’t place much faith in changes to the benefit system leading to people who left during the pandemic returning [to work]. Once people have left the labour market for a large period of time, they’re very unlikely to come back.”
However, he said that did not mean “you shouldn’t reform the benefit system to prevent rises in inactivity in future”.
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said it was a “categorical misrepresentation” that staff shortages could affect hopes of getting people into work.
“Unemployment remains at a near record low, and in the first half of 2022 we supported half a million claimants into work – using our Jobcentres to get claimants in front of employers and filling vacancies,” he added.
“During the pandemic, we opened additional temporary Jobcentres to the public and we recruited 13,500 additional work coaches to help support and deliver the full range of Jobcentre services needed for the increase in demand and drive the economic recovery.”
There has been a huge rise in those on disability benefits in recent years. Numbers have gone from under 600,000 in the early 1990s to about 2.2million now, largely driven by mental health conditions.
Since the pandemic, successful disability claims are up 70 per cent and the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that, as a result, long-term sickness benefits will cost taxpayers £3.7 billion more than previously estimated this year, rising to £8.2 billion by 2027.
About 20 per cent of those claiming disability benefits say that they want to work, but less than two per cent move into employment every month.