The DWP has announced that 1,000 existing work coaches will be transferred to supporting sick and disabled claimants in 2025/26, with 65,000 claimants getting “intensive voluntary support” to move into work.
The DWP say that work coaches will be offering support to claimants on health-related benefits, including those who are furthest away from work.
Coaches will provide “tailored and personalised employment support” and help claimants access support with writing CVs and interview techniques.
The DWP say that the redeployed work coaches are a “downpayment” on plans to overhaul employment support, due to be announced before the end of the month.
At the same time as making the announcement, the DWP released figures from a survey which shows that:
44% of disabled people and people with a health condition don’t trust the DWP to help people reach their full career potential.
Nearly 2 in 5 (39%) disabled people and people with a health condition do not trust DWP to take its customers’ needs into account in how it provides services.
In the same announcement, the DWP claim that “the number of working-age people on the health element of Universal Credit or claiming Employment Support Allowance (ESA) has risen to 3.1 million, a staggering 319% increase since the pandemic, reflecting the alarming rate at which young and working aged people are increasingly falling out of work and claiming incapacity benefits.”
However, if the government wishes to encourage companies to employ more disabled workers, the recent claim by disability minister Stephen Timms that the Access To Work programme is “unsustainable” is unlikely to help.
Access To Work provides grants for reasonable adjustments to help disabled people stay in employment. The average payment is around £5,000.
But giving evidence to the work and pensions committee last month, Timms complained that “we used to talk about Access to Work as the best-kept secret because nobody really knew about it and employers did not know about it. That seems to have changed in the last two years and there has been an enormous surge in applications for Access to Work.”
As a result, some people are waiting many months for their application to be dealt with.
Timms told the committee that the government plans to place more of the onus on employers to pay for adjustments, because “the current style of Access to Work is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term”.
As long as the DWP’s focus is on trying to improve the CV’s and interview techniques of disabled claimants, rather than support and encourage companies to employ disabled people, the efforts of work coaches seem doomed.
You can read “Government bolsters employment support to unlock work for sick and disabled people” here.
