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 āintensive voluntary supportā 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 ātailored and personalised employment supportā and help claimants access support with writing CVs and interview techniques.
The DWP say that the redeployed work coaches are a ādownpaymentā 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 donāt 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 customersā needs into account in how it provides services.
In the same announcement, the DWP claim that āthe 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.ā
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 āunsustainableā is unlikely to help.
Access To Work provides grants for reasonable adjustments to help disabled people stay in employment. The average payment is around Ā£5,000.
But giving evidence to the work and pensions committee last month, Timms complained that āwe 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.ā
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 āthe current style of Access to Work is unlikely to be sustainable in the long termā.
As long as the DWPās focus is on trying to improve the CVās 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 āGovernment bolsters employment support to unlock work for sick and disabled peopleā here.
