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DWP Estate

This was at the Hackney community hub run by the Shaw Trust, so it would have been at Amazon there. This debate is on the future of the DWP estate, which covers the whole of the UK, but I wish any Kazeem in the hon. Lady’s constituency the best of luck with finding work, whether at Amazon or somewhere else.

Understandably, a lot of people who arrive at a jobcentre lack confidence and are nervous. I have seen that at first hand when I have supported my own constituents. All too often, I am afraid, people are greeted by a security guard, who is probably the last person that somebody wishes to see when they are nervous. Some jobcentres are drab buildings from the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s. They do not celebrate success stories. There are no posters or videos that show people who have gone through the same challenges, faced and overcome them, come through at the other end and benefited from work. The staff are too often fixed to the facility. I suspect most other hon. Members who speak in this debate will highlight the challenge of getting to jobcentres; sometimes the solution is taking the jobcentre directly to people.

One of the most important parts of the universal credit roll-out is that, for the first time ever, people entering work will continue to get support. I hope that support will extend to those coming into the workplace. A lot of those people will be entering work on the national living wage, at the beginning of a career path. They will need support in work to secure additional hours and to get promotion when they lack the confidence to push themselves forward. We are all confident here—we all push ourselves forward and we all wish to seek to improve ourselves—but not everybody has that ability. That is an example of why we need to take people out of jobcentres.

When I visited an award-winning job coach, who was doing a great job, I saw another example of why a fixed location should not always be the solution. There was a young lad who was incredibly enthusiastic and desperate to do bar work, which we have a chronic shortage of people for in this country. I used to work in the industry; I remember thinking that, if I still worked in it, I would have snapped him up. His issue was that he was so confident that he would sometimes talk for too long in an interview and talk himself out of a job. Each time,

the jobcentre staff would say, “Go off and apply for some more jobs”, but he would come back two weeks later and he had talked himself out of another job. All it needed was a job coach to go with him to an interview to explain to the employer, “When you have had enough of him talking, just say stop”. He would have secured work straight away. Yet the system meant that he kept returning at his inconvenience every two weeks on a continuous loop, when it just needed somebody to go with him to the interview.

Rightly, we have started piloting a small business employment scheme. Too many employers do not want to engage with their local jobcentre—I was the same when I ran a business for 10 years. We need to get jobcentre people going out to small and medium-sized businesses and saying, “What skills gaps do you have? Can we identify them?” The DWP has been running a small business pilot, in which staff go around retail, industrial and business parks and find people. It was so successful that the DWP ran out of people, either at the jobcentre or in the work programmes, to fill all those roles. That is exactly the sort of challenge that we need to take on. Again, it saves time for the claimant. We also need to organise job fairs.

In an ideal world, the jobcentre would be a hub. It would be a co-location, so that we are not sending claimants from building to building. We need health support. My point about being close to full structural employment is that the vast majority of people are now looking for work. More than 50% of people on employment and support allowance have a health condition or a disability; having instant health support on site will make a huge difference.

For some bizarre reason, rather than letting Work programme providers use our space, we send them off to find their own facilities, for which they secure a contract for a number of years. They spend a huge amount of time finding facilities, settling into them and getting to know them before having to renew the contract. It also gives claimants the inconvenience of having to go from the jobcentre to the Work programme provider and to health support, spending all their time travelling rather than looking for work. That is something that we need to address.

A jobcentre should be a hive of activity. It should have job fairs in the evenings and it should get in external employers, charities and mentors. That should all happen in a brightly coloured, constructive hub that supports people.