13 March 2009
By Alex Klaushofer
The head of Jobcentre Plus has rejected suggestions that the rising demand created by the recession means that more jobcentres are needed.
‘I think it’s not just about the issue of whether we open another office – it’s about how we reach the customers who most need our services,’ acting chief executive Mel Groves told MPs at the work and pensions select committee on March 11.
He denied that the findings of an internal review of the service’s estate, due to report in April, would lead to the creation of more centres. ‘It’s probably unlikely at this stage,’ he said.
The Jobcentre Plus closure programme has resulted in the loss of 503 jobcentres since it was launched in 2005, with a further three to close this year.
In November, employment minister Tony McNulty announced that the government would review the closure programme in the light of rising unemployment.
Groves said that the current ‘service delivery model’, involving greater access through the website and telephone, meant there was less reliance on the network of offices. ‘Increasingly, we may not need an office that we’ve moved out of,’ he said. ‘It’s not necessary to open a new office – it might be that we can move in with a local authority or a children’s centre.’
But he admitted that the sudden rise in the number of jobseekers meant that the £2.6bn budget set for this year had been significantly exceeded.
‘We’re going to spend £2.8bn in the year, so it’s gone up,’ he said.
Many of the increased costs are due to the recruitment of more staff – often drawn from government departments, including the DWP – to frontline roles in job centres and benefit processing offices.
At the beginning of the year, he expected the service to employ 65,500 people by the year’s end, but now anticipated numbers to approach 70,000 by the end of this month. ‘We suddenly find ourselves during this year recruiting 6,000 people,’ he said.
‘Our planning assumption is to carry on recruiting somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000 people every month into customer-facing jobs,’ he added.
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