Conservative Cuts

109 Job Centres Closed
The Tory party have been carrying out a programme of closing Job Centres. The reason given for this is that they are no longer required due to the low unemployment figures. They also state that the PFI contracts have reached the end of the 20 year contract and so will not be renewed on these centres.

Job Centres closed since 2016

Job Centres under review for closure, to co-locate or to be acquired



Support for the long-term unemployed and disabled jobseekers has also been cut. A new Work and Health Programme will assist less than a quarter of the participants of the programmes it replaced. Across the country, hundreds of specialist organisations working with jobseekers have lost contracts, and thousands of experienced employment advisers have lost their jobs.

And all this is happening when the roll-out of the new, catch-all benefit called Universal Credit, is accelerating. By the end of 2018, most new working age claimants in Britain, will be claiming Universal Credit – and many of them will be required to attend jobcentres. The already intense pressure on a shrinking network of jobcentres will increase further in 2019 when the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will begin moving millions of existing benefit claimants onto Universal Credit.

Mandatory personal attendance at jobcentre interviews remains a core requirement of continuing to receive Universal Credit and most other working age benefits. This is especially the case for unemployed claimants who must currently attend their jobcentre at least weekly, or fortnightly if their travel time is less than one hour each way by public transport. Where there is no public transport, they still have to attend every two weeks if they can walk to the jobcentre in under one hour or must walk no more than three miles each way. Claimants outside these limits, or those with particular barriers such as caring needs, are allowed to “sign on”, or report on their work search, fortnightly by post – but they must still travel to the jobcentre to attend more intensive interviews concerning their benefit claim and efforts to seek or prepare for work.



Since mid-2016, the headline unemployment total has been falling – a data point measured by the household-based Labour Force Survey, which includes unemployed people who aren’t claiming benefits. But the claimant unemployment count, which includes those currently receiving Jobseekers Allowance and those on Universal Credit who are expected to work, has steadily increased. In the year to March 2018, it grew by 9% or 73,200 to reach a total of 890,500 claimants.

This increase has been most marked in the areas where Universal Credit has been implemented, and even more so in “full digital service” areas. In the relatively small number of jobcentres where the full service had been implemented longest, before 2016, the claimant count was 38% higher in March 2018 than it had been a year earlier, an increase that wasn’t experienced by those jobcentres where the full service had not yet been implemented. While the final trend is not certain, an analysis by the Learning and Work Institute suggests it’s plausible that the number of unemployed claimants could double to 1.5m by the end of 2020. Yet the DWP and jobcentres have only a third of the resources and staffing that they had in 2012, the last time the claimant count stood at that total.

Jobcentre network as at 2016 and number of unemployed claimants accessing service



Proposed Jobcentre network (mostly implemented now)

Shutting down jobcentres is the austerity era’s most underhand cut yet. Protests about one north London closure are just a drop in the ocean. One in 10 jobcentres will be cut over the next year. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/02/shutting-down-jobcentres-austerity-underhand-cut