The quality of claimants’ experience with the Department and whether they receive the right support will depend on the Department’s ability to integrate the additional 13,500 new work coaches into its organisation and manage their performance effectively. The Department’s employment support is mainly accessible to people on benefits via their jobcentre work coaches. Work coaches have considerable discretion to tailor their support to individual claimants, and they need a range of skills and a lot of knowledge to match claimants to the right employment support package. This can even include checking a claimant’s business idea and referring them to a mentor for the New Enterprise Allowance scheme, which can provide money and support to help people start their own business. The National Audit Office has previously found that the Department cannot know if it is providing a consistent service over time, or between jobcentres, and that the Department does not systematically gather feedback from claimants on the quality of service they receive. Embedding a very large number of new work coaches and ensuring they offer consistently high-quality services to claimants will be extremely challenging in such a system. Recommendations: The Department should commit to undertaking and publishing a full evaluation by the end of 2022 of how well its work coaches provide employment support and how consistently they apply their judgement. The Department should gather and use systematic feedback on claimant’s satisfaction with their work coaches, the service at the jobcentre, and how the jobcentre could be improved. DWP Employment support 9 1 The Department’s response to the pandemic