This piece was written by Matthew Duff, of the UK Cabinet Office. It was a winner of the 2018 Apolitical Young Thought Leaders competition. For more like this, see the other winning entries.

As shops close and abandoned premises decay on high streets across the UK, one brand remains ubiquitous. With its distinctive green signage, the job centre occupies a place in almost every community — but its potential too often goes untapped.

Job centres in the UK are unusual compared to other countries. They dispense welfare to citizens that are unemployed or — as is increasingly the case — people who are in work but do not earn enough to make ends meet. Yet they also exist to coach people into work. Whereas in most developed countries, these two services are distinct from each other, often in separate locations, the UK’s job centres do both.

Since 2011, every job centre in the country has been run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), an arm of central government which overhauled the way welfare was distributed. Unemployment benefits were reduced, and disability payments became subject to more rigorous evaluations and assessments.

Job centres were at the forefront of these changes and inevitably became associated with welfare cuts. They became places of mistrust, their doors manned by private security guards, detached from the communities they were meant to serve. For many, the job centre now represents a lack of hope, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Job centres can and should be hubs for the community — but to achieve that, we need to get out into the communities we serve.

Renewing trust

I joined the DWP as the Minority and Refugee Lead in Glasgow in early 2018, a city with some of the most severe deprivation in the UK and, in parts of the city’s East End, some of the lowest life expectancy levels in Europe. Ethnic inequalities ran deep: the unemployment rate among the BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) community was 24% higher than among the white population.

Furthermore, ethnic minority communities were not accessing job centre services in the same numbers as white communities. Many were missing out on training, guidance and financial support that they were entitled to. And it wasn’t just new arrivals who faced disadvantages — born-and-bred Glaswegians were still being held back on account of their ethnicity.

We had to understand what we could do better. We needed to demonstrate our commitment to improving services in the context of widespread suspicion. We took a number of steps to address these disparities.

We started to get out of the job centre and into the community

We started to get out of the job centre and into the community. We held events in community locations bringing together public and charitable sector services in one place to promote what they could provide locally to ethnic minority communities. For our first event, we invited 330 people, of which 270 attended — far higher than the 50% attendance rates DWP events usually achieved.

To make job centres more welcoming, we swapped the private security guard with a normal member of staff who made it clear that they were there to help. We started running English classes from job centres and allowed charities and support groups to run their services from our premises.

We attended local cultural festivals to learn, promote our work and generally increase our community presence. I worked with Gurdwaras, Mosques, community groups, charities, faith organisations, community radio platforms, and local and national government in order to understand the barriers and build a consensus. We held mentoring sessions with businesses for young people from minority backgrounds. We started to place work coaches at community locations every month — bringing our services into communities, rather than expecting them to come to us.

This worked particularly well for refugees in need of welfare. After going through a rigorous asylum system, many refugees are reluctant to engage with the authorities, regardless of their purpose. But going back into communities built bridges.

A new dawn

The city’s view of job centres is starting to change. People started to see us as being part of the community and a place of genuine support.

For example, leaders of an Eritrean community stopped advising young people against doing apprenticeships and even started promoting them once we explained the potential benefits. Other community support groups stopped advising their clients against attending the job centre and started hosting job centre staff regularly in their spaces. These changes could not have happened without a clear demonstration that we were listening, learning and making positive changes.

Job centres seem an unlikely location for the restoration of civic life, but their presence in all corners of the UK offers an opportunity to engage some of society’s most marginalised people. That requires hard work, consensus building, and listening to hard to reach communities, but the future of struggling communities depends on it. — Matt Duff

(Picture credit: Flickr/Lydia)