Dr Hayley Bennett (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Sioned Pearce (University of Cardiff)

The UK Government’s labour market policy reforms have attracted attention and controversy in recent weeks. But one aspect of the Get Britain Working White Paper that seems to have been accepted without too much concern is the proposed creation of a new jobs and careers services to “transform Jobcentre Plus across Great Britain…bringing it together with the National Careers Service in England”. Central to these plans are an increase in digital services, skills development, and local responsiveness (UK Government, 2024). But what might this mean for Scotland where Jobcentre Plus (JCP) is reserved, but careers and skills services are devolved?

The problem with Jobcentre Plus and the need for reform

Concerns about JCP often focus on the highly centralised design and management by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), a reserved agency responsible to Westminster. By combining employment services with the benefits agency in the late 1990s, it was initially conceived as a ‘one-stop-shop’ model for delivering active labour market policies. However, over time it is known for a ‘work-first’ approach to employment support and increasing conditionality whereby attendance at JCP offices or engagement with mandatory activities have become essential components of benefit receipt. Such policies have eroded trust between benefit recipients and the state as JCP employees are responsible for raising sanctions (leading to benefit deductions), and managing large case-loads of individuals with prescribed job search requirements. Since the introduction of Universal Credit (UC), a digital-by-design approach for administering (both in and out of work) working-age benefits, JCP employees continue to have a policing role with limited discretionary power for individualised support and problem solving.

While there are various reasons why reforming JCP and integrating careers and skills services is in principle a good idea, the proposed organisational reforms raises both reserved and devolved questions. For example, will employment support provided via Careers England remain voluntary? Or will engagement with careers services become a condition to receive social security? What additional powers and resources will Careers England have and how might these link with the – now in progress – economic trailblazers in nine areas of England and Wales?

What might be the future for Jobcentre Plus in Scotland?

In Scotland there is even more that needs to be considered. For example, while JCP remains reserved and managed by the DWP across Britain, skills, training, careers and advice services are actually devolved in Scotland (e.g., delivered via Skills Development Scotland). Plus, post Smith Commission (2014) the Scottish Government has some devolved power for employability programmes and its own strategies (e.g., No One Left Behind), plus some devolved social security policies delivered via a different administrative architecture committed to a ‘Scottish Social Security Charter’ and situated within political discourse critical of conditionality, sanctions, and welfare reform (Bennett, 2025). Furthermore, allied services, such as NHS and health care, are entirely devolved to the Scottish Parliament.  We therefore outline three potential scenarios for JCP in Scotland (in no particular order):

1. Jobcentre Plus in Scotland becomes fully devolved. This leaves the Scottish Government with the option to create a new job centre, merge JCP with its own careers service, devolved employability programmes, or health services. Devolving JCP has been discussed before including during the independence referendum and Smith Commission consultation, where stakeholders such as the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) called for “the creation of a Scottish Job centre Plus”. But since then, times have changed. Notably the rise of Universal Credit, and any Scottish JCP would involve decoupling from the administration of UC which would be a highly difficult and protracted process.
2. Jobcentre Plus remains a DWP controlled agency in Scotland. This would make the delivery of UC more straightforward. But JCP in Scotland would function as it currently does. In this scenario it is unlikely that Skills Development Scotland would merge with JCP as would be occurring in England. The DWP would therefore need to run different approaches to JCP across the UK to maintain the current arrangement in Scotland, and it would likely maintain its current work-first approach.
3. The Scottish Government collaborates with UK government to mirror English developments. In this case the DWP would maintain control of JCP but the service would merge with careers advice in Scotland, either subsuming devolved powers or in a partnership approach. The first option would be politically unpopular. The second would involve administrative complexity and could possibly limit the Scottish Government careers services offer, if there are relatively fixed parameters in order to maintain alignment with reform in England.

Again, we see the complexity of multi-level welfare and it is not easy work for national policymakers (Bennett and Wiggan, 2025), nor street-level workers and area managers to align multi-level services in each locality (Pearce and Narayan, 2025).

An opportunity to consider alternatives?

These are three somewhat technical considerations but perhaps there is an opportunity for a more imaginative rethinking of employment support and the job centre. Back in 2017, the Local Government Association called on the then Conservative UK Government to trust councils to deliver local one-stop shop services, that would “free-up jobcentres…by radically increasing their ability to co-locate and integrate with other services” (LGA, 2017; 16). More politically radical, The Autonomy Institute promote community-based worker centres that focus “resources on organising towards transformative political change, recognising the broader picture affecting workplace concerns” as a necessary response to labour market precarity and exploitation. In 2025, they called for transforming job centres into “inclusive, community-focused hubs that prioritise empowerment, dignity, and holistic support” to “function as “third spaces,” offering accessible facilities like childcare, cafes, and community event areas to serve diverse users, not just the unemployed”. Such ideas question not only the design of employment support in terms of entitlement, eligibility and conditionality, but also the physical spaces in which encounters take place. As Bernardo Zacka argues while studying the architecture of job centres across Europe, “this means taking seriously the idea that the state is, in the first instance, someone, somewhere – a person you meet in a place”. Currently, the future of JCP looks like it might become another political and operational tension in intergovernmental relations and multi-level policy making. But it’s also a chance to reopen discussions on alternative possibilities underpinned by different material and political values.

 

Dr Hayley Bennett (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Sioned Pearce (Cardiff University) are members of the Social Policy Association’s ‘Employment Policy Group’ which focuses on: employment support and active labour market policy, links between employment and social security, gender and other social inequalities, employment protection, regulation and enforcement, employer perspectives, skills policy, and comparative perspectives.

Hayley and Sioned are also both members of the Safety Nets project examining if and how the devolution of social security within the UK shapes realities, risks, and opportunities for families with dependent children. Funded by the Nuffield Foundation  it is a multi-institutional and inter-disciplinary research and policy team comprised of academics from six universities across all four UK nations, the Resolution Foundation, the Child Poverty Action Group.