Jobcentre Plus
Jobcentre Plus (Welsh: Canolfan byd Gwaith; Scottish Gaelic: Ionad Obrach is Eile) is a brand used by the Department for Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom.[1]
From 2002 to 2011, Jobcentre Plus was an executive agency which reported directly to the Minister of State for Employment. It was formed by the amalgamation of two agencies, the Employment Service, which operated Jobcentres, and the Benefits Agency, which ran social security offices.
Jobcentre Plus was an executive agency[2] of the Department for Work and Pensions of the government of the United Kingdom between 2002 and 2011.[3] The functions of Jobcentre Plus were subsequently provided directly through the Department for Work and Pensions. The agency provided services primarily to those attempting to find employment and to those requiring the issuing of a financial provision due to, in the first case, lack of employment, of an allowance to assist with the living costs and expenditure intrinsic to the effort to achieve employment,[2] or in all other cases the provision of social-security benefit as the result of a person without an income from employment due to illness-incapacity including drug addiction.[2][4] The organisation acts from within the government's agenda for community and social welfare.[5][6] Job vacancies advertised for employers within each of the public offices use a computer system called the Labour Market System (LMS). A new government website named Universal Jobmatch has recently been launched whereby jobseekers can search for employment and employers can upload and manage their own vacancies whilst searching for prospective employees.
Services are provided in the first instance via in-house job-advisors and advisors contacted via telephony.[7] Customers are able to access vacancy information through the Universal Jobmatch. Claims may be made for working-age benefits such as Jobseeker's Allowance, Incapacity Benefit, Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support or the new Universal Credit.
The forerunners of the Jobcentre Plus were the state-run labour exchanges, originally the vision of Winston Churchill, President of the Board of Trade, and William Beveridge,[8] who had worked for a more efficient labour system in the early years of the twentieth century. This was intended to address the chaos of the labour market and the problems of casual employment.
In 1908, Beveridge was commissioned to devise a scheme which would combine labour exchanges with a new government-funded unemployment benefit. The Labour Exchanges Act 1909 was rushed through Parliament and was passed in September 1909 and, after months of planning and recruitment of clerks; 62 labour exchanges were opened on 1 February 1910. The number of offices rose to 430 within four years. At the suggestion of the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, from January 1917, the labour exchanges came under the new Ministry of Labour and were renamed employment exchanges, so as to more accurately reflect their purpose and function.
