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 acted from within the government's agenda for community and social welfare.[5][6] Services were provided in the first instance via in-house job-advisors and advisors contacted via telephony.[7] An information technology system known as the Labour Market System (LMS) contained the personal details of job seekers[8] and advertised job vacancies for employers within each of the public offices.
Between 2012 and 2018 a government website named Universal Jobmatch was used whereby jobseekers could search for employment and employers could upload and manage their own vacancies whilst searching for prospective employees.
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,[9] 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.
