They're taking our Jobcentres!
Jobcentre Plus employs more than 1,600 staff on visas and settlement schemes, costing taxpayers at least £52 million a year
With Gordon Brown’s return to influence over economic policymaking, it’s time to ask whether Labour should fulfil his famous promise of ‘British jobs for British workers’. The Prime Minister’s current byword appears instead to be ‘Foreign Workers for British Jobseekers’, given that across England, Scotland and Wales, DWP Jobcentre Plus sites employ at least 1,601 staff on visas and settlement schemes, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. One might quibble that this is a relatively small number of people, as Jobcentre Plus employs over 46,000 staff, but there is little justification for this figure to be anything other than zero, given the costs, rising unemployment, and the fact that these are not roles that require any special skills that could not be sourced from home.
When unemployed Brits go to their Jobcentre work search appointments, they may well be sat across the desk from a foreign graduate or student employed by the state. These foreign Jobcentre workers cost the taxpayer at least £52 million a year in gross basic pay, before employer National Insurance, pension contributions, and other staffing costs are included.
Hundreds of Jobcentre workers on Graduate Visas
In 2007, Brown proposed to the Trades Union Congress that British workers would be fast-tracked for jobs which already existed. Brown’s Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 then clarified that Civil Service appointments are to be made on the basis of fair and open competition, and nationality is considered separately under Civil Service Nationality Rules, which open around 75% of government jobs to a potential candidate pool of several billion people.
This has meant that foreign students now work at UK Jobcentres in the East Midlands, North West, and Scotland, where a foreign student happens to sit as a Member of the Scottish Parliament. However, the largest group of foreign Jobcentre workers is those on graduate visas, with 672 staff. Being in the UK after completing their studies, they become eligible to work in place of an unemployed local.
Anyone familiar with Civil Service recruitment will know of the formal and informal pressure to employ a diverse workforce. For example, I know of one person with no prior connection to the UK who flew in from Africa for a government job after being given preference over an equally qualified white British candidate due to their ethnicity. This is permitted under the Equality Act 2010, which allows for ethnicity to be used as part of the recruitment criteria in ‘tie-breaker’ cases, when two candidates are equally qualified for a role.
When a foreign student is effectively as qualified as a local in carrying out routine administration tasks at a Jobcentre, the state, with reference to its diversity-focused recruitment activities, may in practice nudge its hiring managers to discourage recruitment of a local.
And so, while the DWP’s own White Paper Get Britain Working (published November 2024) encourages employers to ‘reduce reliance on foreign workers’, the state’s bureaucratic incentives push more foreign workers into roles that seem absurd. This has given us 129 foreign Jobcentre employees on so-called ‘skilled worker’ visas. How much ‘skill’ does processing a benefits application really take?
What makes the situation even more bizarre is that the Jobcentre itself appears to be short of staff. The Public Accounts Committee reported that DWP had 2,100 fewer work coaches than it estimated it needed in the first six months of 2024-25, and that 57 percent of Jobcentres had reduced support for claimants because work-coach caseloads were too high. Whilst it is obviously the case that many unemployed people would not be suitable for this kind of work, it is still surely the case that, given relatively high (and increasing) rates of unemployment and the (rather limited) number of jobs available at Jobcentres, there is already a sufficient number of qualified unemployed British citizens who could be hired in the place of these foreign nationals. This in itself would provide much of the ‘skills support’ — from administration, security and the various other tasks in a Jobcentre — that work coaches are also tasked with finding for claimants.
British Jobs for Those Who Don’t Identify as British
The disclosed figures also give something away about the limits of the state’s inclusive ‘British’ identity, raising questions about how socially integrated their ‘diverse’ workforce are. Jobcentre workers who say they don’t identify as nationally British cost the taxpayer £96.3m per year in gross basic pay, before additional costs, including the generous Civil Service pension. 2,983 Jobcentre employees declared ‘Other national identity’ when presented with British and UK constituent nations’ identities, many more than those working for the DWP on visas or other settlement schemes.
To be clear, national identity is different to ethnicity and could include those employed by the state on a British passport but not seeing themselves as British, for example. When breaking the staff down by ethnicity, we see that the workforce is extremely diverse, with London’s Jobcentre Plus sites being just 22% white (11% declaring themselves to be white British). Most of that ‘diverse’ workforce sees themselves as having British nationality.
Actually, some of these ‘diverse’ employees do have ‘skills’ relevant to their jobs. Sometimes entire meetings between the benefits applicant and Jobcentre employee are conducted in a non-English language, and I observed a family completing a benefits meeting entirely in Urdu.
Labour’s long contradiction
As Labour desperately attempts to recover from their local election humiliation — barely eased by a potential change in leadership — it may pay to rationalise the system which Blair and Brown created around them, and the Tories carried forward until the Starmer premiership. Does it make sense for the UK Civil Service to act as a jobs programme for the rest of the world? Why should an equally qualified local ever be at a disadvantage to a foreign applicant due to the local’s ethnicity?
With Gordon Brown back wandering the corridors of power, perhaps it’s time to dust off his old slogan and truly implement ‘British Jobs for British Workers’.
References
DWP FOI2026_10730.csv: FOI disclosure: ethnicity by region; staff based in Jobcentre Plus with visa/status entries by region; annual gross basic salary costs by region.
DWP FOI2025_119567.csv: FOI disclosure: declared national identity by region.
Gordon Brown TUC Congress speech, 10 September 2007: https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/speech-prime-minister-tuc-congress-2007
European Communities (Employment in the Civil Service) Order 2007: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2007/617/made
Civil Service Nationality Rules: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nationality-rules
Hansard, Lords debate on European Communities (Employment in the Civil Service) Order 2007: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2007-02-21/debates/07022181000001/EuropeanCommunities%28EmploymentInTheCivilService%29Order2007
Hansard, Crown Employment (Nationality) Bill, 29 June 2007: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2007-06-29/debates/07062963000001/CrownEmployment%28Nationality%29Bill
Get Britain Working White Paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-britain-working-white-paper
Get Britain Working White Paper PDF: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67448dd1ece939d55ce92fee/get-britain-working-white-paper.pdf
NAO, Work coach shortage leads DWP to reduce support for Universal Credit claimants, 31 March 2025: https://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/work-coach-shortage-leads-dwp-to-reduce-support-for-universal-credit-claimants/
NAO report PDF, Supporting people to work through jobcentres: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Supporting-people-to-work-through-jobcentres.pdf
Public Accounts Committee report: Jobcentres, July 2025: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmpubacc/823/report.html
DWP Work and Pensions Committee report: Get Britain Working - Reforming Jobcentres, September 2025: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmworpen/653/report.html
This article was written by Charles Small. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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