Personal Adviser Interviews With Benefits Claimants in UK Jobcentres

Abstract

We report on a study commissioned by the UK government of the ways in which advisers conduct mandatory interviews with unemployment benefits claimants. Among other results, we identified practices in soliciting claimants’ job goals and job plans that were more, or less, effective in achieving desired outcomes during these interactions. Moreover, we found that making a calculation of how much better off a claimant would be by retaining some benefit and working part-time was ineffective. Our reports, recommendations, and presentation to officials of the Department of Work & Pensions were acknowledged to have influenced policy changes concerning Jobcentre service delivery. Data are in British English.

Notes

1. ¹Advisers were asked for their impressions about each interview once the claimant had left and before the next arrived. These were quite brief (no more than 2 min), informal interviews, but played little if any part in our analysis.

2. ²This is at the time of the study. Since 2012, Income Support is payable only to single parents whose youngest child is 5 years old or younger.

3. ³Those who are unemployed and claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance were (and are) required to agree to certain conditions. These conditions include agreeing on the kind of work they are looking for (three job goals) and their availability (e.g., for night working, distance from home, etc.), summarized in a form of contract with DWP known as the Jobseekers’ Agreement.

4. ⁴For a discussion of how the goals of an institution inform conversation analytic work on institutional interaction, see Heritage (1997).

5. ⁵It will be apparent that the children are different ages, so in Extract 4 the child is nearer school age (though still three years away from due date). This was a pattern across the corpus/collection, whatever age of the child. Also, we made comparisons between matched pairs—the difference held.