On 17th March the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced that it intended to make large-scale office closures all over the country. Amongst the offices affected is Cardwell Place in Blackburn.
April’s Trades Council meeting agreed to support the PCS campaign against these closures and to write to Blackburn’s MP, Kate Hollern, on the matter.
We have raised some specific points relating to Cardwell Place in addition to the general issues raised nationally by PCS.
The office is currently devoted to the administration of Personal Independence Payments, an area of the benefits system that is showing quite a bit of strain.
The Disability News Service reported on 10th March that: “New figures have shown how the backlog of disabled people waiting for a personal independence payment (PIP) assessment has more than trebled in the last five years.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) figures, secured by Disability News Service (DNS) through a freedom of information (FOI) request, shows there are now more than 310,000 people waiting for an assessment.
The size of the queue was 88,500 in October 2016 but this had risen to nearly 312,000 by December 2021”.
Recent Government figures show that new claimants are waiting on average 22 weeks for a first payment.
From the outside it is difficult to estimate how much these problems relate to staffing issues within DWP, and how much to problems with the outsourcing of health assessment work to Capita and Atos. Either way, it seems irresponsible for DWP to be planning to close a “PIP Office” at this juncture. The Department should be mending its system, not disrupting it.
We also expressed concerned at the implications of the closure for the health of Blackburn’s town centre economy. Throughout the Borough Council’s consultation on its Local Plan review we have been trying to make the case that those town centres which are the “healthiest” are those that accommodate office employment at some scale, alongside retail and hospitality, and also that Blackburn “misses out” on Civil Service employment compared with, say, Preston and Blackpool.
We have compiled the attached Table from information in “NOMIS” (the national database of employment and economic activity). There must be some caveats, in that we have drawn from differing searches, and the geographical areas may not have been exactly the same in all cases. For some locations, we noted that the number of Civil Servants rose if the “County” area was included – but we wanted to focus as best as we could on the proportion of Civil Servants employed within town boundaries.
Behind the percentages, the locations are ranked in numerical position. We think the Table does show that whist we are not alone in having a low proportion of Civil Service jobs, we do benefit poorly in this respect in both total numbers and percentage of local employees.
