DWP announces mass office closure programme

DWP has announced the closure of the following Service and Support Centres (SSCs) by September 2027. These office closures will impact many hundreds of members. 

Please note the numbers in brackets are the numbers of staff impacted by the office closures.

• (part of) Blackpool Peel Park, relocation to Blackpool Fylde View (918 staff) 
• Derby Holborn House, relocation to Nottingham Pearson Building (449 staff)
• Halifax Dean Clough Mills, relocation to Leeds Quarry House (350 staff)
• Liverpool Belle Vale, relocation to Bootle Redgrave Court (366 staff)
• Hyde Beech House, relocation to Stockport Millenium House (110 staff)
• Glasgow Northgate, relocation to Glasgow Atlantic Quay (1106 staff)
• Motherwell Johnstone House, relocation to Glasgow Atlantic Quay (505 staff)
• Sunderland Wear View House, relocation to new acquisition at The Faber Building, Sunderland (1548 staff)
• Torquay Cotswold House, divest only as no other DWP SSC sites in the vicinity. (130 staff)

The DWP is claiming that these office closures will assist in:

• Modernising the estate – they say that many DWP sites are old buildings that are not energy efficient or equipped for the way we want to operate in the future.  
• Using their space better – hybrid working allows more staff to work from home, meaning many of their sites are “under-utilised."

The PCS DWP Group Executive Committee is clear that the majority of these office closures will not benefit in any way the staff impacted by them. 

The DWP has promised for decades that it will modernise the estate yet much of the buildings DWP staff work in remain dilapidated and out of step with the kind of working environments that members should expect. It is clear that this office closure programme is primarily a massive cost cutting exercise and that members will be forced to work in ever more crowded and uncomfortable workplaces.

Real risk of redundancies

For many members affected by the office closures, particularly those in Derby, Halifax, Liverpool Belle Vale, Hyde and Motherwell, travelling to the proposed new workplaces will be difficult and time-consuming.

The long experience the GEC has had of office closures would suggest that for many the journeys to the new workplaces simply won’t be possible. This will lead to the very real danger of our members being placed at risk of redundancy. Many members end up taking “voluntary redundancy” because they cannot make the journey to the new workplaces but cannot afford to await the risk of compulsory redundancies as they are offered on far worse financial terms. 

Equally for our members in Torquay, who are not even being offered the safety net of a new DWP location, today’s announcement will create real uncertainty, with so few civil service jobs available within daily travel.

Compulsory redundancies

For decades PCS has managed to persuade the DWP that there are ways around making people compulsorily redundant. Given the ability that the DWP now has to move work to staff rather than staff to the work, and the ability for staff to work from home or in a hybrid fashion, it should be even easier for the DWP to avoid compulsory redundancies. 

Despite this, PCS is now in a fight to save the jobs of 3 members of staff in Lincoln who are facing compulsory redundancy.

Your GEC negotiating team have made it clear that the meaningful work that these members are doing now in their workplace, in Lincoln, could still be delivered by them from the very place that they are working now. 

DWP GEC will fight office closures

DWP office closures can have a devastating impact on the staff who work in them and on the communities where they are based. TheGEC has pledged to use every tool at its disposal to fight any office closure that could result in DWP job losses in local communities. PCS fundamentally opposes these office closures, and any further closures of service centres or jobcentres that would remove jobs from communities.

Members in the impacted offices will be invited to a members’ meeting where we will discuss how we intend to campaign to keep these jobs in their communities. Invitations to this meeting will be issued within the next two weeks.

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