Lincoln DWP members start 2-week strike against office closure

There are 95 members of staff who are currently deemed unassigned by the DWP and face the real prospect of redundancy when the office closes in May 2026.

Efforts by the DWP to redeploy staff have so far been relatively unsuccessful with fewer than 30 staff being redeployed within the department or found jobs in other government departments. The vast majority of members impacted by this decision are low-paid AO staff and are out of mobility for most jobs in the DWP.

The department has restated its commitment to the discredited estates strategy by saying in a recent response to a DWP letter:

“The decision to close the Lincoln site was taken following careful consideration. The department is reshaping its estate by transitioning from a wide network of smaller sites to fewer, larger, multi-functional locations. This shift will:

• Reduce the overall footprint of our estate, focusing on modern, high-quality buildings
• Enable targeted investment in the condition and long-term sustainability of our sites, supporting our commitment to a greener estate, and:
• Improve value for money by ensuring we only pay for the space we need.”

Callous position

This response makes clear the callous position taken by the DWP to close Lincoln, in addition to the closures of service centres in St Helens, Warrington and Dover and the HQ office at Caxton House in London. It is clear that the department is more concerned about cost than the impact its decisions will have on the future of staff and the communities they work in.

DWP has had decades to improve its crumbling estate and has allowed it to become run down and in some cases unsafe. Much of the estate they have proposed that members relocate to is not the fabled modern, high-quality buildings, nor is their strategy greener as staff are being forced to make much longer journeys to proposed workplaces.

The PCS DWP group executive committee met last week and agreed that it would work closely with members in the other offices currently impacted by office closure announcements. PCS will not stand by and allow members to be thrown on the scrapheap by the DWP. Members in Lincoln have shown they are prepared to fight their office closure and we hope members in all the other offices earmarked for closure are prepared to take the fight to their employer.

It is clear from the recent communication from DWP that the department has a much larger agenda to close offices than it has shared with PCS. Lincoln is just the beginning of a fight against office closures and job losses that PCS is determined to win for the sake of our members and the communities they live in.