According to the Policy Exchange think-tank, private and third-sector companies should be supplying job finding services. In its Joined up welfare report, it claims that Jobcentres are not very effective at helping people find work and that just over a third of jobcentres succeeded in getting people into long-term employment.

The report goes on to recommend that jobcentres be restructured so that voluntary and private providers were competing with the employment services, with the other services renamed as ‘Citizen Support’. According to the author Guy Miscampbell, this would ‘make it as easy as possible for individuals, who often have multiple problems, to work with an organisation that is best suited to helping them into work’.

Universal Credit described nationality as ‘like banging your head against a brick wall’