The impact of the DWP's COVID-19 contingency measures on Jobseeker's Allowance and Claimant Count geographic information

In response to the increased number of claims being made to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as a result of customers affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic, contingency processing arrangements were introduced from 30 March 2020 for New Style Jobseeker's Allowance.

New Style JSA

All new claims made across England, Scotland and Wales since the 30 March 2020 have been aligned to one of the following eight sites.

	JSA Service ID	JSA Caseload ID	Service Name	Jobcentre Code to be used for registration	Jobcentre Name
A	JSRU	106195	Lisahally Processing Centre	201890	Eltham
B	JSRY	102105	Glasgow Northgate BC London	201602	Redbridge
C	JSOR	100806	Cosham (Thames Valley)	201563	Banbury
D	JSOS	100904	Watford	201666	Hemel Hempstead
E	JSGO	100401	Newcastle	201707	Eastleigh
F Wales	JSRT	100598	Llanelli	209503	Port Talbot
G Scotland	JSRR	104311	Glasgow Northgate BC Scotland	210683	Cowdenbeath

Impact on DWP office based geographic information

This temporary change in processing for New Style JSA claims has distorted all DWP Office data that includes JSA volumes. Therefore this data should be used with caution and heavily caveated.

Impact on other geographic information

No other geographic information on Nomis is built up from DWP Offices. Other geographies, including DWP Districts and Groups, are based on the address information of the individual claimant.

However, in the small number of JSA cases where claimant address information is not available, a geographic location is imputed for the individual. This imputation uses DWP Office information in allocating a postcode to the case. This methodology is based on individual DWP Offices having set limited area of coverage. Under the current DWP contingencies, this may potentially lead to the overallocation of imputed cases to the normal geographic areas that contain those Offices listed above.

In the count for April 2020, the upper limit of the number of cases impacted would have been 2,500.

Impacted cases would have been used for calculating both the JSA and Claimant Count figures for local geographic areas.