Connect to Work: the scheme reaching disabled jobseekers in Cornwall

For someone who has been out of work for years because of a health condition or disability, the barrier is rarely just finding a vacancy. It is getting through the door of a job centre in the first place. A new employment programme is trying to close that gap by meeting people where they already are, in GP surgeries, cafes and community hubs across the South West, and new figures published on Thursday 10 September show it is starting to move the numbers.

What the figures show

Connect to Work, funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, has taken on 1,110 participants across the South West between April 2025 and June 2026. Of those, 130 people who were previously out of work have started a job through the programme.

The scheme is backed by up to £90.6 million in government funding for the region and is delivered through seven separate Connect to Work areas across the South West. It is worth being clear about what the figures cover and what they do not. They are reported at delivery-area level, not broken down by county, so there is no Cornwall-only total in this release. Cornwall (including the Isles of Scilly) is one of the seven areas the South West figures are drawn from, alongside Dorset and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole; Devon, Plymouth and Torbay; the West of England including North Somerset; Gloucestershire; Somerset; and Swindon and Wiltshire.

Many of those delivery areas have only recently started supporting participants, and the Department for Work and Pensions says numbers are expected to rise as local services become fully established.

How the support works

Connect to Work is open to disabled people, people with health conditions, and others facing more complex barriers to employment. Participants do not need to be receiving benefits to take part.

Support comes from specialist employment advisers who work with people one to one, providing coaching, job matching and ongoing support once someone is in work, as well as help for the employer taking them on. The idea is to make the support feel less daunting than a traditional job centre appointment, meeting people in GP surgeries, local cafes, parks or community hubs, wherever suits them, and to help people not just get a job but keep it.

What’s being said

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said the figures showed what Connect to Work could achieve “when local areas are given the tools and trust to deliver support that works for their communities,” adding that hundreds of disabled people and people with health conditions across the South West were “moving closer to work, earning and building better lives.”

Helen Godwin, Mayor of the West of England, pointed to the local scale of the investment: “Connect to Work has provided the West with £15.3 million of investment to support people with health barriers and disabilities into work. It is great to see people already benefitting from this support since delivery began in April this year, and I know over summer our teams have reached even more.”

The bigger picture

Connect to Work sits inside a wider £3.5 billion government employment support package aimed at disabled people and people with health conditions. Nationally, 25,000 people have received support through the scheme so far, with 4,100 moving into work. The programme is expected to reach around 300,000 people across England and Wales by the end of the decade.

The same package includes a national expansion of WorkWell, backed by £259 million, aiming to help up to 250,000 people with health conditions stay in or return to work, and 1,000 redeployed Pathways to Work advisers who have already supported 100,000 people. A separate £2.5 billion youth employment package is also being rolled out, intended to support almost a million young people and open up 500,000 opportunities to earn or learn over three years, including 11 new Youth Hubs across the South West.

The government frames all of this as part of moving the country “from a welfare state to a working state,” against a backdrop it describes as 2.7 million people out of work long-term sick nationally, of whom 5% are in the South West. Whether that scale of ambition is matched by results in Cornwall specifically is something only a local breakdown of the figures, when one is published, will really answer.

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