Civil servants from across the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are to work in Jobcentre Plus offices.

Work and pensions secretary James Purnell announced that the department is to spend an extra £2bn on staff who would help the rising number of unemployed.

Officials to move from other roles include employees of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC).

Purnell said some workers would be those affected by the government's planned programme of reducing the civil service headcount. "Instead of them going, we are now redeploying them in my department," he explained on the BBC Politics Show on Sunday.

As well as the movement of civil servants from other DWP roles, the department is also running a recruitment drive to appoint an additional 6,000 members of staff.

The government's response to the rising number of unemployed people has come in for criticism from shadow work and pensions secretary Theresa May, who said Purnell had been "complacent" to continue the programme of Jobcentre Plus office closures until a moratorium was placed on it in November.

"Instead of providing extra support when unemployment began to rise, Labour continued its programme of Jobcentre closures," she said. "Now unemployment is rising by more than 100 per cent in some areas and there simply aren't the resources to cope."

Purnell's record has also been attacked by the head of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), Mark Serwotka. He said measures in the government's Welfare Reform Bill, including the use of private companies to get people back into work, were "shameful".

"It seeks to privatise the delivery of welfare, allowing companies to make huge profits, to deliver on the basis of payment by results, when actually Jobcentre Plus is the leading deliverer of welfare anywhere in the world," he said.

Purnell was "probably the worst secretary of state for welfare this country has ever had", he added.

But the work and pensions secretary has rejected Serwotka's claims. He said Jobcentre Plus staff "are fantastic" and were coping well with the increased demand for their service, but added: "We should use whoever is best at helping most people back into work. We should not be ideological about who provides the service."

He added: "Going into a recession, surely it should be all hands to the pump rather than saying ideologically, the only people who can provide are people in the public sector."