Jobcentre Aggro

The following is more or less the text of a letter that I have emailed to my MP:

("T___" represents the town in which the nearest Jobcentre to my home is to be found - it is not actually in the same Parliamentary constituency as my home, but will be familiar to my MP)

I am writing to you today to draw to your attention some issues with the way in which the rules governing the way in which Jobcentre staff are able to handle circumstances relating to jobseekers’ activities, and also to ask for you as far as possible to intervene in these matters.

I have been unemployed since October 2007, and claiming Jobseekers Allowance since then. In that time, I feel that on several occasions the operation of the rules have tended to hinder rather than promote my efforts to find employment. I am writing to you now about the most recent of these occasions, and what I feel to be the most direct and obvious example of such hindrance.

On Wednesday 21st January I was informed by my parents of a jobs fair being held the next week near to where they live. This struck them, and me, as being an ideal opportunity for me to expand my search for a job beyond the Wealden area, since relocation would be easy by moving into the spare bedroom at my parents’ until such time as I could find my own accommodation in the new region. I therefore made plans to visit my parents in order to attend the jobs fair. It was my intention to spend a few days afterwards in the area just in case any employers wanted me to attend an interview soon afterwards.

By coincidence, the date of the jobs fair was the same date as my next signing on at the Jobcentre in T___; I therefore immediately rang the Jobcentre to inform them of my plans and in the hope that alternative arrangements could be made for my signing. I expressed the hope that I could sign on Tuesday 27th January instead of Wednesday 28th, as this would give me the opportunity of staying those extra days with my parents hoping for a call to interview.

Firstly, I was told that it was never possible to sign earlier than the due date for signing. Although I was disappointed by this, I was not particularly surprised (even though it is common practice to alter signing, or paying-out days, to account for Bank Holidays). I was told in my first telephone call to the Jobcentre that I would have to attend on Thursday 29th January to sign and that I would have to “hope that a signing slot is available”. As I had occasion to attend the Citizens Advice Bureau on Friday 23rd January, I mentioned this situation to the advisor there, along with the other subjects on which I was seeking advice, and from the CAB made a second telephone call to the Jobcentre, with the guidelines concerning such situations in front of me. These guidelines stated clearly that I should be given a specific appointment since I had informed them of the fact and reasons for my missing the Wednesday signing, and it was only with the information there in front of me that I was able to secure the appointment, and thereby my ability to sign at all.

Secondly, I was not informed at any time prior to my journey that it would have been possible to arrange for me to sign at the Jobcentre local to the jobs fair. I only discovered this when I attended the jobs fair, and I asked the representatives of the local Jobcentre to provide some form of proof that I had attended the jobs fair as I had informed the T___ Jobcentre I would do. The local Jobcentre staff members refused to provide such a signature or proof of my attendance, but told me I should have arranged in advance for their job centre to accept my official signature.

Thirdly, and of most concern to me, I was informed that if I chose to attend the jobs fair instead of signing at my originally scheduled time and date, that the matter would have to be referred to an external adjudication as to whether my reasons for not attending were sufficient to justify it. It is this point in particular that I feel constitutes a clear barrier to my efforts to find work. Whenever an external adjudication is made in this way, it at least carries the possibility that sanctions will be applied against a jobseeker. The fear of this was a strong disincentive to me in seeking to attend the jobs fair. I was told that I would need as much proof as possible of my attending the jobs fair, and of opportunities gained by doing so (this is why I asked the local Jobcentre employees to give me some form of proof of my attendance at the jobs fair).

In the end, I decided that I would attend the jobs fair because I felt that I should do everything in my power to look for work, and should ignore the barriers being put in my way by the Jobcentre rules – in the words of a famous Conservative politician, I decided that I would “get on my bike and look for work”. I returned home on Wednesday 28th January having attended the jobs fair and made several applications by CV, and acquired in addition application forms for other jobs, which evidence I then presented to the Jobcentre on Thursday morning when I attended my appointment to sign late.

I am still awaiting the outcome of the external adjudication as to whether my attendance at the jobs fair was sufficient reason to miss my scheduled signing date and time.

The barriers that I feel the Jobcentre placed in front of me, when I had hoped instead for encouragement and assistance, are therefore as follows:

• Failure to inform me accurately of all the options for me to sign on;
• The inability to sign early, which would have made my attendance at the jobs fair less hurried, and would also have made it easier to be available for employers had they wished to interview me;
• The initial failure to grant me a specific appointment to sign on Thursday;
• The inability of the staff at T___ Jobcentre to make an assessment of my reasons for not attending on Wednesday, and necessity instead of sending it to external adjudication.

In a time of economic crisis, when more and more people are becoming unemployed, it seems to me to be counterproductive to be placing barriers such as these in the way of those who, like me, are earnestly and vigorously doing all they can to secure gainful employment. It is with great alarm that I have viewed the Government’s current proposals to use the unemployed as de facto slave labour, and I can only imagine how much harder this will make the task of finding actual gainful employment and lifting oneself from the mire of joblessness.