I am an ex-employee of the Department for Work and Pensions and between Sept 13 and Aug 14 worked as a Personal Advisor/Works Coach at a busy inner-city Jobcentre in Leicester. It was my task to send Claimant’s payments to the Decision Makers for sanction.
Email the Department’s own Decision Makers to staff:
The direction isn’t reasonable – guidance states that JSD’s should be issued, where the customer won’t do something voluntarily. If you issue the direction immediately then you need to convince the DM why it was reasonable to issue it to the customer without first asking him to do it voluntarily. As well as convincing us why and how it will help him to get back into work.
From the Department’s own guidance:
However, for legal reasons, you cannot issue a Jobseeker’s Direction to mandate a claimant to create a profile and public CV unless a DWP IAD service is reasonably available to them should they need to use one - for example, because they do not want to accept cookies and therefore need to have access to a device on which cookies have already been accepted
Those Coaches who most successfully carried out the Dept’s new Claimant Commitment ethos and got their Claimants to engage in a realistic and achievable path to work would logically have hardly any Claimants who were not complying to the criteria for receiving JSA. As such they would not need to stop their money and would then end up in disciplinary for not stopping their enough peoples money. It was a catch 22 situation in that those most successful in carrying out the Dept’s Claimant Commitment policy would end up in disciplinary.
I received no answer at the disciplinary meetings or in the written decisions were all these issues were ignored. I have written to my MP Mr Andrew Robathan who has taken this case up for me and is arranging to speak to the head of Jobcentre Plus.
Sept 12 980
Oct 13 5,570
Aug 14 2,120
These figures have been increased by the application of the ‘Loughborough Method” throughout the region. They have fallen because the Claimants are getting wise to the tricks used on them by unscrupulous Advisors and the staff themselves are refusing to follow the instruction to issue a JSD at every meeting as they are sickened by the injustice of it.
If the Department had fulfilled its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act I would be able to show the spread of this pernicious policy.
To Summarise:
Staff are being bullied with the threat of disciplinary action into following unwritten local policy that is against the Department’s own published guidance and according to that guidance is illegal.
The number of Claimants being sanctioned has increased due to a deliberate policy of management, a policy they know to be wrong as they refuse to put it in writing.
Imagine you are a member of staff who for financial reasons cannot afford to lose your bonus never mind your job. You know that you have to meet unwritten ‘expectations’ in sending payments off to be sanctioned or you will be disciplined. Which Claimants do you decide to pick on? The strong and articulate or the weak and vulnerable? The answer is obvious. There are staff with few scruples who will set up claimant’s to fail by failing to give out information or giving false information. I know of a case in which a person who could neither read nor write was given a JSD by a “Signer” to put their CV on the Universal Jobmatch website. Unsurprisingly they did not manage this task and were sanctioned by their “Signer”. Fortunately, when the Claimant next attended the office, the original “Signer” was off on leave and as the Claimant, in tears, told her temporary new “Signer” what had happened. Happily the temporary new “Signer” was a good person and wrote an appeal for the Claimant and a formal complaint for them. If her original “Signer” had been in that day, the Claimant would have been told there was nothing they could do and he would have received another sanction (financial penalty) which would have been a direct punishment for their lack personal skills.
Claimants are paid JSA three working days after they sign on. If this day falls on a Bank Holiday great efforts are made to make payment before the holiday rather than a day afterwards. I don’t know whether this is to meet statute law or through a realisation that many Claimants are living hand to mouth and need the money by the day it’s due. If a Claimant’s payment is sent to the Decision Makers it is stopped immediately until they make their decision, this could take 6-8 weeks. To seriously aggravate the situation, is that as soon as JSA payment is suspended, the Claimant’s Housing Benefit also stops. For many of the most vulnerable this can lead to homelessness, which I suggest does not assist either their health or job prospects in any way.