WHAT WILL THE GOVERNMENT DO ABOUT THIS?

Liar!

Iain Duncan Smith claims that coalition government reforms are helping people back into work.

But yet another whistle blower, an ex Jobcentre official, John Longden,  has come forward with evidence that Jobcentre bosses have been instructing staff to inconvenience and agitate customers in order to encourage them off the books.  Staff who failed to meet sanctions targets each month are threatened with disciplinary action. The people they laughingly call “customers” are set up to fail from day 1.

 

Helps though, when you get an 11% pay rise,
doesn't it?

People, it seems, are being bullied off the dole. Staff have been told to annoy claimants, to change appointments without telling them. Sanctioned claimants are considered, for the purposes of government statistics, to be in employment, that is to say, no longer claiming benefits for being unemployed. This makes the figures look better, and saves the DWP budget for more important things like paying £39 for breakfast for Smithy, or buying his underpants on expenses.

Stephanie  killed herself because
she couldn't pay the bedroom tax.

There are reports of people being sanctioned for ridiculous reasons like...being 1 minute late for an appointment, for applying for the 'wrong' jobs, for missing an appointment whilst at an interview, for turning down a job interview becasue the client was already attending another job interview at the same time...even for failing to complete and interview because of having a heart attack in the middle of it! 

IDS's ambition. To be first at something!

Some of the people affected by unfair sanctions are having to borrowing money or visit food banks, but some have nowhere to turn and have died from hunger or cold, or have committed suicide.

We pay taxes for the Jobcentre system to exist. It is right that people be helped to find work, and that those who show a reluctance to do so should be sanctioned. But it seems to me that we are paying taxes to have people unfairly targeted in order to save the face of Iain Duncan Smith, who has made a complete mess of the benefits system, like everything else he has ever turned his hand to.

We have to get rid of him and his team of evil ministers, McVile and Fraud. The trouble is that the alternative Labour shadows would be every bit as vile.

SCANDAL OF TOP CIVIL SERVANTS' CONDITIONS

You’re not going to believe this. Even by UK standards this is a stonker.

A top Civil Servant spent his final working year as the stand-in head of Jobcentre Plus. Acting up, as it were. As a result of this he was rewarded with a 25% boost to his pension pot. He retired with a pension pot worth £1.75m.

It is interesting to note that during his tenure as chief executive of the job centres there was a 50% increase in the number of people on the dole.

A row has broken out over the award which has been described as being out of proportion for someone in the post temporarily and it has reminded us all of the debate over public sector pay and perks.

The civil servant in question is one Mel Groves whose pension value in March 2008, was £1.4m while he was chief operating officer for the agency. But because he stayed on to be the acting chief executive for one year the value of his fund rocketed. In March this year his fund was valued at £1.75m. Details of the package only emerged in the Jobcentre Plus annual report.

He retired in November 2009 aged 63 if you please (when the Dept of Work and Pensions is demanding that everyone work to the age of 66).

The Department for Work and Pensions admitted the £1.75m pot "looks large" but insisted it was because Mr Groves "has worked for a long time".

Hmmmm? He retired at 63, damn it.

They went on to say that there was nothing unusual about it. It was in line with the pension scheme that he was on. Apparently his wage was £175,000-£179,000 in his last year.

During Mr Goves tenure the number of people collecting Jobseekers’ benefit rose from 1 million to 1.5 million. JC+ was in disarray due to what they call a "capacity challenge" and what we human beings would call too few staff, too few offices, and general mismanagement.

The TaxPayers' Alliance described this situation as an extreme case of gold-plated public sector pensions, which represent a huge liability for taxpayers.

Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger pointed out that the size of the retirement fund was at odds with the experience of people attending Jobcentres. He said that MPs were giving up their lucrative pension provision (awww) and senior civil servants should do the same.

It seems inconceivable that in a country facing the kind of financial challenges we are, and where the chancellor is indicating that he will be ruthless with the benefits of people using the services of this organisation, the boss can run away with a gold plated pension, for presiding over chaos.

Hopefully something will happen soon as the Paymaster General is looking into how many people in the Civil Service are being paid to do nothing. Whitehall admitted having 2,400 in what they call "redeployment pools", and what we human beings would call, people sitting around on their backsides getting paid for doing sod all.

In January, the MoD had 1,525 officials with no role, including about 60 who had been jobless for at least two years.

WHAT?

I suggest: Note from Osborne to Fox. Overall allowance to MoD for salaries reduced by amount due to 1,525 personnel. Action this day.

SOUP KITCHENS AND FOOD PARCELS FOR EX-BENEFIT CLAIMANTS

Across the country tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people could be forced to rely on food parcels because of benefit problems, as Davnik Cleggeron’s government presses ahead with its plan to slash the country's welfare bill.

Of course cutting welfare is always a good idea, and helping people back to work is something that every government should do, and to be fair, has been doing, but the best time to help people back to work is when there is some work to help them back into.

Charities that run food banks have warned this weekend of the prospect of people having to rely on third world-style food aid, and, as a person peripherally involved with such a charity, and the amazing people who actually work there, I know that this is the case. The needs have nearly doubled over the last year. The charities think that food parcels and soup kitchens will have to be arranged for maybe up to 1.5 million people who will be moved off incapacity benefit.

Around 37% of people who have been referred to this degrading “poor house style” charity have been in need because of delays and inaccuracies caused by the DWP, whose agencies are understaffed to deal with influx of people they are having to deal with and staff are untrained and disincentivized.

I have certain knowledge of people’s benefits being stopped effectively retrospectively because of delays in sending out letters. And as you can’t just walk into a job centre for help, you have to make an appointment first, sometimes weeks in advance, this may well cause problems.

Neil Coyle, director of policy for the charity Disability Alliance said: "For people to be pushed into poverty and forced to rely on food parcels to eat, something we all think of as a basic human right, is disgusting,"

Foodbanks are something that perhaps most people find an alien concept in a supposedly first world country which conducts wars all over the world and has regattas at Henley, strawberry teas at Wimbledon, and garden parties at the Palace, but there are three times as many of these organizations as there were only 2 years ago.

Another of the problems is that people with chronic illnesses such as multiple sclerosis and ME will probably be told to go get work, move to another town, whatever, but perhaps very few employers will want to employ them, especially when there is a HUGE pool of labour freshly redundant from big business closures and civil service payoffs. They will be left with insufficient money to pay for medication out of their Job Seekers Allowance and may have to turn to crime, such as shoplifting, to make ends meet. This is what happens in third world countries where there is no or little welfare provision.

In other cases people will have to be hospitalized in an NHS already facing massive reductions in funding.

People visiting food banks are usually given supply of cheap food, which includes tinned, fruit, meat and fish, and pasta, tea bags and UHT milk. A parcel for a family of four weighs roughly 20kg, and is worth around £19. Food banks, which are staffed by volunteers, rely entirely on donations from local schools, businesses and individuals. They are community-run, in conjunction with local churches, and of course in many parts of the country there is no food bank provision at all.

How much will the new nuclear deterrent cost? Oh dear. It makes you proud to be British doesn’t it.

Pics: Poverty and people raising money for Food banks: Wealth and Fancy dress parties for the super rich at Royal Ascot and Henley Regatta.

MPs DON'T WANT TO FUND THE "INDEPENDENT" COMMITTEE THAT TRIES TO STOP THEM FIDDLING....

Well...would you look at the expression on that little piggy’s face.

The angry and defiant look from Mr Woolas, or Wool Ass as I prefer to call him is, it seems, directed at the new parliamentary expenses agency. Perhaps they have refused him his wife’s cosmetics, blouses and underwear on his expenses.

According to the Telegraph, disgruntled MPs have threatened to bring down the new supposedly independent allowances watchdog in protest at being treated like ordinary human beings and not the gods they think they are.

Now when I say it is independent, I use the word loosely because the MPs have to vote for its funding. They have already had some of the rules changed because it took time for them to get their money..... and they are not like ordinary people and have to make arrangements to suit when public bodies mess them around.

So members of the Speaker’s committee refused to sign off on the budget for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) and demanded officials provide new information before they would agreed to fund the body, raising the prospect that it will not be able to continue.

That’s the way to do it guys. I wish I could just refuse to fund the Revenue or Jobcentre Plus or DVLA or TV Licencing.... or whoever happens to be making a mess of my finances this week. Come to that I wish I could stop financing the Royal Bank!

MPs crowded the committee room and shouted and barracked the staff of the IPSA as they answered questions. (It’s nice to know that they can get really worked up about something, isn’t it?) and one was heard to shout “Bastards”, perhaps after a particularly liquid lunch, possibly on expenses, so it’s good to know that our representatives are showing our kids a good example on the behaviour front.

Presumably they will be fighting with equal vigour the next time that one of their constituents gets done over by some public body. Or maybe they’ll just yawn and pass the letter over to some clerk to deal with.

Bob Russell, LibDem, called the organization the most inefficient he had known in 40 years of public office. He should get out more. Really!

Nick Brown, Labour Chief Whip, indicated that there were no satisfied MPs... Well of course there aren’t, you balloon. No one who has had an open cheque book for years and years is ever happy with being kept in check! People like Winterton resigned because of it.

Charles Walker, Conservative, accused IPSA of wasting money after a compliance officer was appointed to investigate questionable claims. Erm, Charlie, don’t we have the same sort of thing on TV Licences, Tax, Social Security? Aren’t there snoopers all over the country making sure that we stump up and don’t cheat? Why would you be different?

On the basis that evidence turned up by the Daily Telegraph showed that over 50% of your number cheated on their expenses and took what was not there (in other parlance stole), I think it’s not unreasonable that you should be treated just like ordinary mortals.

A word of warning: don’t try to mess with this committee you set of conniving, dreary little cheats. We’re angry. You should know that. We haven’t forgotten. We are all suffering hardships to pay back for the incompetences of the last few years. Don’t add insult to our injury by continuing to assume that you are above it all. That would be really foolish.


Pics: Phil Woolas, Joanna Lumley's doormat, a collection of MPs, and Charles Walker who clearly has been off planet over the last year or so... out to lunch maybe (they have long lunch breaks in parliament)?

SO WHO IS GOING TO BRING 800,000 PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS TO SCOTLAND?

The Tories have promised to get people off Incapacity Benefit and JSA and into jobs.

They have also promised to drastically reduce the size of the civil service, presumably by sacking staff, and to increase the age at which men and women can retire.

This is a subject I’ve visited before on the blog, and I do so again because according to the Dundee Courier a new study by the GMB union shows that there are 650,600 people of working age in Scotland who are economically inactive and 175,200 people registered unemployed. But, as of this week, there are just 21,700 notified job vacancies across Scotland.

The Tory’s policies will increase unemployment by large numbers. Each year a certain number of people retire to be replaced by school or university leavers on the job market, but with the age for female retirement rising from 60 to 61, then 62 and by stages to 65 to make them at long last truly equal with men, there will be fewer people retiring and fewer vacancies to fill.

Then there are the civil service cuts that the Tories have promised. They will be swingeing; vast numbers of staff can be expected to go and in addition there will be the people who depended on these civil service personnel to spend their money in their shops, restaurants, gyms, hotels....etc. They will downsize too. And so the miserable cycle of unemployment will begin.

The Tories say that the private sector will supply the new jobs, but exactly how that is going to happen I’m not sure. Mrs Thatcher managed to created quite a number of jobs in finance and insurance, but ...well, the bottom has kinda fallen out of that market here, and in any case most of the existing or soon to be unemployed would, had they been capable, have taken that kind of job with big fat bonuses when they were in supply.

Where are the jobs going to be for the people who actually live in the country and aren’t some fairy tale dream that the politicians have created? You know, the ones that find reading and writing hard; the ones that can’t spell too well; the ones that speak with heavy regional accents and bad grammar; the ones that swear lots and punctuate with F***s rather than commas and semi-colons?

Currently in Dundee 5100 people were chasing 797 jobs and 20,300 people of working age were recorded as economically inactive. That’s around 25,000 people chasing 800 jobs (31 people for every job) and that’s before all the redundancies from councils and civil service.

And one of Dundee’s biggest private sector employers D C Thomson, the Courier’s publisher announced over 300 redundancies today.

So who will create these jobs? We might need around 800,000 of them across Scotland.

I’ve worked in the employment business for 10 years and more now and I can’t see foreign companies bringing manufacturing jobs here unless we bribe them with all manner of costly concessions, and allow them to employ eastern Europeans. For the life of me I can’t.

Getting Britain Back to Work. Is Iain Duncan Smith the Man for the Job?

Iain Duncan Smith has been handed the poison chalice that is the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). He seems a reasonable choice for the job. Although being something of a catastrophe as leader of the party and, despite touted as being more right wing than Norman Tebbit, he seems to be a man with both a heart and a head.

He will need both.

The objective is to get people back to work. A hard task. Unemployment is rising, and will continue to do so as the results of the recession long after recovery starts. There are fewer jobs at lower salaries, with fewer hours, and ever more people are being thrown on to the dole by the government’s own plans to cut costs.

It will seem to IDS that just as he gets a few hundred back to work, some government department will pay off 4,000 and he’ll be even worse off than before.

Welfare to work is important: for everyone. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to maintain any more people than necessary, and the jobless must work for a living. It’s how life is. You work, you eat!

But at the same we have to be cautious. There are many reasons why people are not working, besides the fact that currently there are few jobs.

Much is made of the Eastern European influx to do work that Brits won’t do, as there was in the 50s and 60s (in England) of Windrush Caribbeans. People from ex-communist countries are imbued with the culture that you worked or you were thrown into prison. Good, some say, let’s do that here... but you need to remember that there, the state provided jobs for everyone. We can’t do that here.

One of our problems is a mismatch between what is needed and what people can do. We live in an increasingly technological age. Of the few jobs that are available, most require trained and skilled workers. We don’t have them. Until recently we have always had heavy factory work for guys, and we don’t any more. The failure in the DWP and its predecessors’ management is that they have failed to understand that. You just can’t take a lad who wants, and is equipped to spend his days lifting, digging, sweating over a heavy load, and put him in a callcentre.

Much is made of people’s apparent unwillingness to work, but many I’ve worked with would do anything to get a decent job. Employers though don’t want telesalesmen with heavy local accents, and no natural inclination for keyboard work. Within a generation typing has gone from being something girls do, to a job for everyone.

We need to look very carefully at what successive governments have done to help create this situation.

The closure of most of our manufacturing industry; the stopping of assistance for apprenticeships; the competition between privatized exam boards selling the easiest exams to schools so that they will be able to get the best results in the league tables; the league tables themselves resulting in those who will not shine in exams being discarded; the ‘university for all’ at any cost, producing graduates for whom there are no jobs, and who end up taking the callcentre/pub jobs that might have gone to the less educated.

This subject is far too large for a single post. I will return to some of the many reasons I have found why people can’t get work, even when there is work.

I’d appreciate hearing other people’s views on surely one of the most contentious of all government problems.