http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/10/private-companies-making-fortune-out-of-unemployed
With the current figures looking better than they have done is this a fair criticism?
Read the following article that I can vouch applies throughout other areas of the U.K
"An old friend emailed me recently from the northern city that has been his home since birth, though we first met far away in Pakistan where work had taken both of us. He's a freelance – I won't say in what or name him – but when he started out his city still exported machinery across the world and his work was associated with that. He's 62 now, single, no family, and owns a small house. "Work seems to have dried up these last few months," he wrote in March, "so I may have to sign on again – and no doubt get threatened with being 'sanctioned' again, although now I hear that for new claimants my age they're recommending pension credits – looks interesting, anything to get the JSA numbers down. They're certainly not making it any easier for these youngsters that are claiming – the jobcentre staff say they have quotas for sanctioning but the government won't admit to it, they really are a bunch of bastards."
I knew that JSA meant job seekers' allowance, which is £71.70 a week for a single person, and I suspected that he feared "sanctioning" – having his benefits cut – because he wouldn't be interviewed for any old job. But pension credits? His next email took the time to explain. So far as he could see, "the holy grail" of government policy was to reduce the number of JSA claimants by whatever means so that the unemploymentfigures look better. ("Thatcher did this by allowing millions to claim disability allowance, and we are paying the price for that!") Money could be saved by "bringing in the heavies" to take over from the "usually sympathetic local jobcentre people" and sanctioning the unemployed for not applying for enough jobs ("10, 20 or maybe 50 jobs a week") or for missing an appointment. Reducing numbers, on the other hand, required a different technique.
After a year of signing on as unemployed, a jobseeker is obliged to turn to one of the government's workfare programmes that are run by private companies where, in my friend's words, "they either try to find you work or, if you have nous, persuade you to go self-employed". Two years ago, he was sent to be interviewed by one of these companies, Ingeus, which operates under the slogan: "Our role is simple – to help people realise their potential." His interviewer strongly recommended self-employment in words my friend always remembered: "Look, you'll get £50 working tax credits, housing and council tax benefits, so you only have to earn £22 a week to be better off [than on JSA]. We'll give you a start-up grant of say £300 and we're off your back."
In fact, my friend was already self-employed – self-employed in theory and often unemployed in practice. His work picked up for a while, but is now again in the doldrums. If the government still wants to keep him out of the unemployment figures then the pension credit, a supplement to low incomes for people approaching pensionable age, is the obvious way to go. Before his work ran out, my friend earned £2,500 in the last financial year and received £50 a week in working tax credits and full relief on council tax. After some calculations, he thinks he'd be entitled to pension credits at the top rate of £145 a week while still preserving some or all of his council tax benefit.
To my friend, this looks a good deal. He won't need to sign on once a fortnight and the £7,250 a year in pension credits comes very close to the sum he needs to live on: he leads, as he says, a simple life. But the term "pension credit" confuses him, because, having neglected to pay enough national insurance contributions, his actual pension when he comes to claim it in three or four years' time will be lower than the money he could receive now, as a so-called credit. Nor is this his only confusion. Why is the government so keen to encourage private companies "to make a fortune out of the unemployed", paying the likes of Ingeus up to £14,000 for every person they help into "sustained employment" (including self-employment with small and precarious earnings), when jobcentres are offering £49 a week under the new enterprise allowance scheme to anyone willing to call themselves self-employed? If you want to cheat the figures, doesn't the state offer a cheaper way of doing it?
That may be so, but more states than the United Kingdom have offloaded their responsibilities under a smokescreen of talk that capitalism knows best. Ingeus, for example, was founded in 1989 in Australia as a small organisation called Work Directions dedicated to getting apparently "unemployable" people, often with physical disabilities, into employment. There was an inspiring story behind it. Its founder, Therese Rein, had seen her war-wounded father overcome severe handicap to work as an aeronautical engineer.
When the age of outsourcing began to dawn in the early 2000s, it rebranded itself as Ingeus and was soon opening branches in countries as disparate as Sweden and Saudi Arabia as a provider of welfare-to-work and business psychology services. When Rein's husband, Kevin Rudd, became prime minister, the group sold off its Australian business to avoid perceptions of conflict of interest, but three years later Duncan Smith's work programme opened a large new opportunity in the UK. Getting British people into work or "work" is estimated to generate about two-thirds of Ingeus's turnover.
Last month Ingeus was sold to an American company, Providence Service Corporation, in a complicated deal that was reported to be worth $225m (£135m). Every time you hear of the growth in the self-employed, which allows the government to claim that "more people are in work than ever before", think of a graph at the new company headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, and the strange way money is made."
Then look at todays article
It is hard to speak the truth about valued national institutions. But when they are not fit for purpose, we must speak out. Reports on Monday suggested the government is considering a radical overhaul of the Jobcentre Plus system that is so badly failing to help the unemployed find work. The news doesn’t come a day too soon. Our one-size-fit-all national system doesn’t reflect the varying and specific needs of individuals and needs serious reform.
The system in its current form is clunky, impersonal, and suited neither to today’s society. Time and time again I meet young people being let down by a framework that fails to help people find lasting employment.
For Britain to build a balanced and sustainable economy, and to avoid a genocide of wasted talent and potential, that needs to change.
Some people will feel an instinctive hesitation about scrapping an organisation that aims to support the unemployed and help them find work. The fact is that jobcentres are totally failing in their primary aim: only around one in three claimants find sustainable work within six months of claiming benefits. That is not good enough for an institution that receives many millions in state funding and serves, in theory at least, a crucial purpose. Back in November I gave a speech calling for exactly these reforms.
As the MP for an area like Tottenham you quickly learn that the factors leading to unemployment are as numerous as they are diverse. 18% of the working population, for example, has a mental health condition that creates a barrier to sustainable work. The unique nature of each case of unemployment means services must be personalised and responsive to individual needs. That could not be further from the reality of Jobcentre Plus. The fault is not with the advisers themselves but with a system that forces them to see too many people in too little time. When each overburdened adviser has an average caseload of 168 people, it is virtually impossible for individuals to be given any specialised support or treatments tailored to particular needs. It is hardly surprising, then, that two-thirds of unemployed young people feel that government services aren’t giving them enough support.
A report by the thinktank Policy Exchange outlines much of what needs to change. The current system should be abolished and replaced with a flexible alternative that can treat cases on an individual basis. The number of support providers should be increased so that specialist help is always available. And we should separate the system that distributes unemployment benefits from the organisations that help the unemployed into work. That will mean the young unemployed are treated not as benefit scroungers but as what they are: people with the potential to make a hugely valuable contribution to society. Unemployed people should be treated as potential to be realised, not a problem to be solved.
For this to happen, Jobcentre Plus’s role of helping people into employment should be handed to specialist organisations, creating a network of regulated charities and private sector organisations that already have expertise in this area. This would mean that individuals could be referred to an organisation best suited to their needs, with support packages tailored to each person. This system should be geared towards helping people on a case-by-case basis, working with individuals to work out the barriers preventing them from finding work and building a plan for overcoming those barriers. It is this kind of methodical and personal approach that will help people not simply to find work but, equally importantly, find the type of work that they are best suited to.
There is also a real need for services to be better integrated. Each organisation tasked with helping people into work should act as a central hub for combating the many different reasons that lead to people ending up unemployed– from health issues to confidence problems to a lack of training and skills. The limited powers of Jobcentre Plus staff mean that too often they try to force people into work without making efforts to tackle the underlying problems that make employment difficult. It is not surprising, then, that 40% of people that Jobcentres help into work end up back on benefits within six months.
Jobcentres have become a bastion of green and yellow-branded stigma; a silo where the unemployed are forced to trek each week for the briefest of appointments with an overworked and under-equipped adviser. It would make much more sense to move employment support organisations to the places where people spend their time: in shops, on high streets and in community buildings. We need to make it as easy as possible for those who need help and support to get it.
To tackle the scourge of young unemployment we need to be ambitious. That means radical reform of an institution that in its current form is not fit for purpose. The government should be brave in undertaking reform of the employment support system. It is the very least our young people deserve.
As stated before I have worked for A4e and other providers and can assure readers of the Blog that intiative is restricted to the requirments of DWP contract. Indeed, other approaches DWP may wish to roll out are restricted. Governments have always looked for the short cuts rather than the concept of meeting the need of the employer's business need. It takes some research to find out about quality available training as most forms of traning are restricted to Level1
I was approached by a Graduate asking my advice about the job Seeker agreement..Be aware i said that you need to be clear as to your own direction so you dont get trapped into a job rather than reaching you full potential
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