Introduction

I feature some views on the Unemployment situation News in the UK. We feature the latest on The U.K Unemployment News. The Youtube channel has a focus on UK Unemployment News with specially selected material

Wednesday 30 July 2014

UnderEmployment

Arguably Underemployment in the U.K is as significant issue as Unemployment has ever been. Politically there has always been the issue of the Job Seekers on Job Seeker Allowance (Unemployment Benefit) But now we see the emergence of the part time worker, or 0 hour worker
many politicians argue that this suits these individuals. However, the growth of the Food bank in recent years indicates that this is not the case.
The growth of self employment rather than unemployment has seen development but the test will occur when the interest rates rise as to how many of those self employed one man bands survive. Often the case is that these self employed people will work part time as well as being self employed.
The 0 hour contract is possibly the worst contract as it does not provide sufficient stability of hours and income to meet our Banking industry criteria. 
The emphasis of some of the sites I am connected to will be adjusting their direction to reflect on this change in emphasis


Underemployment refers to an employment situation that is insufficient in some important way for the worker, relative to a standard.[1] Examples include holding a part-time job despite desiring full-time work, and overqualification, where the employee has education, experience, or skills beyond the requirements of the job.
Underemployment has been studied in recent decades from a variety of perspectives, including economicsmanagementpsychology, and sociology. In economics, for example, the term underemployment has three different distinct meanings and applications. All meanings involve a situation in which a person is working, unlike unemployment, where a person who is searching for work and cannot find a job. All meanings involve under-utilization of labor which is missed by most official (governmental agency) definitions and measurements of unemployment.
Underemployment can refer to:
  1. "Overqualification" or "overeducation", or the employment of workers with high education, skill levels, or experience in jobs that do not require such abilities.[2] For example, a trained medical doctor who works as a taxi driver would experience this type of underemployment.
  2. "Involuntary part-time" work, where workers who could (and would like to) be working for a full work-week can only find part-time work. By extension, the term is also used inregional planning to describe regions where economic activity rates are unusually low, due to a lack of job opportunities, training opportunities, or due to a lack of services such as childcare and public transportation.
  3. "Overstaffing" or "hidden unemployment" (also called "labor hoarding"[3]), the practice in which businesses or entire economies employ workers who are not fully occupied—for example, workers currently not being used to produce goods or services due to legal or social restrictions or because the work is highly seasonal.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

Providers and Job centre business

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)
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.
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

Email to employers for free with a personal touch


In todays day and age all Job seekers can learn new skills and ways of contacting employers.
Why for example shouldn't you send out your CV and cover letter to a large number of employers at the same time Using Mail merge and a free gmail account you can do exactly that and you can add all those key important lines to feature the key aspects that the employer should expect. You can even add those key words that their search systems use on recruitment. Get a few prospective letters proof read by someone who can sport those errors in grammar and spelling.Its an effective concept and if needed you can add some key touches.
Agreed you need to build an effective database and do some research but that is all part of the work required.
If all goes to plan then the employer may well be impressed.
Employers and companies do it all the time in the form of marketing you . The News Letters that personally appear in your inbox. Here is your chance!!!

Tuesday 22 July 2014

Sanction advice

Here are some tips for anyone being sanctioned.
Firstly remember there is a right to an appeal. Appeals often have success
sanctions are multi layered and are set for different levels of time.
they can run together as well
Worth taking advice, even though you may be angry you have to be calm during a meeting with them.
Write everything down and keep hold of all paperwork so that you can take the matter as far as is needed.

Graduates have positive news


Graduate vacancies have changed recently as the recent reposts have indicated. The student loans situation has come under pressure and one of the questions has to be are the Graduates qualifying with the degrees that they employers are seeking?


or

What positions are the graduates taking

There has been a significant increase in the number of graduate vacancies in the UK but many employers are struggling to fill posts, a poll says.
The Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) predicted there would be 17% more graduate posts available in 2013-14.
However, its summer survey of 189 top employers found nearly a quarter had been unable to fill posts last year.
The government said the increase in graduate vacancies showed confidence in British business was growing.

Start Quote

Nearly a quarter of member have unfilled vacancies”
AGR survey
The twice-yearly survey of the top graduate recruiters, which runs from September to September and covers a wide range of businesses, suggests "significant recovery" in the graduate job market.
There will be an estimated 22,076 vacancies by September 2014.
It follows on from optimistic signals in the winter survey when a 10% increase in graduate posts was heralded.
It says: "This is good news but it doesn't mean the market has necessarily become easier for all employers and students.
"Nearly a quarter of members have unfilled vacancies. This means there is a mismatch in the graduate labour market between the supply of students and the demands of employers."
The report goes on to say the causes of "this dysfunction are complex", and it predicts the problem will grow because of a fall in the number of teenagers.
On wages, the median graduate starting salary has risen by £500 to £27,000 this year.
There is a £20.000 threshold on the Student loan

Changes in graduate job vacancies

  • 2007-08 Down 6.7%
  • 2008-09 Down 17.8%
  • 2009-10 Up 12.6%
  • 2010-11 Up 2.8%
  • 2011-12 Down 0.9%
  • 2012-13 Up 4.6%
  • 2013-14 Up 17%
The largest starting salaries are for investment bank or fund managers who can expect £42,000, according to the survey.
AGR chief executive Stephen Isherwood said: "The rise in vacancies and salaries shown in our summer report is fantastic news for graduates, and it is encouraging to see that employers are able to invest in graduate talent in this way.
"However, this doesn't mean the job market is easy.
"There are still unfilled graduate vacancies as employers are not always able to find the right people, with the right knowledge, skills and attitudes, for the job.
"Graduates must ensure they really do their research, target their applications and ensure their CVs do them justice if they want to be in with a good chance of securing a place on a graduate scheme following university."
A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: "This increase in the number of graduate vacancies is yet further demonstration of the growth in confidence of British businesses.
"There is an increasing number of students entering higher education, and evidence across the sector suggests that employers recruiting from university and higher education have found the large majority of graduates to be well or very well prepared for work."

Saturday 19 July 2014

Housing london-rent cap arrears-Benefit and work

Housing Benefit and the CAP rent is a political issue. If people find part time work. Brent is featured on this video along with the Immigration issue. This includes the Citizenship issue. Add this to the fact that London has the highest rent which means that if you cannot afford rent and working you can still be evicted. So potentially you can be working and still be moved to another area.
If you have a large family then London ceases to be cost effective.
The CAP is a National CAP.
60% of those capped are single parents.
The move from London is not popular. Is it the correct move..A difficult question. If all that is required is part time work then couples are less likely to have the child care issues.
The Grocer job isn't enough for a large family. Having to move out of the area.
The 0 hour contract may be another challenge. Certainly child care is also an issue . Affordability in the private sector is a major issue. and is likely to get worse. It is clear that Councils will have the issue of moving more and more families out of London. More offers being made out of London in areas like Birmingham and other cities. Additional to this is the demands on housing in these areas outside of London that have their limits.
Welfare Reform Teams have a tough hard job. DHP Discretionary Housing payments have their limits.  The larger the family the Bigger the challenge.Even in employment the challenge for the larger family remains. For the single parent there is a need for flexibility
Siyad SHARIF  is in work

Thursday 17 July 2014

Bedroom tax-An election battleground

This definatly looks like a change in position from the viewpoint of the Lib Dems and a possible key moment in the for a change in the direction of this particular policy
Nick Clegg will set the Lib Dems on a major collision course with the Tories over his plea to axe the hated Bedroom Tax.
The Deputy PM has finally agreed the crippling penalties are battering the poorest in society and will push for change before next year’s general election.

There have clearly been issues on the legal side with challenges.
But if Mr Clegg cannot persuade his heartless
Coalition partners the Bedroom Tax is a disastrous flop before Britain goes to the polls, he will make ditching it a Lib Dem manifesto pledge.


Wednesday 16 July 2014

Employment training and Geographical challenge

In the recent Mind the Gap: London vs The Rest it was identified that there was a significant Gap between the economies of London and the rest of the country
Education and skill base is seen as an issue for the U.K and takes planning.

When you look at the figures produced by the ONS and then reflect on the UK map they  produce the figures make interesting readng based on the overall

economic situation. Using your mouse you can highlight any area of the country and see the figures for the are represented from the Consensus. The qualifications and skills differ
Today's unemployment figures are continuing to encourage many They however do not take into consideration the number of hours that people are working. The rate of income increase sadly isnt reflecting the cost of living and the Unemployment figures do not allow for those on Universal Credit still, neither do they reflect the 0 hour contract that in many cases keeps employees under the Eu hours rules as well as reducing the options of overtime.. People working part time Youth Unemployment has been a challenge since the recession


Education and training is a key 25% of youth have lived at home. This months figures



If you look at the GVA the Gross Value Added per head in the regions with London being most GVA is higher. Education has an interesting report here


Tuesday 15 July 2014

Hidden story-timebomb

Well hidden in yesterdays news was the update on the so called" Bedroom Tax"
"Some 59% of tenants - more than 300,000 - affected by new "spare room subsidy" rules were in arrears five months after the changes came into effect last year"
This is surely a problem disaster area for the future. 
"The new interim report, carried out by the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research and Ipsos MORI, looked at the initial impact of the policy.
The report - the first official study into the change - found most people were paying by cutting back on household essentials, and a quarter had borrowed to pay their rent.
During the first five months, 41% of affected tenants had paid their additional rent in full but 59% were struggling - 39% had made some contribution to the additional rent but 20% had paid nothing at all."
Even with advice there is likely to be a shortage of accommodation for those needing to rent appropriate accommodation. There is also likely to be shortage in revenue for council and Housing association. With a potential issue for investment in infrustructure
Blame Tenants?
"The analysis for the DWP found that while many tenants hit by the cut had wanted to move, they had been unable to do so owing to the lack of smaller properties.
While 19% of tenants had registered to downsize, 4.5% had managed to do so within the first six months of the policy"
To set up and implement a policy there has to be the flexibility in resource to meet the demand. In this instance there is clearly not.
" David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, which campaigns for affordable housing, said the government's policy remained "flawed".
He said: "Time and time again it has been shown that the bedroom tax is pushing people into rent arrears and people have been unable to downsize because of a lack of smaller properties.
"Now the figures from the DWP prove it is not working, surely now it is time for the government to admit they got it wrong and repeal this ill-thought policy."
If the builders are saying this then the Government needs to review this prior to the next General election.
This is my argument that there is a ticking time bomb which can lead to more social issues in many cases out of the control of the claiment. Add this to the Universal Credit system and the country has a right to have some concerns