Flexible New Deal Scandal:
Flexible New Deal

UKBIX announces to New Deal Scandal that Mark Hamilton, 36, a civil servant working at a Jobcentre Plus office in Scotland stole over £24,000 from Giros he made and cashed after he stole blank giros when the Jobcentre Plus office merged with another.

His seven month scamming spree was brought to a close when the DWP Fraud team contacted the police.

What took the DWP so long to notice?   View the rest on Flexible New Deal Scandal

Just looked at the statistics on display at the Jobcentre the other day. In the last few months (last quarter) they received 247 complaints to only 5 praises.  A complaint is one to the District Manager in writing not a verbal complaint, written complaint/letter to your personal adviser or unofficial complaint made online in form of feedback.

If this figure included verbal complaints and complaints to your personal adviser then it would be much higher.

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So you are unemployed, about to make a claim for Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) or have made a new claim for Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) however not attended an New Jobseeker Interview (NJI) yet. This article explains what you need to know about claiming Jobseekers Allowance.

You wouldn’t have thought that the Jobseekers Agreement (JSAg) would be a crutial element to claiming. The problem is most claimants see it as simply a pathetic agreement which is created just as procedure, whereas the truth is the Jobseekers Agreement is in effect, within a limited capacity, your power to create a law to your specification of how some elements of the Jobseekers Act 1995 (as amended) are implemented and used.

The Jobseekers Agreement (JSAg) has two main uses:- The first is to trap the typical naive Jobseeker in to being required to apply for more widespread jobs than otherwise could be argued as reasonable. As the average jobseeker doesn’t realise the full impact of the Jobseekers Agreement they will go along with whatever the Employment Officer (EO) suggests, they then sign and it becomes a large element of the rules for receiving Jobseekers Allowance. The second reason is for the Jobseekers Agreement to be used for enforcement – or should I say to decide about applying sanctions or refusing later benefit claims.

You may also hear the Jobseekers Agreement (JSAg) being an agreement you negotiate, where you pledge what you will do weekly to find work, what your responsibilities are, your availability and what restrictions you have.

Was it just me? ..Or did I hear the word negotiate mentioned? Read on… View the rest on Flexible New Deal Scandal

You may have heard about assaults on Jobcentre Plus staff in the news, however, these figures are largely distorted. They refer to Incident Cases and not solely due to physical assault – which we will explain later.

Six months ago Jobcentre Plus boasted over 1,600 security guards costing the taxpayer over £40 million a year.  I am sure this amount will be on the increase as new claimants are increasing.

This article will focus on: a) are all these security guards necessary?  and  b) how many actual assaults were there?

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I can’t stress enough how great it is to have a job which is permanent and secured

Tonight I wish to raise the major unemployment issue: the System’s  Cherry Pick or Park approach.

Regardless of being in a recession or not, there are two distinct groups of unemployed people that are jobseekers who are on benefits:

1) The Lucky.

The lucky group will only be unemployed for a short period typically between 2 weeks and six months and head back into sustainable long term fulltime employment. This employment is likely to be secured by knowing friends and family, and even keeping in the loop of internal job vacancies from previous employers rather than the overcrowded application processes.

and

2)   The Unlucky.

The unlucky group is destined to remain longterm unemployed with the occassional unsustainable short jobs (Agency, temporary etc.) from anything between several hours a week here and there, and 4-9 months. The unlucky ones are forced to register for agencies who are only usually interested in promoting very casual work – which obviously are unsustainable, inadequate to live on, and without much notice (a phone call on the day to work is common) – and requires either signing off for the period (then signing back on afterwards) or going down to sign on and declare work resulting in no payment and probably a staff member reporting you to the fraud squad.

Wonder why there are so many agency jobs advertised at the Jobcentre?

89% of the recuitment industry in the UK is for temporary jobs.  The Government is supporting this multi-billion pound industry and sticking the economy before people as usual (apart from with the banks of course). Putting it another way; the industry’s combined turnover for permanent jobs and normal non-permanent contract jobs make up only around one tenth (11%) of their annual income.

The rest is made up of short term casual short notice jobs. Do you want to be rung up at 7:30am asking if you can start work at 8am for 4 hours at minimum wage?

Employers prefer someone who has stuck at their job for long periods of time

No employer likes candidates who have worked on several different jobs in one year.

Jobseekers Allowance terminated

The jobcentre has for a while allowed jobseekers to be more choosey for jobs they apply for. Generally, if you aren’t better off working than receiving Jobseekers you don’t have to apply. Agency work on the other hand, is an exception to this rule – if you declined the above offer for example – you would likely receive a sanction for it.

New Deal

New Deal is infamous for “Cherry Picking” and “Parking”…

This has to stop!

It actually is a human right for self-progression etc. it is not right for people to just be parked (like a car?) in the car park of unemployment waiting for petrol. Then someone comes along and hand washes the car. The car needs petrol! It doesn’t matter if the car looks brand new, still needs petrol to get anywhere! (don’t ask lol)

Unemployed? What category have you fallen in to?

I don’t believe that the “clever” ones get the jobs and the “dumb” ones don’t. This is why I called the groups “lucky” and “unlucky”. Luck has a part in all this too. Feel free to leave a comment, if you are unemployed, stick which group you think you fall in to, looking back at past events and the current circumstances.

The Independent Watchdog for the Department for Work & Pensions

We hope you’ll find us a useful resource in helping to recognize, combat and raise awareness of abuse of power involving the UK government’s largest department, a department dependent upon a sea of civil and judicial servants, we repeatedly find not doing their job properly.

In March 2007 the then Department for Constitutional Affairs Minister Harriet Harman MP spoke on BBC1’s Question Time of “transparency” and “adherence to law”.

It is with ongoing sadness, we find her former department failing in the latter, this campaign providing the transparency parliament craves.

On the basis of a detailed body of written evidence demonstrating wrongdoing, we seek; abolition of the Office of Social Security Commissioners (OSSC) and the Parliamentary Ombudsman (PO), as they stand.

We likewise campaign for lay involvement in social security appeals, whether by jury or panels, to combat abuse of power in these private judicial courts which we find breaking the law, contrary to their function, as Parliament requires; to uphold it.

We also want to see change in the complaints procedure, again by way of truly independent adjudication for staff misconduct and disciplinary action for all demonstrated instances of mischief or illegal activity within the DWP and its associated bodies including the Child Support Agency (CSA), now re-branded the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC).

We aim likewise to inform, how public servants, salaried by the British taxpayer, can, for their own reasons, bully and defraud the weakest members in society , while those judicial servants in place to oversee them, not only condone such, join in, cover up and whitewash their colleagues criminal behaviour, the DWP remaining a bastion of the archaic and corrupt practice of closing ranks; a mentality which invites the campaign.

DWP CORRUPTION – YOU AND “THE LAW”

PRIVATE AGENCIES

As a DWP watchdog, we have found the DWP’s Office for Constitutional Affairs (now re-branded the Ministry of Justice) misusing taxpayer’s money to employ private legal firms to knowingly and successfully plead for corrupt and illegal decisions, from corrupt Social Security Commissioners .

USE OF GAGGING ORDERS

We have likewise found corrupt DWP management misusing taxpayer’s money, to hire private legal agencies to threaten and thereby gag private citizens attempting to pursue legitimate redress of grievance within the DWP’s internal grievance procedure long before the internal procedure is exhausted!

HUMAN RIGHTS ACT 1998

With regard to the Human Rights Act 1998, adopted by the U.K. we observe breaches of this legislation by the DWP standard, routine practice, the Appeal Tribunal Service and the OSSC invariably tolerating or paying only lip service to such, the DWP having little or no interest in their customer’s legal rights, a situation most benefit claimants know little about.

The so called “new system of protection” namely the European court, requires “domestic remedies” to have been “exhausted”. Although seemingly well intended, the Act is itself vague, slow and beyond the reach of welfare claimants to pursue, such requiring the employment of an advocate for opinion from the court of appeal and beyond, something generally not covered we understand, by legal aid, not forgetting from past cases it could take over sixteen years to get there as in the Deumeland case.

That protection the public could do without and having sought such, never finding a remedy anyway:

Klaus Deumeland was fined DM800 for bringing “vexatious” proceedings his complaint being that the proceedings were extraordinary protracted .

Make up your own mind whether sixteen years is a reasonable period to obtain (or in his case not obtain) the said protection but otherwise keep the legal profession in work at the expense of both the public purse and the victim.

More DWP Jobcentre Plus corruption on www.ukcorruptiontoday.com

I was reading a great article on Welfare Reform (the Welfare Reform Bill 2009) however I greatly disagreed with the points made in the article so I decided to quote sections of it and comment!

The Welfare Reform Bill is to be a tough piece of legislation that will compel people in meeting with their obligations. It comes as no surprise and is long overdue. One of the first targets will be in removing 1 million people off Incapacity Benefit and into work. The entire benefits system is to be streamlined with Income Support being replaced with a leaner ‘out of work benefits’ system. The time has come by which those who “fiddle” the system should take account of what their obligations and duties are.

Removing one million people off “Incapacity Benefit”? Incapacity Benefit doesn’t exist. To the best of my knowledge the Welfare Reform Act 2007 replaced Incapacity Benefit and Income Support with an Employment and Support Allowance in 2008.

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YMCA Training who has dismissed a New Deal participant in just little over 30 minutes of the New Deal course Induction Week due to conflict of personal opinion (breach of the “Freedom of Expression”/”Freedom of Speech” and “Freedom of Thought”/”Freedom of Conscience” Human Rights) has justified their reason as such views were a “Health and Safety concern“.

This is obviously complete nonsense.  The Jobcentre however warranted their request for dismissal even though staff were said to be against their reasons.  The participant therefore is likely to be pending 26 week sanctions