Flexible New Deal Scandal:
Flexible New Deal

Ipswich Unemployed Action and New Deal Scandal has confirmed that Ipswich Borough Council has granted YMCA Training full planning consent for Dencora House.

Dencora House is a detention centre located on Whitehouse Industrial Estate – isolating New Deal participants from society. Even in an industrial estate, the property has a perimeter fence, the entrance is a vast distance from the main road and towards the opposite side the place is shielded from an even busier road by trees – it is good to see trees but I can’t help thinking that this place was chosen to keep the unemployed away from the town centre where most of the towns jobs actually are: funny that …and also where all the recruitment agencies are and the Jobcentre. They think the unemployed goes around creating crime such as stealing so sticking a large group of them in an industrial estate seems a way of solving that problem.

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If you have been on New Deal the chances are you had £4 unlawfully deducted weekly from travel reimbursements and expected to cover that from your training allowance.

New Deal Scandal and Ipswich Unemployed Action has confirmed this is in fact unlawful and New Deal participants may take action to recover the £52 deduction for the 13 weeks they attended. If participants have attended New Deal in the past they can still claim £52 for each 13 weeks they completed on New Deal. This could be £156 for some people.

Under 13 weeks? You can claim £4 per week for each deduction that occured.

You can also claim interest on outstanding amounts.

It has been discovered that Dencora House in Ipswich, a training centre run and rented by YMCA Training didn’t have planning permission for over 6 months.  To run a training centre you require D1 planning consent. Dencora House and it’s 10 units all had B1 Offices planning consent.  When YMCA Training, one of the largest training providers with 31 years experience and over 40 locations, rented units  it was unaware of the law and therefore traded without permission.

Ipswich Borough Council took enforcement action when they discovered that they were illegally trading when they only had consent for offices. The council forced them to apply for planning permission.  After YMCA Training were responsible for a long list of problems including damage to cars, litter and noise disturbances – the neighbouring businesses downstairs of Dencora House and in the local area appealed against their application.

It wasn’t until July that year where they were granted full planning permission to change use from B1 offices to D1 non-residential training centre for a year trial period. It will expire July 31st 2009.

It is not known why DWP and Jobcentre Plus didn’t notice that they did not have planning permission when they did their checks to see if the training centre was up to a required standard to be used for New Deal.

Feel free to view the below posts about each attempt:

• YMCA Training’s first attempt for planning permission (appealed)
• YMCA Training’s second and successful attempt for planning permission (only granted for 1 year though)

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

So… the Government sticks the unemployed who are out of work more than 6 months on to an intensive course called New Deal which is contracted out to organisations such as faith organisation YMCA Training who are supposedly meant to stick New Deal participants in work placements to gain experience and help them find employment.

Enter Andrew Coates, someone who has protested peacefully on an online blog of a newly formed group called Ipswich Unemployed Action about the mistreatment of New Deal participants on the course at YMCA Training’s Dencora House (who were providing such courses without planning consent) – with the group’s other members.

After 30 minutes, an YMCA Training manager and another member of staff removes Andrew from the room and summons him to a meeting with copies of the blog on the table in front of him.

It is apparent that the Freedom of Thought (known in there as “Freedom of Conscience”) mentioned in the Induction Pack wasn’t applicable.  Not only now has he been rejected for thinking different (it might be best also to state that he wasn’t exercising his Freedom of Expression, he didn’t disclose his views with anyone else in the room) he is now without benefits and pending a 26 week sanction.

A lot of the disputed content wasn’t even posted from himself, none of the content was slanderous or libel in nature and he also got the blame for people accessing the blog via their computer systems before he actually was on the course.

Numerous bloggers have picked up on this story – so this may not have been the first you have heard of it.

I ask YMCA Training: why was Andrew rejected from this course? Why have you gone against your principles??