Benefit differences.

If you have been on a means tested benefit for at least 26 weeks, you can expect some perks when you do succeed in getting a permanent job. A job grant, worth £250 if you have children and £100 if you don't is paid to you.
If you have been getting Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit these may continue for four weeks after you have started work, to tide you over until you receive your first pay packet. In some cases, Income Support may continue for two weeks when you are actually working, for the same reason. Income Support, remember, is a non-contributory benefit. If you've paid nothing into the system, you can get IS.
But what if you've been getting Incapacity Benefit? This is a contributory benefit. If you've never worked, you don't get it. However, if you're on IB, when you start work again there's no job grant for you, and no HB and CTB run-on.
I interviewed a claimant who had had a stroke, and wanted to do a college course to make himself more employable. (He was no longer able to do the job he'd had before the stroke, so wanted to retrain for something else). If he'd been on IS, he'd have got a reduction in the fees. As he was on IB, he had to pay the full amount. Or rather he didn't, as he couldn't afford it. So he never went to college, and was unable to make himself more employable.
Things like free prescriptions are also not available if you're on a contributory benefit.
Of course, if you're on IB it isn't means-tested, so you can have £5o,ooo.oo bank and still get it. However, not many of our claimants have much money in the bank, and if they did, it wouldn't last long if they were trying to live on IB.

Happy New Year

During the two days between Christmas and the New Year, we were supposed to offer a full service to the public. That's a laugh! We were very short-staffed, (due to so many people taking two weeks off) and those of us who were in spent most of our time standing around and chatting, except for my computer game playing colleague, who was single-handedly saving the earth from invasion by enemy aliens. To be fair, we were not very busy, as we didn't get many claimants in. People have better things to do than look for work at this time of the year!
One enraged claimant, on the phone to our processing centre, (which is in Wales, a nice long distance away) actually tore the phone off the wall and hurled it across the room. He had no money and nowhere to go, he said, and was still screaming and shouting when the police arrived to take him away. The processing centre had a reduced service as well, and he had even more trouble than usual getting through. No doubt the repeated message: 'You are held in a queue, and will be transferred to the next available adviser' annoyed him. At least the centre doesn't have the nerve to state: 'Your call is important to us' in the automated message.
Our job centre employs more than one hundred people. Is it necessary to employ so many? Well, claimants who genuinely wish to find work, (and they are many) will come in, look through our job points, select a job they fancy and ring the employer on one of our free phones to arrange an interview. They need no intervention from us at all. Those who want to enquire about their claim, or make a new claim, need to ring the processing centre. We do at present have an enquiry desk so officers can look up claims, but this facility is to be wound up.
What about advisers? New Deal is a period of intensive job search for those who have trouble finding work. It sounds good, until you consider that some people, particularly the young, (18-24) have been on New Deal several times. Our New Deal 18-24 advisers often lament this fact, but some of the young people are simply unemployable. Good results do sometimes come, however, from New Deal 50+ (for those over 50, obvious really) and New Deal for the Disabled, as the members of these two groups seem to be more committed to finding employment. It's fair to say, I think, that anyone who really wants to work will find something, especially in London. But I should think that the number of advisers could be easily halved (although I'm shooting myself in the foot here).
What about signing claimants on? This is a necessary procedure, although it can be, and has been done over the phone, (not a good thing to do, to my mind. I've signed claimants on by phone with a great deal of noise in the background. To me, it sounded exactly like a building site, although no-one could possibly be working and claiming, could they? The very idea!) Only six or seven officers comprise the signing on team, however.
Then there are those who check the claimant's documents, (passports, birth certificates etc) and
that is vital, but again it is a very small team.
The management wants to reduce 'footfall' which is the amount of people coming in to the job centre. They want to see only those with appointments, and those wishing to look for a job, so we'll have even less to do. One thing the management does want to encourage though is - targets! We get points if we put someone forward for a job or a training course. Naturally, they often don't attend the training, and then the training provider is supposed to let us know so we can stop the benefit. (Training providers are also paid by the goverment, meaning taxpayer). But do they? On Friday I had a visit from an indignant claimant who had wanted to go on a course to learn computer skills who told me that he had gone there, as arranged, every day for a fortnight, and hadn't as yet met his teacher. Could some of these providers be taking money under false pretences? Perish the thought!

The right to claim?

I am sitting opposite a customer who claimed asylum five years ago (from Eritrea). Someone with the status of asylum seeker is not allowed to claim benefits, but applies to the local authority for support. After this particular claim for asylum was investigated, the customer was awarded 'exceptional leave to remain.' This means, in effect, that 'we do not believe that you were persecuted in your country of origin, but for humanitarian reasons we will allow you to remain here for a period of time.' ELTR is usually given for a period of four years, after which the customer must apply for 'indefinite leave to remain.' This is very rarely refused. When given ILTR, they are subject to the same conditions of entitlement for the claiming of benefit as the rest of us. Or are they?
This particular customer had been claiming Income Support as a sick person since August 2005. Their ELTR had expired on 23/07/06. So why were they still receiving benefit on 03/01/07? Because they had produced a solicitor's letter stating that they had applied for ILTR. Without wishing to malign solicitors in general (well, it wouldn't bother me that much if I did) is a letter from one of them really enough to convince us that someone is entitled to taxpayer's money? Surely we should always insist on seeing original Home Office documents, to see if a non-EU customer has a right to claim benefits, shouldn't we? After all, how difficult can it be to fake such a letter? And when I did my training, (yes, a long time ago) we were always told, 'No official immigration status, no benefits.
Why don't we check with the Home office in such cases? First of all, the Home Office is always busy, and it's sometimes impossible to phone them, or get them to answer a fax. Secondly, it's up to the customer to prove they're entitled to benefit, or so I always thought. Obviously, I was wrong. How many more cases like this? I dread to think. But however many there are, no one will be brought to account for it. Nobody ever is. It would be a lot easier if our computers were linked with those of the Home Office, to enable us to check on things like that. Unless, of course, they asked EDS to link us up.