The Joys of Regulation 23

The Jobcentre's powers to compel claimants to do things (useless or not) have limits but they have a nice little trick to get around the regulations.

Let's say you want to put on an information session for 50 jobseekers. Maybe you believe it's a good and useful session and compelling attendance your chosen group of claimants is the right thing to do. Or, more cynically, you know it's a great way to frustrate and inconvenience them into closing their claim. No problem - it works either way!

There's no official way to compel attendance at a Group Information Session - the guidances says:

5.  There is no mandatory requirement for claimants to attend a Group
Information Session and as such DMA action does not apply.  If a claimant
does not attend their Group Information Session their claim must not be
closed.  (Source)

So what a lot of Jobcentres are doing is to issue a letter inviting claimants to the session but which goes on to say that afterwards they'll have an interview with an advisor and threatens that failure to attend the interview could result in loss of JSA.   This is "correct" because the The Jobseeker’s Allowance Regulations say:

23. A claimant shall participate in an interview in such manner, time and place
as an employment officer may specify by a notification which is given or sent to the
claimant and which may be in writing, by telephone or by electronic means

What many jobseekers have found (me included) is that there is in fact no interview - just the session which may or may not be useful - and certainly wasn't in my case.

It's time it stopped

Derbyshire Mandatory Youth Activity Programme: What the DWP didn't learn

This local scheme involved 8 weeks of  24 (some sources imply 30) hours/week unpaid work by claimants  plus some supported jobsearch. It was mandatory and very like some of the other DWP "Workfare" schemes.

On the face of it however, there was a crucial difference. According to the guidance

4. DMYAP is aimed to test whether a period of activity at the 26 week claim
point, will have a positive impact on sustainable job outcomes

Now, if we for a moment forget that this was a nasty untested mandatory scheme, there's actually something very exciting here - an intention to see if the scheme works!

So I asked for the results. After a tussle, the DWP sent me their evaluation reports. The main one is here and disappointingly reports "It has not been possible at this time to look at the employment impacts of DMYAP.". That's unfortunate especially since finding out about "sustainable job outcomes" was the avowed purpose. I look forward to a further report that covers this vital point!

The report is not without interest as a look at what they investigated hints at what the real priorities of the DWP were:

• It showed a modest drop in claims. This is unsurprising - you do something unpleasant to claimants  and they go away.
• There is a lot of data on how much money the scheme saved.
• It claims to have improved the performance of  staff by giving them more time to work with those that were not randomly selected to go on DMYAP.

I'll keep prompting the DWP on the job outcomes issue.

Shirebrook (Mansfield Station Road) Jobcentre and Sports Direct

Readers may remember my post a few months ago about how this Jobcentre had a much higher sanction rate than any other in the country. The DWP explained: "The main reason for the high proportion of sanctions recorded in Shirebrook is the high number of locally advertised, suitable job vacancies which are not applied for.'' Put another way, there are loads of jobs in the area but the local claimants can't be bothered to apply for them and are rightly sanctioned.

I said at the time that it might be true and I've come across a possibly related related story. 

This other story concerns "Sports Direct" whose largest depot is less than a mile from this Jobcentre. It is alleged in the Daily Telegraph (!) that they are bad employers:

"Or what about the allegations of sharp work practices at Sports Direct’s biggest depot in Shirebrook, near Mansfield? In April, a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation claimed to have exposed some shocking working conditions. Among the policies the programme claimed to have uncovered included the public shaming, through tannoy announcements, of employees who bosses think are not working hard enough, and a "six strikes" rule where someone can be sacked for committing too many minor infringements. The list of a 36 potential "strikes" included talking, spending too long in the lavatory, taking time off sick and even failing to have a clipboard and pen on hand at all times, Dispatches claimed. Workers told the documentary that they live in fear of being fired at any moment and that security is so tight they are frisked at the end of every shift"

So it might be that the reason people are refusing to apply for "the high number of locally advertised, suitable job vacancies" lies in the reputation of this employer.

DISCLAIMER: This is speculation. I could be entirely wrong linking these issues - but I might not be. Further work is needed to get to the truth. This FOI request may help resolve the issue

Excellent truth-seeking by Welfare Weekly

The headline is "Exclusive: DWP Admits Using Fake Claimant’s Comments In Benefit Sanctions Leaflet" and the full story shows how they used the Freedom of Information Act to unearth the evidence.

The efficacy of neuro-linguistic programming by the DWP

Nice bit of work here by Frank Zola, a veritable thorn in the side of the DWP.

The DWP looked to be embracing "neuro-linguistic programming" and forcing it on welfare claimants. It's controversial but does NLP work - or more to the point, does the DWP have evidence that it works?

The answer according to the results of Mr. Zola's FOI request is "DWP does not hold any recorded information in relation to your requests around Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)"

I.E. the DWP doesn't know. A nice example of this technique

The Mystery of Mansfield Station Road Jobcentre

The suggestion that Jobcentre staff have targets to find ways to stop payment of benefits to claimants ("sanctions") is still very much alive and there's been a curious related development.

It started off with an FOI request to find out how many JSA claimants there were at each Jobcentre so it would be possible to calculate sanctions per claimant at each office. This got slightly complicated because the names of the offices were not consistent across both sets of data. It's a problem we had ourselves when we attempted a similar exercise last year

After some persistence, Anna Smith succeeded in getting consistent office names and data - a good result!

When Anna looked at the data, she noticed something strange:

``At Mansfield Station Road, the sanctions rate (calculated as [total number of sanctions] / [total number of claimants]) is 23% over the two years. The average rate at all Jobcentres is 5.5%. This would make the rate at Mansfield Station Road twice that of any other Jobcentre.''

She submitted a review request and the answer was not the data error I expected - it was much more interesting than that:

``We can confirm that the figures we supplied for Mansfield Station Road Jobcentre in Shirebrook are correct.

Shirebrook has a very active and buoyant job market, offering a variety of vacancies including; warehouse, catering, cleaning, administration and driving. These job vacancies are easily commutable for the residents of Shirebrook and offer a variety of shift patterns. The buoyancy of the local labour market is reflected in the Jobseeker’s Allowance register at Shirebrook greatly decreasing.
 
Work Coaches are there to support jobseekers into employment. This involves completing quality interventions with our jobseekers to ensure their Claimant Commitments are robust and they continue to satisfy the conditions to receive benefit. The main reason for the high proportion of sanctions recorded in Shirebrook is the high number of locally advertised, suitable job vacancies which are not applied for. ''

In short, there's loads of jobs in Shirebrook but the local unemployed can't be bothered to apply for them and the Jobcentre is dealing with this robustly by sanctioning them.

Now, this could be true and it appears to be evidence of the system working correctly. It's still surprising that Mansfield Station Road Jobcentre should be so far ahead of the field. It's possible that staff have changed their approach to adapt to their local factors.

Another possibility is that the available vacancies don't look attractive/feasible for many of the unemployed in this former mining area. I'm inclined to reject that possibility because claimants could still apply for these jobs even if they believed they stood no chance of getting an offer. I would also expect similar communities to have somewhat similar statistics.

I'm pretty sure Mansfield Station Road Jobcentre are doing something different but I can't tell if it's justified or not.

A Good Source of Evidence

The House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee report "Benefit sanctions policy beyond the Oakley Review" is out today and has links in to lots of evidence - including our FoI request about Benefit Related Deaths - blog post here