Claimant commitment

Around 100 jobcentres a month to begin using the claimant commitment from October 2013 - has anyone found a link to a timetable of which Jobcentres and when?

Thanks

I would also like to know

I don’t know myself, but wonder if an FoI request would be necessary to get the information.

However, I can tell you that claimant commitments have been introduced in Oldham, where I work, because this is one of the original pilot arears for UC. Myself and a colleague have just had a copy today of a claimant commitment given to a client who is claiming jobseekers allowance and it is shocking. It looks like an Olympic standard Mickey Bliss take. The requirements imposed on the claimant, who is a single parent with two children still at school (but both over 5) are impossible to meet, not least because they take no account of her childcare responsibilities, and they are internally contradictory.

She has to take her children to school in the morning and pick them up from school, but the CC says she is to travel up to 90 minutes each way to work, and work 30 hours a week. She is to start work at 8am - when she has to take the kids to school - and finish at 3.30pm to make up the 30 hours, which is when she has to collect them from school.

She has to be available for job interviews, and to start a job, ‘immediately’ - but she is doing voluntary work, and under the JSA rules, this normally means you have to be available for interviews at 48 hours notice, likewise to start a job; not ‘immediately’.

There is a list of four websites she will look at every day, 7 days a week, for job vacancies, including universal job match - this is perhaps not so unreasonable in itself.

She is to speak to her family and friends about possible job vacancies they have heard of, every day for 7 days a week - Every day? How long will it take for them to start avoiding her because she is hassling them too much?

Look in the local paper once a week - not unreasonable in itself.

But added up, this means she is required to do 43 things per week (43 ‘steps’, in the old parlance) each week to look for work.

She is supposed to spend 35 hours per week looking for work, but there is no indication of how the job centre intends to time that. Or whether they require the client to record the times she spends doing things herself.

Then she is required to create a Universal Jobmatch account , and upload a more detailed version of her CV on to the site, for the job centre staff to check. - acccording to the regulations, and the DWP’s own guidance, they cannot require jobseekers to give the staff direct access to their UJ account, or require them to upload any personal information to it, as this breaches the Data Protection Act. But I’d bet that the job centre interviewer didn’t tell her that.

What this ‘commitment’ means in practice is that she will inevitably at some point fail to do one or two of the 43 steps, or not be able to do them, and the job centre interviewer will have an excuse to refer her for a sanction. Or she may get offered a job and have to turn it down because she can’t do it and look after her children at the same time.

My colleague (it’s his client) intends that we should draw up our own, reasonable and feasible, claimant commitment and put it to the job centre that the original can’t stand because it is unreasonable and impossible for someone with childcare responsibilities to comply with. I have a feeling some of the points in the CC are not legally enforceable under the jobseekers regulations, but we will both need to do some research on that. Myself, I have no faith in the idea of persuading the job centre to be reasonable. I would rather do my research and then serve a judicial review pre-action letter on them, on grounds of irrationality. I find JR notices tend to wonderfully focus the minds of the government departments they are sent to. To my mind, it is one thing to persuade the job centre to be reasonable to a single claimant who happens to come to you for advice, but the threat of litigation is more likely to induce them to review how they deal with claimants generally, as it causes more hassle, more expense and more bad publicity.  However, this isn’t my client or my call.

What I’m not sure of is whether the contents of the claimant commitment can itself be appealed, as opposed to a decision that the claimant has not fulfilled the conditions in it.  That too will take research.