by
A Claimant
NEARING retirement age, I’ve been reflecting on the spells on the dole at both ends of my working life and how signing on has become a bizarre — and fraught — box-ticking Groundhog Day.
After my longest spell in work I secured redundancy at 53, by which time I was on employment & support allowance. Four years later though, I failed a second ESA claim reassessment.
The assessors were focused on finding cause to remove people from welfare. I told the assessor I now walked at a slower pace to cope with a neck weakness following an operation. The assessor records this as “likes to walk at a leisurely pace”.
Initially the clerks I signed on with fortnightly didn’t ask about the jobs I applied for. Then I slotted into the universal credit scheme when it came in, and they wanted to know.
I got to feel demoralised by constant personnel changes in clerks — now called “work coaches” — I sign on to at Jobcentre Plus: the officer changes after a few weeks or months, the new “coach” robotically declares we can get an appointment to see a “mentor” to “refresh your CV” — as if they are doing me a favour.
In the era of universal credit, the Department of Work & Pensions commissions charities and other agencies to provide “key workers” for meetings to “refresh my CV” and practice interviews. Staff there act as if “refreshing” my CV will, as if by alchemy, make me employable and able to land a job — in my 60s.
Ironically, the agencies doing this for the DWP struggle to retain staff. They mostly ad-lib rather than pass on know-how — one mentor will say “change this”: another later tells me it should be changed back.
One coach told a contemporary of mine, also removed from welfare, that she must leave her degree off her CV as it deters employers and makes her look overqualified. It’s the career achievement she’s most proud of: she’d come out of a secondary mod with little to show but got to uni as a mature student.
Required by that coach to prove she made six applications per day, she got so stressed that her doctor put her back on the disability benefits that the notorious Atos assessors had unfairly removed her from.
Signing On
When I first signed on, in Whitstable after leaving school in July 1978, Jim Callaghan was prime minister. The Department of Social Security handled benefit payments, while the Department of Employment ran job centres. Now both are conducted through Jobcentre Plus (as they call it) under the DWP.
Labour exchanges were rebranded as job centres in the 1970s. When I first used them, vacancies were displayed on postcard racks. Jobseekers noted the vacancy number and asked a DoE officer for the employer’s contact details.
Over time, employers largely abandoned job centres for recruitment, leaving the racks showing mostly salesman vacancies or public-sector council jobs that had already been filled internally.
Job centres, though still in the public sector, followed the trend of public services: once privatised, they operate with staffing cutbacks — in the Canterbury district, Whitstable and Herne Bay job centres were shut in 2018.
New Deal
Back in 1999, I’d gained an NVQ in office technology in my 30s via the Labour government’s New Deal scheme of retraining for the long-term unemployed.
Before my course, job centre staff had showed no interest in or effort to find me work when I went to sign on. But after I completed my course, the clerk was eager for me to take a part-time job on a conveyor belt, sticking labels on processed packages of fish. As Yosser Hughes could have truly said: “It’s easy” and “anyone could do it.” The idea was just to tick the box and tell Whitehall that the training was enabling me to find work immediately: any vacancy would do for this.
The job hunter’s other major source, beyond the job centre, was the local newspapers’ classified ads: those have withered and died. Since the millennium, claimants look for work online using home computers. For a time, a DWP employment portal helped, I felt, as it created a record of job applications for centre staff, ready for their perusal before my sign-on meetings. But the DWP abandoned it in their difficulties of building a workable online system for the universal credit regime.
When I returned to signing on in 2018, my office technology GNVQ counted for nothing with the Jobcentre Plus official: they insisted I attend a course for the European Computer Driving Licence, a course which in truth went over much the same ground — but in a more superficial way.
Conscripted onto a Canterbury College job-hunting course (pre-Covid) I had to take literacy and numeracy tests. Were not English and maths O-levels suitable evidence of competence? No: I had to take booklets of infant-school-level arithmetic and vocab questions to complete. Job centre staff sent me to the second floor for my appointment. I waited nearly an hour, only to discover that the examiner had been waiting for me on the first floor — and had left. I joked perhaps it is job centre staff whose numeracy was in doubt.
Uncivil Servants
These “civil servants” I’d see fortnightly don’t always fit that description: some seem unable to think beyond incantations of “requirements for jobseekers”. Yet I had tried to conform to their expectations. In hindsight, I think that when I was made redundant a dozen years ago, I should have recognised I’d never work again and focused on building my best life.
Last year, a work-search mentor — with a soul for once — said I should seek to get a “fit note” from my doctor prior to a work capability assessment that could remove me from job-hunting requirements. My doctor obliged, saying anyone can see that I was unfit for work.
But the DWP job coaches — “I don’t make the rules” — said the assessment had to involve a phone interview with a doctor who would never actually see me. That unseen assessment vetoed my own doctor’s diagnosis, declaring me capable of work.
Unable to copy and paste the text from their document for an appeal and expecting that, as with my ESA reassessment, they’d load the dice against finding in my favour, I didn’t appeal.
So here I am, back to a fortnightly sign-on, just six months away from becoming an OAP. I insist with each new work coach I check in with that I will not consider any further job hunting or CV coaching schemes.
An old hippy acquaintance once told me that we should try to see the spark of humanity in everyone we meet. Since universal credit was introduced, I generally find it impossible to extend that outlook to Jobcentre Plus staff.
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