General discussion of welfare to work issues
Submitted by Claire on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:56am
Hi all,
If you want to continue the discussions which have somewhat taken over the 'What would you ask Employment Minister, Jim Knight MP?' here, then please do so, and feel free to copy and past your comments to here, as the non-relevant discussions in the other thread will be moderated/deleted.
Thanks!
timesheet problems.. you funny so forget about the fraud investigation going on in merseyside. are you saying there is no fraud in w2w?
"proper training", what would you suggest that isn't currently available? when i was at a4e the only courses were you got a qualification out of it were with learndirect i enrolled on ecdl i did the first 3 modules then they told us all that we could not do the other modules what was the point in starting it?. when we are at w2w providers we are told we can only do real tranning if there is a job at the end of it they will not pay money out otherwise. an employer will not take you on without the qualifications they wont wait for you to get them you have to have them when you apply for the job. here are a few things that were taught to us on our w2w course how to get up in the morning how to wash ourselves how to dress smart,,,, and you get paid to do that what a joke.
all you w2w dont forget in the morning to go on the jcp job site see what jobs to give your clients
edit.Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 04/01/2010 - 6:59pm.
I work for a large private company, helping the unemployed back into work. We are offering a service that the JCP dont. They mainly signpost people on to different services. We offer everything to do with jobs; i.e. CV writing / interview techniques and have local links to companies looking for work, etc.
My question is, what happens come July 2010 and FNd hasnt been as successful as they thought it would be? To me, they should have kept the Gateway to Work Programme which was the 2 week intense course for job seekers.
I am looking forward to hearing your comments regarding the FND programme.
.Submitted by Liz Sewell (not verified) on Mon, 04/01/2010 - 8:14pm.
Lone Parents with children at primary school are going to be an increasing part of the W2W workforce. This means we need more part-time jobs. What can Government do to help this happen?
.Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 8:06am.
Surely we should be asking how the government can expect all those who work with the unemployed, including JCP and W2W providers, to find long term sustainable work for our customers when the concepts, ideals and provisions put in place are constantly under threat? The W2W industry and JCP seem to be being used as "pawns" in political games at the moment? Therefore, as a workforce we are appearing to have little "sustainability" which is demotivatin gus in supporting our customers back into work.
In regards to the comments about JCP and W2W providers. I work for a W2W provider. We have a fantastic relationship with all of our JCP's- working together is what will help us support those people not working against each other. In regards to the jobs on JCP website- no member of staff actively seeks these vacancies from within JCP, unless they are an LEP vacancy- so where is the issue?
The job centre are no better placed to deliver services at present- they are not even ensuring their customers have valid ID to work in the UK!!!
My question would be how does the minister see the role of JCP and W2W providers moving the country forward in this "crisis"?
.Submitted by highpark1 on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 8:29am.
so you are saying w2w providers are not supporting customers back into work??. I no quite a few people who work for jcp up and down the country and they dont have a good word to say about w2w providers. w2w only look for lep jobs not at my w2w provider they didnt.
"they are not even ensuring their customers have valid ID to work in the UK!!! really
edit.Submitted by Claire on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:14am.??????????????????????
Some really good questions coming through now, thanks. By all means please do set up another discussion if you want to debate any of the issues people are raising, but if we could keep this particular thread just to questions that'd be really helpful, thanks.
.Submitted by stephw2w on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:19am.
imatt ... the monthly labour market statistics explain the basis of the official figures. Check this out - may help with your question. www.ons.gov.uk/about-statistics/user-guidance/lm-guide/concepts/employer...
highpark1 ... for the record some private training providers also don't have a good word to say about JCP staff, so who do you believe? It depends on your personal experience and yours is clearly not good so you are biased. As Anon says - many providers have great relationships with JCP and work together to help their clients. They all want the same thing so it hardly pays to be at logger heads.
anon (6:59 pm) ... FND providers can choose to run a Gateway to Work style programme and I know that some have retained this type of structure as it provides a solid foundation for jobsearch. Like the question though, as many people have doubts about how much success FND will have in the current climate.
Claire ... still trying to think of a good question that we can't already predict the party political answer for! You could ask whether he was routing for Joe McElderry or Rage Against the Machine at Christmas?! Could be a vote swinger! :)
.Submitted by Raven on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:34am.
Highpark, I didn't say there wasn't any fraud, just that it isn't widespread or systematic. (DWP have found exactly the same in the last couple of investigations they did which turned out to be isolated pockets.) If a JCP District Manager was found to be fiddling the statistics in his office would you say that means the whole of JCP isn't worth a bean? Of course not.
It's a decent point that as funding follows a job, not the training itself, so the training will only be paid for if there's a job at the end of it. But actually is that so bad? If you needed a Food Hygiene Certificate to get a job I can't imagine many if any providers would stop you studying for one. Training for Work in the early nineties had a payment mechanism that would just pay for the training irrespective of the job outcomes and it got slaughtered by everyone for not finding people jobs - the current Government (then in Opposition) led the charge on that one. (That said, TfW had job outcome rates not dissimilar to the New Deal so perhaps I ought to rethink my argument there.)
I also agree with Steph's point that many providers think JCP staff aren't up to much either so trading insults about who thinks who is worse doesn't really help much.
And for my big finale, another question for Mr Knight - does offering 80% payment on outcomes rather than 60% make it 20% more likely that providers will be incentivised to find jobs? Is it not the case that raising the proportion of outcome payments merely means fewer companies can take the risk of getting involved in the first place, and how exactly does that square with your desire to bring more players into the W2W market?
.Submitted by Raven on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:35am.
P.S. I downloaded Rage Against The Machine.
.Submitted by chunky on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:46am.
Getting back to questions for Jim Knight, does he think DWP have got the payment structure for FND slightly wrong? To me it would have made much more sense to structure it 20:30:50, with the largest payments made for long term outcomes. Surely if you target 26 weeks you should achieve 13 weeks anyway, but if you aim for 13 weeks initially, you may, but might not, be quite so successful in getting to 26 weeks.
.Submitted by Daniel on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:48am. shame on you
Oops. I just deleted what appeared to be a spurious discussion thread elsewhere on the site as I hadn't realised it was a recommended solution to a problem here.
.Submitted by Claire on Tue, 05/01/2010 - 9:58am.
Ok, feel free to continue all of your other discussions here, but we're just after questions here and it's not proving easy to sift them out at the moment, so please do feel free to copy and paste/edit your comments over to the new discussion page as I'll be going through and taking out everything that isn't relevant to this thread in a bit. Thanks!
Ok, here's the last part copied over from the previous thread!
Raven:
'Gerry Atric, having worked on the frontline in commercial recruitment for some years (albeit some years ago now) I can attest that yes, this goes on, and yes, it has always been illegal. In my experience we only did it occasionally when we were short on particular types of applicants for particular types of jobs that we knew for a fact were coming up, so I doubt the numbers concerned would be substantial enough to make a difference to the general order of magnitude of job vacancies, but there again perhaps we were just particularly conscientious relative to other agencies. I very much doubt agencies would have much need to make up jobs to attract candidates at the moment.
Highpark, you can't assert that JCP do a better job when their effectiveness is measured differently from private providers. For a JCP job to "count" they only have to work for 8 hours, full stop - for private providers they have to be for at least 16 hours a week and be sustained over a period of time. It's like comparing apples and pears. I'm also not sure what fraud you're referring to, unless it's the relatively minute timesheet problems confined to one office of one major national provider whose Chairman may only recently have been ennobled.. There certainly hasn't been anything of any scale that would warrant disbarring from contracts, unless you can show me otherwise. as for your last point on "proper training", what would you suggest that isn't currently available?
As far as what I'd ask Jim - how about why it is that the very worthy idea of offering wage subsidies to get employers to take on 16/17 year old unemployed as Apprentices is apparently ending at the end of March 2010? 5000 Apprentices in that time when the scheme isn't even running yet? Fat chance.'
I want to know when JCP will start upskilling its advisors. there is loads of help for jobseekers but unless advisors define what each customer needs, money and time is wasted.
First of all there would honestly be no reason for welfare if all states would be a little more tougher on the people responsible for making the babies and then just living the single parent to do all the work.
Secondly, If there were legitimate home programs or even just work programs out there designed for WOMEN/MEN(single parents) without the need for any kind of gov/fed political non-sense, scams, prejudice, discrimination, or belittling ... more single parents would WANT to work.
Last but never the less, take a good look around you, all these children need at least one parent at home to feel a little love from their family, remember society we are NOT raising robots(do the research and take a look at "one parent at home" statistics)! If we were ... then no one would need to work! STOP CHILD ABUSE/NEGLECT!!!! FEED/SHELTER THE POOR, LOST AND HUNGRY!!!BREAK DOWN THE STRENGTH OF WRONG-DOING!!!!
I believe those people "trying to get over" on the "welfare to work" program are just fed up with the non structured rules, laws, and regulations that go with them. Life is to hard on those that have lost their way with no one to follow and not hard enough on those that LEAD! So let's take a REAL GOOD LOOK AT WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON HERE! The poor man get poorer and the rich man get richer plot is not working! Lets find a little sense of equality in our world's workforce system! The we will all stabilize a way for the future ...(period!)
excuse the multiple typos but you get the just.