Thousands of East Londoners in employment experiment

Research done in 2005 found that young people and men on the dole slow down their job searches if they are not watched closely - the findings have inspired a new experiment on East London's unemployed. 

This requires thousands of JSA claimants to sign-on once a week rather than once every two weeks and will therefore increase the workload of a diminished Jobcentre workforce. 

The original research did the opposite and greatly lowered the number of visits that unemployed people claiming Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) had to make to Jobcentres. 

Government pilot increases workload at Hackney Jobcentres

Hackney Jobcentre Plus is taking part in a pilot scheme which requires some Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) claimants to sign-on every week rather than every two weeks.

I am one of the 10,600 unemployed people in Hackney claiming Job Seekers Allowance and I was put on the pilot a couple of weeks ago.

Job loss trend becomes clearer

The number of people claiming Job Seekers Allowance in Hackney rose by 40 in October, according to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics published yesterday. It's not a big rise but, as the chart below shows (click on it to expand) while the size of the moves up and down may be calming down, there appears to be a solid upward trend.

In terms of actual numbers, there are now 11,243 JSA claimants, the majority in Hackney South.
In the meantime, as the number of unemployed increases, the level of staffing in Hackney Jobcentre Plus is falling.

Hackney Jobcentre cuts staff as unemployment peaks

Blood and Property has been told that a number of members of staff at the Mare Street Jobcentre Plus in Hackney Central have not have their contracts renewed. That's as the number of Job Seekers Allowance claimants using Hackney job centres hits record highs.

Back in 2009 Derek Harvey, external relations manager for Job Centre Plus and a member of Team Hackney told Blood and Property that JCP was “gearing up to handle greater volumes” of JSA claimants.

In those days the combined number of Job Seekers Allowance claimants in Hackney North and South was 9,350 (May 2009) falling to 9,308 (June 2009).

The forecast was correct - the count in September 2011 was 11,208 - a rise of more than 20% since the new recruits were taken on.

But now the volumes are here, it looks like JCP is gearing down.

A DWP spokesperson told Blood and Property: "Jobcentre Plus recruited a large number of people on temporary contracts to deal with the recession. As the Government looks to grow the economy and reduce the deficit JCP is now reducing its overall staffing, this year through a combination of normal turnover and releasing some of the people who were recruited on Fixed Term Appointments (FTAs) as their contracts come to an end. Its priority is to ensure support for people in Hackney is maintained."


This post is going up before the ONS releases the latest unemployment figures for the UK which will show whether or not the number of people claiming Job Seekers Allowance has risen again Hackney.

If it has then Hackney will be maintaining its highest level of JSA claimants since the Financial Crisis

Jobcentre reorganised - can it cope?

When I last signed on at Hackney's Jobcentre Plus it had just been through a major upheaval (the change happened on August 17) and it now segregates job seekers who have been on the dole for more than three months from those who have come in more recently. The longer-term unemployed are now sent upstairs to face deeper scrutiny.

Meanwhile the new arrivals are given specific five minute time slots which they cannot miss. At my last signing-on, my adviser didn't have time to take down the evidence on my attempts to get back into work. Is this just streamlining or have numbers of claimants gone up significantly?

On Thursday the Hackney Gazette reported that an employment charity had lost its funding and would have to close down - the story was posted on the Gazette's website yesterday. The charity's head said that job centres in Hackney "can't cope".

Unemployed in Hackney - the lull before the storm

I was made redundant in June and signed on at the Jobcentre Plus on Mare Street last week. It was not an unpleasant experience.

The only disconcerting thing about it was that the unemployed seemed to be outnumbered by Jobcentre staff. There was a friendly gang to usher me in and two members of staff sitting behind every desk.

The silent observant ones, I was told, were the new recruits getting their training. There seemed to be a lot them.

As luck would have it, Derek Harvey, External Relations Manager for Jobcentre Plus across East London, was at the Overview and Scrutiny Board meeting on Thursday (16 July) and I asked him why there were so many new staff at the Jobcentre Plus.

Yes, a daft question, but I thought there was a chance that there might be a happy answer as Derek had just delivered the only real good news to the O&S board – that Hackney’s job seekers allowance (JSA) claimant count had fallen for the first time since September.

(Office of National Statistics Regional Monthly Data - July 2009 show the number of claimants has dropped across the borough from 9350 in May to 9308 in June. The biggest fall is in Hackney South and Shoreditch down from 5296 in May to 5190 in June. The figures were still on the rise in Hackney North, up from 4,081 in May to 4,118 in June. It sounded vaguely optimisic – it was presented as vaguely optimistic.)

So when Derek left the meeting I ran after him to ask if he really thought the news was good and, if so, why Jobcentre Plus had so many new faces. All he could say was that Jobcentre Plus was “gearing up to handle greater volumes” and that I should ask Jobcentre Plus’s press office for details of recruitment in Hackney.

Unfortunately the Jobcentre press office couldn’t provide those figures. Considering the borough’s claimant count fell by just 42 in June, it might have been interesting to see if Jobcentre recruitment helped keep the numbers down (although the new people might well not be from Hackney).

The national figures are pretty interesting though – apologies if everyone knows them already. In November last year Jobcentre Plus was given cash to recruit 6000 new staff and in April it was given cash to recruit another 10,000 - that’s 16,000 jobs.

So far, since the November 2008 cash injection, Jobcentre Plus has employed 9,000 new staff leaving room for another 7,000.

The press officer I spoke to said that, so far, there had been no problems with providing a decent service and that the time it was taking to process claims was within targets.

It seemed fair to ask how bad things might get. But I was told that no one at the Department of Work and Pensions was into the forecasting game – apparently it's none of their business, not even a guess was allowed. We both became a little embarrassed when I kept asking how the government had come up with this 16,000 figure for new staff.

I was too thick to see that there are other ways of doing this - it had something to do with the state of the economy, not how many people might lose their jobs.

Luckily a few economists have had a go at this forecasting lark and none of them were optimistic.

For Hackney though, the hope is that the new Jobcentre recruits will be twiddling their thumbs til I drop in again on Wednesday.

Will Hackney return to 17% unemployment?

Hackney had the biggest rises in employment – should we expect the biggest falls? Socialist candidate says yes.