In reply to Sharp: From recent experience, jobcentres are useless hellholes. they have staff that are 10% ok, the rest are idiots.: 'Yes I did biology at school, but would you like me to explain what the reasonable expectations for 'head of surgery' are again?'.
i first signed on just after the election.; I asked for lists of training, thinking I'd do 1st aid or Health & safety. They showed me a file of about 50 A4 pages; all of the courses were crossed our except remedial maths and english.
they had a big area with terminals (and poor software!) that would print stuff on thermal paper (!). Mostly agency minimum wage jobs, or stuff 100 miles away. My jobseeker agreement stated that i had to be able to travel for 2 hours each way, up to 100 miles. I tried claiming for travel expenses for interviews twice and was refused once, 'we lost the paperwork' once.
Similarly, phoning up to say I would be late for signing on was 'fumbled'. I turned up the next day to be tld that I was looking at a anction because I didn't give my national insurance number>? I didn't give my inside leg measurement eaiher. Because they didn't ask for either.
Eventually, I was sent on a compulsory jobseekers course that taught me stuff like, um, how to spell (obviously, my a level english and 20 years report writing skills had evaporated) and not to go to interviews in jeans... Still, it made a lot of money for the private provider that bankrolls the tories...
You turn up every 2 weeks, get patronised, insulted & seen late. you show them some bullsh1t applications written on a form with a box marked 'what did you do'. Then they randomly cut your benefits. useless wasters.