Margot James offers practical support for jobseekers
18th April 2009
Margot James visited Stourbridge Jobcentre Plus and met with Centre Manager, Yvonne Gascoigne and Labour Market Recruitment Adviser, Linda Roberts.
There has been much criticism of Jobcentre Plus in the national press. Jobseekers promised personal support which is then not delivered, poor service and so on. Margot found no evidence of this at the Stourbridge Jobcentre, quite the contrary. The environment is such that no stone is left unturned in the help provided to jobseekers.
The terrible toll of unemployment is acute in Stourbridge and the Black Country where unemployment has risen by 80% in the last twelve months. This is where the human costs of the Government’s eight year debt bubble and out of control spending are really felt.
Margot believes everyone has a responsibility to do whatever they can to help people who find themselves out of work. Her action plan is as follows:
- Lobby for the transfer of funds for the provision of skills training to people who lost their jobs immediately. They should not have to wait for three months for this service. There are Further Education Colleges in the West Midlands who have unspent budgets for skills training because they can’t attract students. Yet Stourbridge College, oversubscribed and especially successful in this area, can’t get more funding. This is wrong and the Learning & Skills Council (LSC) could and should authorise a transfer of funding. But of course the LSC are in a terrible mess of their own and are about to be wound up. Sound familiar?
- Margot will support the upcoming ‘Redundancy Programme’ which will be offered by Jobcentre Plus this summer. She will share her own experience of starting and running a business with those people who intend turning their redundancy in to an opportunity by starting up their own company.
- Margot is to meet the Black Country Manager for so-called ‘hard to place’ employees to explore what can be done to assist people with limited English and people with learning disabilities to get in to work.
