Tougher time for Black Country benefit claimants
People looking for work in the Black Country will be obliged to spend 35 hours a week in a job centre trying to find employment, as part of a new trial starting next month.
This October will see the introduction of the pilot job search schemes, where unemployed benefit claimants will be required to carry supervised job searches every week.
Claimants will be expected to sign an attendance register at a local job centre provider at 9am and search for jobs until 5pm, for five days a week over three months.
If they fail to do so, they will face sanctions, with the first sanction resulting in the loss of one month's worth of benefits, and the second sanction culminating in the withdrawal of three months' money.
The scheme is also being rolled out in East Anglia, West Yorkshire, Surrey and Sussex and will run until March next year.
If the programme is a success, the Department for Work and Pensions say it may be extended to cover the whole country.
A total of 6,000 claimants are being selected to take part.
They will be selected by two criteria: the first batch will be aged between 18-24 and have been claiming for 20-24 weeks, while the second group will be over 25 and have been claiming for 33-37 weeks.
They will only be selected if their job adviser thinks they will benefit from the extra support to find work.
A spokesperson from the DWP said: "It's right that we ask claimants to do everything they can to look for work in return for their benefits, and this pilot is looking at how we provide that extra support to those whose lack of job-hunting skills is preventing them from finding a job".
In many of the places where the scheme is being rolled out, the problem lies in a lack of jobs rather than a lack of job seeking.
Wolverhampton has the highest unemployment rate in England double the national average at around nine per cent.
Claimants can have their benefits cut for a number of reasons, including arriving late or missing an interview, failure to participate in a work programme or leaving a job or programme without good reason. Nationally, the number of claimants being sanctioned has risen steadily since October 2012 when the DWP instituted a tougher policy on sanctions. The new rules increased the minimum duration of a sanction from a week to a month and the maximum sanction to three years. For example, in the last three months of 2013, 227,629 people were sanctioned - 69,600 more people than in the equivalent quarter in 2012. Job Centre staff have already begun handing out information to claimants but we will have to wait until October to see how the programme pans out.