New Deal and Flexible New Deal Exposed

The place is a joke

I am from the North West. The situation I am in at the moment is I have been unemployed for over 6 months and before that I was on a full time Business Admin course (full time 34+ hours, UNPAID) working in an office (1 and a half hours travel from my home). I have a NVQ level 3 in Business Admin and also a Diploma in IT Hardware (2 years), amongst many other qualifications.

The Jobcentre originally sent me to a local A4E (after 3 months) which was the most dehumanizing and depressing situation I have ever been in. It lasted around 11 weeks. At first I was promised “We can find you a work placement in Admin or IT”. I started and after the first 2 weeks of empty promises I was then told that they do not deal with Admin or IT placements, only retail… (I will get to this in a minute).

So, on the 5-6th week I was told of some “options” for work placements I could do, to which they give the choices of – Poundland or The Range (a store which sells home items), This was unacceptable as I had heard from other “customers” in the room who had been through this before that A4E always send people to those companies and no jobs ever come out of it. I was told this was to gain some “work experience”, which I did not need. So I said I would not work for these companies as it was slave labour, and I would find a charity to volunteer for instead. (I ended up finding a local charity shop to work in).

The A4E staff where extremely rude to both me, and the other people attending. There was a lady aged 30-35 who was from a European country. She could speak 3 languages and was previously an interior designer. This one day she was sitting next to me looking at an interior design company website and the A4E staff member in the room said to the lady “Get off that website, its not allowed”, she asked why? And he replied “It contains video material and we don’t allow that on our computers”. This “video” was a flash player showing designs of the work which the company does on its main webpage. She said “So I am not allowed to look at interior design companies? Even this one I used to work for?” and the A4E staff member replied “Lets not talk about this now, I have told you to get off the website”. This continued on and on. He spoke to her as if she was an idiot. In the end the lady was crying, and she had to leave.

I also had many encounters with this A4E staff member. He would go on about how important timekeeping was. I was always in at 8.45am (15 minutes early) and this one day there was a car crash in front of the bus I was on, which delayed me getting to the A4E centre and I was 6 minutes late (9.06am) and you should have seen the look on his face when I walked in through the door. Before I could speak he started yelling “Your late!” . His attitude was terrible. Every day he would find something to try and pick on you.

I could go on and write a story about my time at A4E but I am sure most of you have experienced the same.

So how do I find out what section19(5)(b)or 20A (2)(b) of the jobseeker’s act 1995 is?
Perhaps a letter to someone to do with freedom of information?