Leics & Northants Work Services Meeting

PCS met with management on Wednesday 19 November 2014 to discuss district issues.  This is a brief overview of some of the topics that we discussed.

While we did not agree on some issues, the meeting was constructive and helpful.

The district manager gave a presentation on the challenges facing the business and where we were heading.

We discussed the Unipod system and we made it clear that there was a lot of concern from staff about training and support.  Management agreed to ask every Work Coach if they had completed the advisor routeway and solution focussed approach and then ensure that any courses took place.  The dashboard would also be rolled out so that everyone had access to the support and guidance specific to each benefit.

We discussed ESA claimants and agreed that we need to ensure that we remain within the law.  We have concerns about claimants being told that interventions are mandatory when they are not and claimants being coerced to stop claiming ESA and claiming JSA instead.

We discussed staffing. We welcome promotion and development opportunities but the future staffing levels were very much unknown.

We clarified that leave levels over Christmas and New Year would be 18-25% with some flexibility as management recognised that there would be a higher need for staff in January when JSA claims peak rather than over the festive period when signing is suspended.

We had a number of outstanding health and safety issues but arranged a health and safety meeting as we ran out of time.

If you have any questions or want further details please get in touch.