Just listened to it and it shows perfectly the comments made in the blog:

".....it rarely seems worth my while to let them read their PR notes out loud, answer any questions but the ones I ask and glide glibly over any attempts to root the exchange in reality."

They don't need to use agencies to recruit at that level - suggest that is a red herring. Is this the best environment with which to evaluate people if you are basically force-feeding them in these roles?

The car doesn't start to depreciate at Yr 4!! its biggest years of depreciation are years 1-3

Tut-tut!

You'll be getting a horse next.

I think you have hit the nail on the head.
Unless it costs the employer less than minimum wage (or, more likely, nothing) there is no incentive other than altruism (which I think we can discount from this argument).
Hence, the whole scheme is either conspiracy (to provide the private sector with publicly-funded labour) or cockup (the private sector cashing-in on the notion about having to work for your benefits), it certainly doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

So you are suggesting from an employers perspective workfare isn't any use at evaluating staff because of the compulsion involved? If so wouldn't that reduce the likelihood of them being taken on by their workfare employer and wouldn't it also mean any other employer ought to consider compulsory involvement in workfare by the potential employee equally useless as any indicator of how they may pan out in the real world of work?

Which is why it is only leased for 3 years!!! Motobility need to get the best value possible to continue to run as a charity. What would be the point in leasing a car for 10 years from them and then they get a low price for the car. They simply couldn't continue to operate.

Back up a sec, £55 a week Mobility allowance is £8600ish for a 3 year period. You can buy and run a decent car for far less than that, ergo it is an extravagance!

But can you run it!? Mobility allowance is about allowing people access to the world, their medical appointments, etc. Also, cars may need to be specially adapted, which costs money and they are not readily available on the market. Ergo, it's not an extravagence and far from it.

I can't understand why they ever got rid of those little light blue three wheeler shopping trolley car things that they gave invalids, for invalids is what we called y'all back in the day - apart from the fact that they got blown across the road in a stiff breeze into the path of large trucks and buses of course, apart from that though...

£55 a year would pay for one of those.

Used to get a few parked round the Boulevard.

You would be better off leasing three year old cars when the bulk of the value of the car is written but - in most cases - the cars are perfectly usable and reliable. Having new cars is an unnecessary luxury.

That is exactly what I am saying - if what is being suggested here that most participants are not interested and are only doing it to keep their JSA that is hardly the best way of building a working relationship. Do these participants really want a job at Poundland?

It should be offered as an option in the job seeking arena - if you want to give it a go in the hope of securing a job then you should have the option it should not be compulsory.

However there still the issue of should you have to do anything for your benefits?

Well then we agree on that.



Given the benefits (i.e. JSA) is so low I would have thought the requirement to be able to prove you are actively seeking work was pretty much what you needed to be doing. Any voluntary work such as that what Cat Reilly did should also not be used as an excuse to say someone wasn't available for work.

The whole problem of any kind of real employment undertaken for JSA is as has been said several times in this thread that it is tax payer funded cheap labour that us a disincentive for employers to take people on and for the employers, not the taxpayer to be paying their wages. I can't really see how you can solve this problem.

As soon as you have people working as in real work for JSA you end up in this situation. It would surely be far better to abandon this notion of working for benefits completely and just accept it is nonsense to suggest people work for £54.25 or £71 a week (depending on age). People just need to go back and think for a minute that these benefits are a safety net and not something to begrudge others even if they are themselves in a low paid job.