Signed On - No Payment

cozza

I bet esa has not been in this situation . I makes me sick when through not fault of your own you become unemployed or get sick . people Automaticly think think it was your own faulty this has happened . I hope ESA gets in this situation

di3004

The help on here by staff from DWP have been tremendously helpful, I would not know what to do without them, well done to you all and thank you for finding time to help on here.:T:T:T

Its not an easy time for the DWP either at this current time, they are over-run with customers and I must give them credit where credit is due.:beer:

NASA_2

stanley38 - Your allowed to say what you did just as I am allowed to say what I did.

cozza - Although I have been in employment for quite a while I have had to sign on JSA a couple of times. Once for a period of six months or so. It was the second most soul destroying thing I have ever gone through. I've seen JSA from both sides - the last thing most staff need is insults. Its a fairly thankless job.

redz

If your claim is now live and in payment it will take up to 5 working days for the benefit to be credited to your account.

Yours helpfully

Kermit the Frog

cozza

ESA i am just saying it most soul distrying when you have to go on these benefits in the first place . but you didnt need to say hope they accidently terminate you case to people !!!

NASA_2

And the OP didnt need to call staff muppets.

cozza

well yes there is that but i have been on the phone to benefits before and the person well gave me all the wrong info . when i phoned back got someone else and they gave me the right advice it is so annoying when this happens so i made a complaint and got an apolagy from them so some are wrong so i would have done the same as well

zappster1966

cozza wrote: »

well yes there is that but i have been on the phone to benefits before and the person well gave me all the wrong info . when i phoned back got someone else and they gave me the right advice it is so annoying when this happens so i made a complaint and got an apolagy from them so some are wrong so i would have done the same as well

We do the best with what we've got, matey.

Long established benefit payment teams have been scattered to the winds with the closure of so many social security offices & job centres. Many experienced staff left through either compulsory or voluntary redundancy, others took early retirement.

With the explosion in unemployment DWP have taken on new staff ... but I'm kid you not when I say it can take a year or two for probationers to get up to speed with the benefit system, it's so damned complicated.

To get "bums on seats" the management aren't offering full training for a lot of them ... they're getting little bits here & there. New telephony staff, for example, are simply getting a rudimentary overview of the benefit system & are being trained to answer the "top ten questions" ... where's my giro, when's my next payment, that kinda thing.

The more experienced staff are not only trying to cope with their own workloads, they're also having to nursemaid the new staff, deal with the problems they cause whilst at the same time trying to encourage them to stay with DWP ... new recruits come & go like the tide because they either can't cope with the dogs abuse they get from the customers or can't live on the pitiful wages that DWP offers.

And it's not a case of "you DWP people don't know what it's like to claim" ... far from it ... many DWP employees with families have to rely on Working Tax Credit just to get by from month to month. I know our family does, heck my wages are gone by the third week of the month & if it weren't for WTC my family would be snookered.

I'm sorry you & Stan have either had or are having a hard time of it. But we're doing our best, honestly.

Muppets, though, we ain't.

NASA_2

Where I am we have agency staff working on the telephones, fairly often giving out the wrong information or just not answering a question that is as obvious as it comes, but, I feel sorry for them. They are thrown on the phones after a week of sitting listening and watching someone else do the job. Often they will have sat with someone who had that same introduction to the system.

On the processing side the caseloads are huge, 70 or more cases for each processor, to people who dont know benefits, 70 is a huge number of cases to be dealing with.

There are very few staff, maybe even none, that are deliberately unhelpful or deliberately get information wrong. Its usually down to a lack of training which isnt suprising at the minute. The benefits system is huge. It takes ages to get familiar with it.

lufcgirl

It raises the question why instead of trying to teach each advisor everything, they don't just give them a specialised area (for example JSA or IB) and make life a whole lot easier.

In a previous position I had, I was trained to do billing, I didn't touch any other area and transferred the call appropiately so why they don't do this instead of trying to do everything is beyond me.

That said, I've never had a problem in an actual jobcentre, it's always on the telephone. 'Oh you'll get a callback from a manager but we can't tell you when'....6 weeks on I'm still waiting! But hey-ho it got sorted by itself in the end.