I went to Charles St Jobcentre in Cardiff for my fortnightly signing and was given details of an appointment for 8th July to see an adviser to discuss the support available now that I have completed the Work Programme. I had to sign for the document and it consisted of three pieces of paper stapled together. The first page shows the appointment details and the rest of the first two pages just gives you all the basic stuff about attending appointments and potential benefit sanctions for missing an appointment. The third page is far more interesting. The heading is “Post Work Programme Support”. The first paragraph welcomes you back to Jobcentre Plus and states that over the next six months I will undertake a period of intensive support and my Personal Adviser will be my main point of contact. The next paragraph informs us of what we can expect from Jobcentre Plus. It includes such things as developing an on-line CV and completing mock job applications and mock interviews. Of course most of us have done that on the Work Programme and on many other courses. Undertaking a skills assessment course although that was done on the Work Programme so again just duplicating things we have done before. The final paragraph is called “What we expect from you”; They expect us to look for work each week and of course we do. It suggests that successful job seeking can take as long as a full time job. We must also be willing to take any work that we are capable of doing unless otherwise agreed with an adviser. This would suggest that people leaving university with a degree would be expected to take any job however poorly paid if they were capable of doing it and skilled tradesmen would be led down the path of taking minimum wage non skilled jobs. I am not against this if the jobs are available. On the whole this document makes the Work Programme look a total waste of money and billions could have been saved by letting Jobcentre Plus do it all in the first place. I will find out on monday what my adviser is like and what they have in store for me.