What people really think of the dole

Over the past four and a half months I have posted 10 or 11 blogs. What I was wondering the other day was, am I coming at this subject from the right angle or am I being unreasonable? I wanted to know if I was being fair about my dealings with the people at the dole office. Or was I just whingeing and feeling sorry for myself and thinking that they're not very nice to me? So, in order to find out what others think about having to sign on, and how they are treated by the staff at the Jobcentre, I decided to do a survey. Now obviously I'm not IPSOS-MORI or YouGov and what I did was hardly scientific but I was interested in other people's points of view.

I set out with three fairly open questions and asked people to participate in my "survey" as they left the dole office. There are three offices where I live, (there's a lot of people out of work and unemployment is higher than the national average) and I decided to divide my time between two of them. I wasn't daft enough to stand outside the dole office where I sign on with a notepad, as that seemed to be inviting trouble if anyone had got an inkling of what I was up to.

I was very conscious of the need to be fair minded. I'm not sure if it's part of our national attitude but there were quite a few people who were just not interested in answering any questions at all.

So these were my 3 questions and some of the responses from the public:

A - Do you think the Jobcentre helps you?

"Sometimes, sometimes not, seems to depend on their mood."

"No, they're just going through the motions."

"No they see you as an inconvenience."

"Up to a point, but not as much as they say they are going to."

"No they're rude. They're stuck up."

B - Do you have any experiences, positive or negative that you think other people should know about?

"They can be a bit irritating, they don't do what they say they they're gonna do, they lose things, you need a receipt for EVERYTHING, they try to make YOU at fault for being slack and losing things."

"They love to claim you haven't done x, y or z."

"Bane of my life. Pain in the arse. How many times have you been in there and they're chatting away, going for a fag break together, sorting out their social life and completely ignoring you."

"Their resources have got better and their staff are better as well, less idiots. People don't shout as much."

"There isn't fucking nothing positive about that place except they're not as bad as they have been."

"Lots of pointless bureaucracy. Lots of window dressing and ticking boxes."

C - How do you feel about coming here?

"You have to just remember your manners though they don't have none."

"You have to so you just put up with it. None of them can tell the fucking time."

"They love to make you feel like you're less than them. Shit I'd be ashamed to have that job - wouldn't do it, would you?"

"No fun, but they're giving you sixty-five quid a week."

"They won't get you a job, they're rude and they lose stuff."

"Not happy, the right hand don't know what the left hand is doing."

"It's the grade of people they use, they love making you feel small."

"Don't do this, don't do that. One time they gave me a mop test! They made miss a course over a bus pass - two minutes of their time was too difficult!"

"It's fucking humiliating."

So what conclusions was I able to come to?

That the Jobcentre were spectacularly inefficient even though their job shouldn't be difficult.

At every given opportunity the staff would try to make you feel bad about yourself.

They would always try to avoid responsibility and pass the buck.

The staff seemed to have rudeness built-in as their default position when dealing with members of the public.

I must stress that some people were quite relaxed and said that the way they were treated by the dole was fine.

All of this I found strangely reassuring, it seemed to mean that I hadn't been banging on unnecessarily and broadly speaking I'd been right. One last thing I learnt was that there isn't a swear word in the English language that I didn't know, but they seem to be in more common usage than I'd first thought!

Now I realise that the staff at the Jobcentre are under pressure and don't have an easy time of things and there are lots of boxes for them to tick, etc. I hope one thing my survey demonstrates is that the service they provide falls some way short of what one might reasonably expect from a Government agency.