Canning Town job support staff lose their jobs

Young unemployed in Newham will have an even harder time finding a job as the people meant to be guiding them into work have themselves lost their jobs.

Eight employees have been made redundant from charity Community Links who were meant to be helping young Jobseeker’s claimants back into work as subcontractors for JobCentre Plus’s new Work Programme.

Under the old New Deal programme, the young, long-term unemployed were referred to Links, based in Canning Town, for assistance with job-seeking while the JobCentre dealt with benefit payments.

But the Work Programme, the coalition’s new scheme for JobCentre Plus, means Links are playing a smaller role. Now the young jobless will be mainly referred to one of three national training and employment services for assistance with their job search.

This means that Links’ contract with the Work Programme has been halved and plans to transfer the staff to a prime provider failed. As a result, there were no further jobs left with Links and redundancies were made to protect other jobs within the charity.

Complicated

Links highlighted concerns about TUPE, a policy used to protect employment rights during staff transfers, saying it was “extremely complicated”. The Employment Related Services Association says the welfare to work sector will fall by a third.

Chief executive Geraldine Blake said the government has not been clear about the scale of redundancies in the welfare to work sector as a the work programme contracts.

“Across the country, it appears that staff who have been transferred under TUPE between providers are simply being made immediately redundant. We fully understand that this is a very difficult time for the staff affected, and that they are anxious about their future. ”