Smart Works is a charity that aims to help women look professional and feel more confident, so that they have a better chance of succeeding at their job interview. 

Each appointment with a client will last about an hour/hour and a half.

During this appointment, trained stylists help women choose a smart professional outfit to wear at their job interview.  Then a professional adviser will help clients prepare for their interview by going through interview questions and talking about the role.

Additionally, Smart Works offers additional programmes throughout the year to help improve confidence and move women forward with their job search.

The organisation wants to open more outlets, could you run one of them or could you donate? 

The ABC thinks this is a great intiative:

Smart Works, 94 London St, Reading, RG1 4SJ, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 118 959 4245

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Website: www.smartworks.org.uk

Anti-immigration sentiment continues.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party won only 17.6 percent of votes in Berlin state elections (NYT), removing it as a junior partner in the governing coalition. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party will enter the city-state's legislature for the first time following its campaign against Merkel's decision to allow about one million asylum seekers into the country.

Outlay on housing is highest in the private rental market. Between (2012-13) the average private sector rent in England and Wales was £646 per month. This average conceals major regional variations, with average rents in London up to twice as high, followed by the south east of England. Average rents in England and Wales are rising quicker than the rate of inflation. It was forecast that average monthly rents would rise to £800 by the middle of 2015. In fact the figures as of August are:

• The average UK rental value was £913pcm - this is 3.1% higher than the same period last year (£885pcm) and a reduction in the rate of increase seen in August 2015 (5.6%)
• Rents in Greater London are up by 2.7% year on year – a drop in the rate of increase seen in August 2015 (7.7%)
• Average rental values have increased in eleven out of twelve regions in the UK, compared to the same period last year

Private renters typically spend in excess of 40% of gross income on rent.

Document: My Rights as a Tenant in Europe

If you’re unemployed, you must register with the Department of Social Security (DSS) where, provided you qualify, you’re given a form to complete and lodge within 14 days. You must provide proof of identity and your tax file number. If you’ve been ‘terminated’ (sacked, made redundant, etc.) from a previous position, you need your Employment Separation Certificate, which states the reason you left work and your wages.

For new immigrants there’s a two-year waiting period before payments start. If you remain unemployed for more than a year, you must apply for the Newstart allowance. Rates of payment depend on your circumstances, including your age, income, marital status and number of children. In 2016, payments ranged from $527.60 (£303.86) per fortnight for a single person, $570.80 (£328.74) for a person over 60 with no dependent children.

Neither Jobsearch nor Newstart allowances are paid during an absence from Australia.

Jobsearch Allowance

To qualify you must either be under 18 or have been registered with the DSS for no more than a year, and must have permanent residence status. You must also convince the DSS that you’re looking for work or that you’re improving your job prospects by attending training or educational classes. To receive payments, you must report every two weeks in writing to the DSS on your job searching activities. This is called the ‘activity test’ and, if don’t meet the requirements and have no good reason for this, your allowance is stopped.

Newstart Allowance

To qualify you must be over 21, a permanent resident, unemployed and have been registered with the DSS for over a year. You must also be actively searching for work. In your initial interview with the DSS you must sign an undertaking agreeing to a plan of action to improve your employment prospects. Refusal to sign the agreement limits or nullifies your chance of qualifying for the allowance.

You must also report to the DSS every two weeks. The Newstart allowance is usually paid from the day the Jobsearch allowance stops, if applicable.

Unemployed people aged 21 to 34 who have been receiving a Newstart allowance for six to 12 months can be obliged to do work experience, mainly on local projects or in community service.

This article is an extract from Living and Working in Australia. We cannot gurantee the accuracy of the figures. 

We have our own Hashtag now #ABCorg 

Tomorrow the world!!

With the current fall in unemployment surprising and delighting people, I contacted Bob Watson of the Office of National Statistics for more information on compiling the figures and on the work of the Labour Market Division.

I asked Bob the following questions:

How does the Claimant Count relate to the Labour Market (LMS) Survey?

The Claimant Count is the number of people receiving benefits principally for the reason of being unemployed. It does not measure unemployment - for the UK as a whole the Claimant Count is only around half the level of unemployment. However, the two have very similar properties. When the Claimant Count is rising it is likely that unemployment is rising, when the Claimant Count is falling it is likely that unemployment is falling. It is also the case that if an area has a relatively high proportion of people on the Claimant Count, it is likely to have a high proportion of people unemployed. Consequently, it can be a useful indicator to reflect areas of high and low unemployment. Consequently, it is used, along with other information, as one of the indicators in the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which I will get to in a minute.

Are there other ways the government looks at people on very low incomes?

The Claimant Count is only one indicator out of many aspects of deprivation. This is where the Indices of Multiple Deprivation come in. These are not an ONS set of statistics, but are produced by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). The latest versions were published in September 2015.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2015

For further information on Indices of Multiple Deprivation IMDs, I would suggest contacting the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

How do you conduct the Labour Market (LMS) Survey?

The Claimant Count does not measure unemployment. In fact, the measurement of the two are totally independent, with no reference made to benefits within the determination of whether someone is unemployed or not. The Claimant Count comes from administrative data from the benefits system. Measurement of unemployment, however, comes from a household survey, based on interviews conducted with around 40,000 households. As part of the interview, the members of the household are asked if they did any paid work in the reference week. You will note that if they had a zero-hours contract that they did not do any work on, the answer would be no. They must have done paid work. If they did, then they are considered to be employed. Further questions would then check to see whether they meet any of the other criteria of employment; self-employed, government supported trainee, unpaid worker in family's own business, HM Forces.

If through these questions you establish that they did not meet any of the criteria of being employed, then they are asked whether they carried out any actions to look for work during the reference week and whether they would have been available to work if they had found suitable employment. This meets the international criteria of the agreed definition of being unemployed - to not be in work, but be seeking and available for work. Notice that these questions do not make any reference to any benefits that they may or may not be claiming.

Finally, if they are not in work (employed) or out of work, actively seeking and available for work (unemployed) they would be classified as economically inactive.

How will Universal Credit (UC) affect these figures?

The existence of Universal Credit does not have any direct impact on the ability to produce unemployment figures.

However, Universal Credit is affecting our ability to produce accurate Claimant Count figures (as shown above a totally separate indicator from unemployment). This is why the Claimant Count is currently labelled as Experimental, rather than a National Statistic. We are working toward a position where we will be able to produce a Claimant Count that we are confident in, but there are still a number of stages to go to ensure that the information we get from DWP is correctly identifying the appropriate Universal Credit claimants.

Unemployment is said to be low, so how come so many people are in the High Street, should they not be at work? Back in the 80’s my local High Street, Colchester looked empty in photographs during the business day?

To borrow a psychologist’s, hat for a minute - we are always convinced that things are worse than they are and they were somehow better in some halcyon bygone day. Now to put my statisticians hat back on.

On a more serious note, we measure how many people are unemployed in line with the International Labour Organisation's internationally agreed definition of unemployment as given above. This does not necessarily match people's ideas of what unemployment means, having their own ideas about a wider catchall measure that they are not entirely sure of the definition of, but includes far more people than the official definition. Sometimes the definition given will meet a different concept of 'underemployment', which take into account unemployed and those who are employed but could work more hours. Sometimes they will think of some vague parts of the economically inactive as being unemployed, expecting a wider 'workless' definition.

Based on the survey information from the Labour Force Survey, we have record numbers of people in work (often the case as the population increases). However, we also have a record proportion of the population aged 16-64 in work. This is partially fuelled by record numbers and proportions of women in work, partially driven by the changing nature of society, partially driven by changes to benefit rules, partially driven by changes to the female state pension age.

However, the labour market has changed significantly over the last 30 years. Higher proportion of the population are employed part-time, although the numbers who work part-time because "they couldn't find a full time job" has not soared enormously, suggesting that they are happy with their part time work. There is also vastly increased flexibility in what hours and days people work, with more late/early/weekend working than we once had.

So we have record high proportions of people employed, and record low proportions of people economically inactive.

As mentioned before, the Claimant Count is currently experimental, as it is under development. Currently we 'know' that the figures we are getting aren't quite right. However, we do believe them to be fairly close and we know what kind of deficiencies they have. Generally, the Claimant Count is based on raw data files extracted from DWP systems which are passed to us for processing. You could argue that it is possible for DWP to 'tamper' with those files. However, I'm not sure what they would gain from this. The Claimant Count is not the headline measure - unemployment is, and as explained this has nothing to do with the benefits system and could not be directly affected by DWP. The Claimant Count is only really useful in that it provides information at a level that unemployment can't, but looking like unemployment. If it was tampered with to stop looking like unemployment, it would stop being as useful. Whilst unemployment is the main measure and is totally independent of ministerial control, there would be no point deliberately tampering with the Claimant Count.

How do the public know that your figures are correct? Do you ever have any survey carried out checking the work of the ONS?

I can't say that surveys on confidence on ONS statistics are my area of expertise. We have regular surveys with "key account" holders reflecting the main stakeholders. Generally, these people have a certain level of confidence in our statistics, often want us to be able to produce statistics of higher quality - but never suggest that there is any question on the honesty or integrity of the statistics that we produce. There is also ongoing review and assessment of what we do and the statistics we produce. This work is carried out by the UK Statistics Authority - who are basically there to police what we and other government statistic producers do.

In addition, we have some online user feedback surveys, but I'm going to have to admit to really not knowing too much about these. (I know all about the ones to do with the quality and usability of our websites, less about public confidence in our data).

As a general rule of thumb, if we say that unemployment is going up (like we did in the economic downturn) people believe us and use our figures to shake their fists at the government. If we say that unemployment is going down, then it is all government lies and we are all trained government lap dogs.

The biggest problem we have is this persistent public expectation that the measurement of unemployment is in some way directly linked to benefits.

WOW, thank you Bob for those answers! This was a very interesting discussion, and on behalf of our audience I do thank you for taking the time to explain more about the work of your Labour Market Division, and that of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in general.

Jobseekers are spending up to a staggering £1.44 billion a year on their job hunt, each spending on average up to £852 a year on interviews, which includes new clothes, courses and training, transport and haircuts. 

This is according to new research from totaljobs as part of its #MillionPoundJamie campaign, which has found that, on average, jobseekers spend £146 on every job interview they attend, including £33 on a new outfit, £20 on new shoes, and £24 on transport. The 16–24 age group spend the most, splashing out up to £167 on average for every interview.

However, despite this huge outlay, the data also reveals that 27% of jobseekers don’t research the role when preparing for a job interview and 60% don’t update their CVs for each role applied for – a basic and key component of any job hunt. Furthermore, 37% of jobseekers don’t research the industry when preparing for a job interview.

Meanwhile, for the older generation, a huge majority are worried that their age gets in the way of progression. Almost two-thirds (63%) of 55- to 64-year-olds have said they have felt discriminated against by a prospective employer because of their age, despite the over-55s often being the most prepared for an interview.

EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker wants to block UK access to single market, and condemns racism following the death of a Polish worker in Harlow, Essex in a racist attack. 

Six teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of the murder of a Polish man in a suspected hate crime in Harlow, Essex.

In the incident two Polish men were set upon outside a row of takeaway shops in what police believe was an unprovoked attack on Saturday.

40-year-old factory worker Arek Jozwik died of head injuries on Monday, killed it is belived by a single punch, while a 43-year-old man was treated for suspected hand fractures and bruising to his stomach.

Police said one line of investigation was that  it was a hate crime.

Mr Jozwik's brother Radek made an emotional visit to the scene of the attack and said that other people in the area have suffered from race-related attacks. He said there had been a surge in ill-feeling towards Eastern Europeans since the Brexit vote.

Images courtesy of the Daily Telegraph. 

SNP Treasury spokesperson Stewart Hosie MP has welcomed the decision by the UK government not to renew the contract with US firm Concentrix – but has said that questions remain to be answered about the award of the contract  - how much was actually saved and how much it is going to cost to ‘clean up another mess‘ caused by UK government incompetence.
 
Stewart Hosie MP commented : 
 
"It is welcome that the Tax Credit fraud and over-payment contract will not be renewed with Concentrix.
 
‘’This will be some comfort to those who have had benefits stopped as a result of their activity. But – the Concentrix contract was designed to save £1 billion in fraud and overpayment.
 
"The UK Government have to come clean on how much was actually saved–  it leaves many questions to be answered about UK government incompetence.
 
"How much of the so-called “savings” were as a result of false accusations by Concentrix against Tax Credit recipients?
 
"If there were, as reported, anywhere between 120 and perhaps many thousands of people affected by this, why did the Government not cancel their contract sooner?
 
"The cost of the Concentrix contract was reputed to have been £75 million. How much of that will be clawed back to directly compensate those affected?
 
"There are reports that civil servants have now been drafted in to clean up the mess left behind – and this will also have a cost. The taxpayer has an absolute right to know how we got into this mess and what plans the UK government has to sort it out.''

ONS FIGURES SHOW-Between February to April 2016 and May to July 2016, the number of people in work increased. The number of unemployed people and the number of people not working and not seeking or available to work (economically inactive) fell.

There were 31.77 million people in work, 174,000 more than for February to April 2016 and 559,000 more than for a year earlier.

There were 23.25 million people working full-time, 434,000 more than for a year earlier. There were 8.51 million people working part-time, 126,000 more than for a year earlier.

The employment rate (the proportion of people aged from 16 to 64 who were in work) was 74.5%, the joint highest since comparable records began in 1971.

There were 1.63 million unemployed people (people not in work but seeking and available to work), 39,000 fewer than for February to April 2016, 190,000 fewer than for a year earlier and the lowest since March to May 2008.

There were 901,000 unemployed men, 88,000 fewer than for a year earlier. There were 731,000 unemployed women, 102,000 fewer than for a year earlier.

The unemployment rate was 4.9%, down from 5.5% for a year earlier. The last time it was lower was for July to September 2005. The unemployment rate is the proportion of the labour force (those in work plus those unemployed) that were unemployed.

There were 8.83 million people aged from 16 to 64 who were economically inactive (not working and not seeking or available to work), 92,000 fewer than for February to April 2016 and 195,000 fewer than for a year earlier.

The inactivity rate (the proportion of people aged from 16 to 64 who were economically inactive) was 21.5%, the lowest since comparable records began in 1971.

Average weekly earnings for employees in Great Britain in nominal terms (that is, not adjusted for price inflation) increased by 2.3% including bonuses and by 2.1% excluding bonuses compared with a year earlier.

Public Sector employment falls

Source: ONS