Professional Boundaries

The request was successful.

Dear Department for Work and Pensions,

Please could you provide me with, or point me to, any internal policies and guidance for Job Centre Plus (JCP) 'advisers', setting out the professional boundaries required and expected of them, in their conversations with benefit claimants ('Job seekers').

Specifically, I am interested in knowing whether it would be considered either 'usual' or acceptable to make a personal remark regarding a claimant's perceived/alleged psychological make-up, and to then link this to a further statement that (the particular label chosen) is likely to be a causal factor in the claimant's not having (at the time of the conversation) been successful in securing paid work.

Thank you.

Yours faithfully,

S. Howarth

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DWP CAXTON HOUSE EXTERNAL HR, Department for Work and Pensions

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Ms Howarth

Please see attached response to your recent FOI request.

Kind Regards,
DWP HR Central Freedom of Information Team Department for Work and Pensions| Human Resources| Level 7, Caxton House, 6-12 Tothill Street. London. SW1H 9NA

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Ron (Account suspended) left an annotation ()

Some of the issues raised in this "Grounds of Appeal" to the Social Entitlement Tribunal may be of interest:

From around paragraph 27
http://www.scribd.com/doc/164658925/Soci...

Incidentally, the Tribunal found all 6 decisions the Jobcentre took to sanction unlawful.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/193302234/Soci...

Susan Howarth left an annotation ()

Ron,
Thanks for the information.

At the time of making the request there wasn't any question of sanctions (though there have been a couple of allusions to them since). The comment made seemed unprofessional in the extreme but the difficulty in launching into a formal complaint is that there is a need to continue to 'engage' - and there are only so many alternative employees in case of a sideways move that could result. This wasn't by any means an 'unusual' or even (@today's JCP 'standards') an extreme circumstance, unfortunately - although enough of a (concern at the time) to prompt this request.