Jobcentre Plus in Scotland

Every working day in Scotland Jobcentre Plus:

• Receives 1,250 vacancies from employers;
• Conducts 3,900 work focused interviews;
• Helps 395 people into jobs;
• Invests £217,000 in the delivery of services through partners in the private, public and voluntary sectors;
• Takes over 9,300 calls to Jobcentre Plus Direct contact centres of which over 6,760 calls are to our telephone job-matching service;
• Pays more than £7.8m in working age benefits.

In Scotland, we are reaching the end of rolling out new local Jobcentres.  We have 91 Jobcentres and 2 Contact Centres operating in the new environment. Ten offices remain to be rolled out and plans are well advanced to open these offices during this operational year.

From 2005, the District boundary structure in Scotland was restructured to create the following six Districts:

• Ayrshire, Dumfries, Galloway and Inverclyde
• Edinburgh, Lothian and Borders
• Forth Valley and Fife
• Glasgow
• Highland, Islands and Clyde Coast & Grampian
• Lanarkshire and East Dunbartonshire

We are continuing to centralise our benefit processes across the organisation. Our aim is to make benefit processing more efficient through larger centres. This will enable us to deal with telephone enquiries more efficiently and allow our benefit processors to focus on processing claims quickly and accurately. Eight Benefit Centres will be established in Scotland, located in Coatbridge, Bathgate, Clydebank, Greenock, Kilmarnock, Inverness, Springburn and Glasgow Northgate. We expect to have 60% of our processing work migrated to these centres by March 2007.

This is only one of the ways in which we are modernising service to customers. We have introduced new Internet routes and increased our telephone capacity to allow staff to spend more face-to-face time with those customers who need the most help. We now take initial claims to benefit through our contact centres and we will be investing more resource over the next year to make sure that customers can contact us quickly and we can start their claim process accurately and efficiently.

Our targets for the next year clearly reflect a focus on getting people into work and paying the right people the right money on time every time.  In particular, our new Job Outcome target now allows us to count our successes in getting people into work, no matter which of our services they use to do so.  The new target works by matching our system with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs information to identify customers who move into work.  This will make it much easier for us to count customers who have found work for themselves through our internet or telephone services.  It will also help us to improve our service to employers, who will not have to field follow up questions to confirm whether our customers have filled their vacancies.

We have made some significant progress over the last year but it is clear that some challenges remain, and we have another two years before our current modernisation programme will be complete.   It is crucial that we continue to work constructively with partners to get your feedback, support and involvement in the future evolution of Jobcentre Plus and the continuing improvement of the service we deliver for our customers

Partners

We encourage our managers throughout the country to build links and work together with employers, partners, local communities and others to achieve their goals and ours.  We also want to keep you informed about Jobcentre Plus services and developments in your areas. However, if you feel you don't have the relationship with us that you would like, please contact Dave Cowie, Acting Customer Services Director (Tel: 0141 207 3808) who will be happy to help.

Scotland External Relations Manager

Jim Mulholland 0141 207 3581 - e-mail: jim.mulholland@jobcentreplus.gsi.gov.uk