Job centres take on extra staff to cope with unemployed

Oct 21 2009 by Jonathan Walker, Birmingham Mail

JOB centres have taken on more than 1,000 staff to help cope with the massive increase in unemployment in the West Midlands, MPs have been told.

And the job service is facing an influx of professionals and executives – who have little experience of looking for work, and may never have been in a job centre before.

Margaret Tovey, customer services director with Jobcentre Plus in the West Midlands, said staff had received training on how to help middle class jobhunters who had been hit by the recession. The region continues to have the highest unemployment rate in the country with 281,000 people out of work in the region, an unemployment rate of 10.4 per cent.

This is more than double the unemployment figure of 112,000 people 12 months ago, and the unemployment rate is higher than in any other part of the UK.

Ms Tovey was giving evidence to the West Midlands Select Committee, a House of Commons committee investigating the effects of the economic downturn on the region.

She told MPs: “We have actually taken on 1,110 staff since the recession started to bite.

“Most of these staff are for front-line services. Most are fixed-term contracts of 18 months duration.”

The jobs service was also planning to open 16 new sites on a temporary basis, she said. They would operate for up to two years. And existing job centres were opening at weekends and evenings.