Saul Cahill, a work coach at a busy job centre in Gateshead and another PCS Union rep, says people with health conditions and disabled people are often the most difficult to support into work. <\/p>\n
He says delays in other services like the NHS mean it can take longer to find someone suitable employment.<\/p>\n
One person he has been supporting, who he says has been “really engaged” in their search for work – despite having a long-term health condition which means they are not required to do so – has been in his caseload since he started four years ago.<\/p>\n
Many employers are simply not able to accommodate some disabilities, Saul says, while time constraints also mean he can not help them as much as he would like.<\/p>\n
“I might be sitting with someone who is, on paper, doing all the right things and doesn’t seem to be getting any response,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I’d love to sit down with them [and] go through the job applications together, and that’s not necessarily possible.<\/p>\n
“People get very frustrated.”<\/p>\n
Around 1.6 million universal credit claimants are in what’s known as the “intensive work search” category. <\/p>\n
They are fit and able to work, but are either not working or working with very low earnings.<\/p>\n
These claimants require significant support from a work coach, including meeting weekly for the first 13 weeks of their claim, and either weekly or fortnightly after that.<\/p>\n
Almost 300,000 intensive work search claimants have been job-seeking for more than five years, 18% of the total.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saul Cahill, a work coach at a busy job centre in Gateshead and another PCS Union rep, says…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[72,61,60,150],"class_list":["post-64211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jobs","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jobs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}