I haven’t covered this owing to laziness, but Boris’s extension of half-price tube and bus fares to Job Seeker’s Allowance recipients is of course very welcome, not least because it’s a refutation of the ‘workshy-layabouts-on-your-bike’ Thatcherite mindset. Let’s examine the detail of the scheme:
From 1 April 2009 the Bus & Tram Discount Scheme will be extended to include Londoners who have been claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA) for a minimum of 13 weeks. JSA claimants will be able to get an application form from their Jobcentre Plus branch once they have been claiming for 13 weeks.
The scheme will also be widened to Londoners who claim Employment and Support Allowance from 1 April 2009.
However, something Roger Evans said on LBC struck a note here – he suggested, in response to caller’s confusion on Freedom Pass validity and tickets, that better advertising was required. Quite right. Later on, however, he suggested that there must be savings to be made in TfL and elsewhere in areas such as marketing. Well, up to a point. If you want pepole to know about the services you’re providing, you’re going to have to spend money on marketing.
Bringing this together, it’ll be interesting and instructive to see how much advertising is put out around the discounts for Income Support and JSA claimants. The original half-price Income Support scheme had a fair amount of advertising, but didn’t reach its targets on take up. I haven’t seen any tube or bus advertising about the revived half-price fares – however, since it only comes in in April, there’s still time. So if you see any effort being made to let people know that they can save money on their recently increased fares, either on billboards, transport or in Jobcentres, let us know. The measure for this is whether levels of Income Support discount take up reach the levels of 75,000 or so under the previous Venezuelan-funded scheme. Obviously it improves TfL’s finances if it doesn’t, so we’re not going to give Boris the credit until it does what it says on the tin.
[As an indication of how hard it is to find the details, it is on the website, but not on the front page. You have to click 'Tickets' then 'Photocards and Discounts' and it's there in fairly small print in a link at the bottom of the 'Adults' section of the page, although it's confusingly not the one that mentions 'Jobseekers' - the link that does is actually the existing 'New Deal' scheme, which wasn't Boris's doing. They need to get their message clearer here.].
Tags: 6 Comments
6 responses so far ↓
Tory logic: do not advertise sufficiently, conclude that take-up is so low that the offer should be discontinued, discontinue offer.
I’ve seen it advertised in the local paper but that is all so far.
I think we should be public-spirited and help Boris advertise it.
Look on the bright side, no advertising is at least better than advertising that is wrong … as with the adverts on buses saying fares have fallen when in fact they’ve risen:
http://www.libdemvoice.org/london-bus-prices-10616.html
In order to get Job Seeker’s Allowance, don’t you need to attend a job centre in person every two weeks? Surely the career advisors there could just tell people they are entitled to the travel discounts. I don’t really see why you’d need to advertise it at all – there should be a very high take up if job seekers are properly advised by the people whose job it is to do that.
My local job centre informs me that they dont have the forms, this effectively is a brick wall, preventing take up of the entitled benefit.
A cosmetic policy designed to make boris look good, in reality hardly anyone at the job centres knows the scheme is in effect, and those that do fob you off with admin excuses. Take up will be low because there is no recourse to ‘we dont have the forms’.
any journalist looking for a story should start here.
Liam: Can you send me an email about this?
adambienkov@btinternet.com