What It’s Like To Lose Your Local Job Centre
A spokesman for the DWP, however, said that support is always given to those in need and that funds are available for people to apply for to help pay for travel costs. However these payments are discretionary.
The spokesman said: “When we close a site, we take precautions to minimise disruption for customers. More people are accessing their benefits online, resulting in many of our buildings being underused.
“We will always make sure that people have the support they need to get into and progress within work, including scheduling appointments to suit them, supporting travel costs and arranging home visits for the most vulnerable.”
Like the rest of Kent, the area is traditionally a Conservative stronghold. However in 2017, the Canterbury constituency, which includes Whitstable, elected a Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, for the first time since the constituency was formed in 1918.
Duffield was involved in the campaign to save the job centre in Whitstable. She said: “When you take community facilities away (such as happened by the closure of the job centre in Whitstable in 2018) you are losing the heart from some of our towns.”
Simon Warley, a local councillor and chair of the Herne Bay Labour Party, agrees and says the job centre closures point to a bigger trend of moving services away to nearby cities or bigger centres.
“Lots of towns on the peripherals of cities are having their services removed whether it’s less banks, post offices, job centres. People were asking why everything has to focus on another town.
“We’re quite a large place and we should be an entity in our own right. It goes against the whole localism thing and the idea of bringing communities together.
“It would be easy to blame it on the local Conservative administration but it’s bigger than that. It’s part of the whole austerity agenda. It’s becoming more costly with the current financial settlement to run local services and we are seeing the effects of that.
“It’s unfortunate that we’re being left behind.”