Making Appointments - when did this happen?

Today I assisted a claimant to make an application over the phone for JSA because he’s been found not to meet the criteria for ESA.  When arranging the appointment at the jobcentre for him to sign his claimant commitment etc we were offered an appointment that’s no use because he has a PIP appeal tribunal an hour after the appointment time - and the appointment might take an hour.

In the olden days, I’ve had no problem not accepting the jobcentre appointment and arranging it for another time, but today I was told that we had to be given the first available appointment and phone another number in order to ‘re-arrange’ the appointment.

Obviously we did do this but what a faff…...  No wonder appointment wait times at agencies are so long when even the simplest thing takes twice the work.