Oh dear god, where to start? I was referred to the Restart Scheme at the beginning of the year and it has just been consistently downhill. The travel reimbursements were at least quick for the most part, however I felt judged for primarily using the more expensive trains over busses in my area as the reliability of the busses is not that great. Multiple times I was threatened with sanctions when I was physically unable to attend appointments due to busses not showing up the few times I took them. I live in a decently remote area which it takes around an hour and a half to get to my nearest Reed office, of which I would try my hardest to keep giving them updates on when I could or couldn't make appointments due to being at the mercy of an unreliable transport system.I was consistently pressured to apply for 10 jobs in the multiple fields I was interested in each per week, which is impossible due to how remote I was, and the excuse I was given by my coach was that I "wasn't looking hard enough" despite every single listing that I was sent was beyond the "90 minute" travel time guidelines as it was all in or around the large town the Reed office is based in, not my local area, and I was never listened to when I constantly tried to point this out. As someone with a diagnosed anxiety disorder, the amount of stress this put me under is absolutely immeasurable and I would say actively made it harder for me to job search, as I was mentally more exhausted and more concerned about their quota obsession than my actual employment status.The cherry on top is that when booked for "Cover Letter appointments" or "CV writeup help" all they would do is go through an absolutely useless powerpoint and then basically tell us to just use AI to write it for us! It was completely insulting to my intelligence as a person and absolutely unhelpful, just shoving an AI "tool" in my face isn't going to teach me anything at all. The "cover letter" "lesson" was 3 hours long as well, not including the time to travel there being over an hour each way. The CV one, all they did was run my pre-existing CV through an AI "tool" and then change the font, they did basically nothing to the core contents, yet another insult to my ability. There was always an overarching feel of judgement, like I was seen as a lazy slob regardless of what I did.When I did recently get a job, they begun to hound me for the (admittedly little) information on it that I have, and the little I do have was, of course, not enough for them to leave me alone. For close to a month now, my calls, texts and emails have been spammed, interrupting my rest and work time, and are so frequent at least the calls are starting to be marked as spam and the numbers blocked automatically.Overall, the Restart Scheme and Reed in general has been a massive damper on my mental health and job searching ability, and I have reported issues to my DWP/UC work coach however she was unfortunately unable to help me, as her co-worker who liaises with them said I couldn't be taken off it regardless of how bad my experience was with them. This one conversation with my UC work coach was infinitely more helpful than multiple months on Restart.To any poor souls in my shoes or about to be in them, stop drop and run.
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