Great news. Obviously you don't want to give away any personal details, just wondering the best way to find something the same/similar?

Yeah, I mean, its retail - It isn't really a sector I wanted to get back into and I left it years ago for a reason but I can't really be that picky and at least its something to get me going again and giving me that routine and sense of purpose again a bit.

The scheme definitely seems to be working well for others too, a chap in my social work group sessions had to leave our session schedule because he ended up with a job due to it too, which is great!

Really good news. This is the exact reason why I started this post. To give us some glimmer of hope there is a way out of this mess. I am in the early stages of trying to do something for myself. In the self employment route. I wish we did something like that scheme down here. That would be amazing. I did hear from another PO that she had another success story about someone in our position getting a job in a recycling place. To be honest the job sounds awful. But it's got to be better than sitting here every day for the next few years. 

Yeah, I haven't changed my surname but now I tend to go by my formal name as opposed to my common name (and what I was reported under). So thing along of the lines of being called John and I now go by Johnathan. When you Google that version of my name only a handful of things come up for me and they're all music related so no issues there.

There's obviously always the chance someone I know might come in but it's just one of those things that I'll just have to deal with if it happens. I don't feel it's a good idea to stress out about something that may never happen.

punter99: I'd rather not, just from a safeguarding point of view I hope you understand, it's definitely nothing personal, but what I will say is it's a large retail group in the UK that deals in food.

Really good news. Sounds like a model employer. Are you able to give the name of the company? 

I was always nervous about the googling aspect. That’s why I changed my surname so if people chose to they don’t find anything. Has worked well for my role as people obviously know my new surname.

Have you thought about what to do on the situation if not only a colleague but a customer was to find out and challenge you? Put something in place to obviously protect you in such a situation? Might be worth considering.

They asked none of that.

As mentioned earlier in the thread - This was set up via the job centre's Long Term Unemployment scheme, so the companies are aware it's for people with 12+ months unemployment. They didn't ask for any references at all, the job centre just give them a bunch of CVs, they pick out the ones they like the look of and interview them and then offer the job as applicable.

Congrats - great news to hear.

Can I ask if they asked for any references from previous employer and if you had to explain the unemployment gap? How did you circumvent around that (if they did ask).

So an update following my induction! All looking super good now!

Running through the paperwork I was obviously a bit anxious and waiting for the dreaded question about criminal convictions to come up but it never did! I did look online and it seems like they don't bother doing disclosure/DBS checks.

I ran through all the paperwork, right to work and all that stuff, got my shifts for next week all sorted and ready to go. 

So super positive, the only real thing now I guess would be if a member of staff decides to Google me then I'll have to obviously try navigate that but I'll worry about it if it happens.

Yeah the employment obligation is a bit weird as up until that point I'd always been working under the pretense that it was required and one thing that was told to me a few years back was the police could make a decision to disclose to my employer should they feel there is a potential safe guarding issue (like becoming a school janitor or something). But if I'm under no obligation to tell them then how would they know in order to make that judgement call..?

Thankfully they've been pretty hands off with me the entire time. I don't have any SHPO/SOPO conditions, I'm purely just registration requirements however they do have their random spot checks of my devices to make sure I'm behaving myself.

Thanks for the good wishes! I hope it sticks as it'd be a good finishing point for it all as I'm officially off the register and a "free man" in February so not too long to go however social work did state there might be potential for an early discharge but I'm not holding out much for that.