Redundancy and signing on

[PinkSparklyPussyCat]

I'm going to be made redundant later this year. I don't plan to look for work for 3-6 months after leaving so do I still need to sign on or do I wait until I'm actually looking for a job?

Might be a good idea if you need the NI contributions paid towards your state pension.

If you claim New style JSA then you are expected to look for work for 35 hours a week, so if you want to claim you do actually need to be job searching. If you don't want to job search then don't claim until you are ready. the problem with leaving it too long to claim though is that you may not have enough NI contributions in the qualifying years to claim.

Yes I did this last year.

To be fair the way the job market is it can take a few months to find anything!
Signing on you'd need to attend the job centre every week then every 2 weeks and tell them what jobs you have applied for etc
I never had to supply proof though so how they knew I wasn't making it up I don't know!

Thanks everyone. I’ve been working since I was 17 and I’ll be 49 when I leave so state pension shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll just wait until I’m ready to look