Provisional offer from CS agency

[YorkshireTea2929]

Can someone pls help

I did my interview with one of the civil service agency in November 23, verbal offer in December 23, provisional offer through CS portal and provided the details for Pre Employment checks in Jan

After a month's wait they emailed today to say the vacancy is on hold for few weeks and the checks will take longer.

If the hold status don't change in few weeks, I'll be placed on a Reserve List !!

What should I make of this? I'm so stressed

Emailed HR and vacancy holder, left two voicemail neither of them got in touch to tell me what happened and what can be realistically expected

Hoping someone can shed some light smd offer advice.

Surely a provisional offer means you have a job unless your checks aren't satisfactory? What words does the offer letter use to offer the job?

It seems weird they'd say the vacancy is "on hold" - civil service jobs are requested and budgeted for long before any advertising goes out.

There are a few areas restructuring at the moment so that might mean they are pausing recruitment , going into reserve list means that when other similar jobs come up you will be allocated to one of those within a given time eg a year

@KTheGrey lots of departments have had holds put on recruitment again. We had several vacancies approved for external recruitment only for the annual budget to be slashed (again) just after interview. Absolute waste of so many people's time and money. So we're carrying several hundred vacancies across the service with bugger all recruitment and voluntary redundancy in place.

@NCForQuestions

What a mess 🙁