The Work Program Results Are In...

[Zaune]

... and they're bloody awful.

Only one in 28 unemployed people referred to the government's flagship welfare-to-work programme has been found a job for six months – failing to meet the government's target, official figures show.

An analysis by the Guardian shows that none of the 18 work programme contractors - 15 of which are private companies - managed to get 5.5% of unemployed people referred to the scheme a job for half a year in the year until July 2012, despite the government having spent £435m on scheme so far. Providers are paid for taking on a jobless person, finding them a job and then ensuring they keep it.

Ingeus, part of a multinational founded by the wife of Kevin Rudd, former Australian prime minister, is the biggest private contractor winning seven franchises of the work programme worth £727m over five years.

In the north-east of England Ingeus was referred almost 28,000 jobless people and got 920 into sustained employment, a success rate of 3.3% until July 2012. A4e, which is the second biggest contractor to the programme with £438m of deals, found 490 jobs for more 17,650 unemployed people in the south of England – a performance rate of 2.8%.

Mark Hoban, the employment minister, told a press conference that he would be writing to companies to warn them that they were falling short of the government's targets — reminding them if they have not improved by next April he can begin to divert the jobless from poor performers to the best companies.

Describing this as a "snapshot" he said: "We clearly have measures in place to deal with underperformance and we will be writing to providers to ask them to set out their plans to improve their performance."

"They will have to put plans in place and deliver against them. We will take action thereafter if they are not delivering."

Hoban said that the figures had to be considered "against the backdrop of much weaker than expected growth. We had been expecting growth of 2 or 2.5% a year by now."

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had threatened to remove contracts from providers who fail to meet minimum performance levels.

Chris Blackwell, the managing director of Maximus, which holds £180m of the work programme, told the Guardian that the suggested figures were "just wrong. It's a complete misrepresentation of the data. The figures are looking at just the first few months of the scheme and do not give an accurate picture of what's happening with the work programme."

The trade body ERSA, which represents all the providers, estimates that if the government were to take figures up to September 2012 then the picture improves considerably – with 20% of the unemployed referred getting into long-term employment.

Others backed the industry. Alan Downey, UK and Europe head of public sector at KPMG Management Consulting, said: "Today's data may be taken by some as an indication that the government's efforts to help the long-term unemployed back into work are not working.

"Such a short-term perspective fails to acknowledge that the work programme is an initiative which has made some progress but, like any new programme, needs time to create the impact we all hope and expect to see."

The department said that the figures show that at least 56% of the scheme's earliest participants have come off benefits, with 19% spending at least six consecutive months off benefits.

[Keevan_Colton]

The department said that the figures show that at least 56% of the scheme's earliest participants have come off benefits, with 19% spending at least six consecutive months off benefits

I'd be particularly interested in the breakdown of details there, since the number of ways they have to fuck you over and sanction you out of benefits with the help of the likes A4e is astounding.

[KlavoHunter]

Is this the screwed-up program where companies just cycle between government-paid employees and never actually give any of them a lasting job?

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

To elaborate on what KlavoHunter and Keevan said, if only 3.5% of people on the scheme are getting long-term jobs but over 50% of them are off-benefits anyway there are two possible conclusions, or a combination of the two if you prefer. One is positively chilling, the other is merely bad.

1) People are getting shunted from one short-term government-backed job to another. There's no chance of them finding anything permanent, but it keeps them off the dole queue. This is the "merely bad" option.

2) The amount of ways there are to fuck people over and sanction them out of the benefits numbers altogether is mind-boggling, so there are no jobs to be found but people are being kicked off of benefits anyway for any one of three million different reasons. For obvious reasons, this is the "positively chilling" option.

To add some original thought, this bit in particular sprung out at me.

The Guardian analysis also indentified an alarming trend: that the work programme performed best in richer areas where there was lower levels of unemployment. The work programme in Middlesbrough, where 8% are unemployed, found 100 jobs for 4,500 people referred.

This bit of info explodes the right-wing myth that there are jobs available but nobody is willing to fill them. If that was the case then there would be no correlation between the existing unemployment rate and the success of the program in a given regional area. Obviously you'd need more information to give a firm conclusion across the whole country, but it seems a pretty solid hypothesis for the moment. Bottom line, the jobs aren't there and no amount of private-sector racketeering is going to change that, so this has become an exercise in cutting the welfare bill and fuck the people that it's actually claiming to help. Tories are as Tories do.

[Block]

Teddy I don't know if it's like this in the UK, but here in the US there ARE a lot of jobs that do sit open, because 1) HR departments are incompetent and set standards for employment that would require one to be massively overqualified for the actual job, and 2) They're not incompetent, but do it under instruction from higher ups so that they can show they're "trying" but just can't find anyone qualified, so people have to work just a little bit harder to make up the slack.

[Zaune]

Teddy I don't know if it's like this in the UK, but here in the US there ARE a lot of jobs that do sit open, because 1) HR departments are incompetent and set standards for employment that would require one to be massively overqualified for the actual job, and 2) They're not incompetent, but do it under instruction from higher ups so that they can show they're "trying" but just can't find anyone qualified, so people have to work just a little bit harder to make up the slack.

I dare say that's going on as well -witness the number of adverts that insist on "previous experience" no matter how unskilled the job may be- but the total number of vacancies is noticeably smaller than it used to be; if it gives you some idea, the Situations Vacant section in my local paper used to be eight pages five years ago and it's now down to four.