Less youth gets jobs with job scheme!

From - The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/27/work-programme-long-term-jobs

"Only 3.5% of people referred to Work Programme find long-term jobs

None of welfare-to-work scheme's 18 contractors reached target of getting 5.5% of clients a job for at least six months


An analysis by the Guardian reveals 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 14 months until July 2012, despite the government having spent £435m on the 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 the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, is the biggest private contractor, winning seven franchises of the 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 17,650 unemployed people in the south of England – a performance rate of 2.8%.

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

...

Hoban said 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 failed to meet minimum performance levels, which look at the first 12 months of the Work Programme. If this measure is used then just 2.3% of jobseekers found sustained work compared with the 5.5% minimum expected by the DWP.

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The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, pointed out that long-term unemployment had soared by more than 200,000 since the scheme began. He said the work programme was a "miserable failure. It's just not working because over the first year of the Work Programme just over two in every hundred people have been getting a job. And estimates are that if the Work Programme didn't exist five in every hundred would be getting a job."