After the initial results of the Work Programme showed a miserable return on the investment made by the tax payers the government explained last year that it was early days and the published figures didn’t reflect the upturn which they were now detecting after the start-up phase.
Today (22 Feb 2013) the Public Accounts committee published an update which covers the first fourteen months performance figures for the Work Programme and by all accounts it is has been a spectacular failure. This time around government sources are feeding the media that various Work Programme agents are being subject to performance review plans which seems to be attributing the failure of the programme to the poor efforts of the agents rather than the principles which underpin the scheme itself.
The rewards for the Work Programme agents in getting somebody into a job are eye-watering and one can discount the lack of incentives involved as being a factor. So keen have Work Programme agents been in the past to earn commission that allegations of fraud have been made against Working Links and the A4e by their own former auditor who described the level of fraud as having reached epidemic proportions in these companies.
The answer is simple: there are not enough jobs around to soak up the number of unemployed people in the U.K. So long as the number of unemployed out-numbers by far the number of vacancies the government can preach to the wind about the need to get people into work and the wind will reply “there aren’t enough jobs”.
Why does the government set up such a Work Programme when there aren’t enough jobs in the first place? The simple answer is that there was a lack of common sense within the DWP and nobody was going to challenge Iain Duncan-Smith and other ideologically driven ministers who wanted to sort out society but were blind to the very obvious problems faced by their schemes – reality. A less generous reason would be to assume that the government weren’t stupid and the scheme was intended to cut the welfare bill by way off sanctions initiated by unscrupulous Work Programme agents who could help the DWP, in the words of a Whitehall source, make welfare clients tap-dance. There seems to be something about working in these agents that brings out that streak of cruelty within the human heart and I understand that people with a conscience do not last long as employees with such companies. Emma Harrison, who ran A4e and became a multi-millionaire on the back of DWP funding, is not noted for her veracity. Not content with the huge increase in benefit sanctions levied against the poorest sectors of society Work Programme agents are calling for even more sanction powers.
John Mason recently asserted “Iain Duncan Smith needs to explain why job centres have an unpaid work experience target, yet they have no target to get people into work. Surely that is their primary purpose?” The answer is simple – because there ain’t enough jobs.
Perhaps an unintended side-effect of all the bluster associated with the Work Programme and “getting people back into work” was that it distracted people’s attention away from the real issues: the flat-lining economy, there has never been a better time to be wealthy in the U.K, no senior bank figure has yet been prosecuted for fraud, benefit fraud is so small that it would cost more to eradicate it than to leave it alone, that vastly more benefit money is owed and goes unclaimed, that solving unemployment involves economic regeneration and not simply more cuts to the welfare budget whilst giving tax cuts to the wealthy. The scapegoating of the unemployed has helped provide the diversion that stops people asking the right questions and demanding the right actions.
If the government is serious about solving long-term unemployment then it would do well to encourage in whatever way it can the regeneration of the economy which will create jobs. Only then will the idea of a Work Programme begin to make sense, and only when it is cleansed of all aspects of forced labour.
Welfare Sorrows
