Margaret Hodge, the Labour chair of the Public Accounts Committee, is "astonished" at the performance of the government's flagship Work Programme [2]:

This first analysis of the Work Programme performance figures shows the extent to which the scheme is failing participants, and particularly the young and the harder-to-help. Against a contractual target of 5.5 per cent, the lowest performing provider did not manage to place a single person in the under 25 category into a job lasting six months. The Work Programme was specifically designed to incentivise providers to assist those furthest from the work place, but the appalling performance for ESA ex-incapacity claimants demonstrates how this experiment simply is not working. Between June 2011 and July 2012, of the some 9,500 ex-incapacity claimants referred to providers, I am astonished that only 20 people have been placed in a job that has lasted three months.

My committee will be taking evidence from the department next week when we shall expect a clear explanation for what action is underway to turn performance around and get the Work Programme working for participants and the taxpayer.

For background, the Work Programme is the workfare scheme which offers "tailored support" - which can be anything from CV writing classes to mandatory unpaid work - to people who have been out of work for a long time. When viewed against the best estimates of the background rate of "job outcomes" (an unemployed person getting a job and keeping it for six months) it turns out that the programme spent money to, in effect, destroy jobs [3]:

The Work Programme is, so far, worse than nothing at ensuring "job outcomes" – that is, people in unsubsidised work six months after they leave the programme. In the first fourteen months, 3.5 per cent of participants achieved job outcomes, but for people not on the programme, 5 per cent were expected to get jobs, according to Labour's shadow minister Liam Byrne.

…In other words, the Work Programme did not cost £2,000 per job. Instead, for every £4,600 it spent, it destroyed one participant's chance of employment.