The government’s £5 billion flagship work programme is failing those people furthest from the labour market as providers ‘cream off’ those easiest to get into employment, a report has found.
The University of Birmingham’s third sector research centre has found that ‘parking’ those that were hardest to help in the programme was ‘endemic’
Several homeless charities are involved in the delivery of the work programme, and homeless people with high support needs – such as those with drug, alcohol and mental health problems – are often those who need the most work to get into the labour market.
The scheme works through paying by results and although the government will give higher payments for harder-to-help clients, the research published on Tuesday found that there was ‘no evidence as yet that these differential payments had incentivised providers to work with harder to help customers – in part because the categories did not correspond to the groups they perceived to be hardest to help’.
Looking at the role of charities in the work programme, the report Does sector matter? Understanding the experiences of providers in the work programme, said: ‘Providers with long experience of welfare to work provision argued that gaming [concentrating on the easiest to get into work] was embedded in the work programme and could be seen as a rational response to payment by results since a proportion of customers would always be very unlikely to get a job.’