Work Programme Is Failing

Alarming figures out last week show that the Government’s back-to-work scheme, the Work Programme, is clearly failing.

In the two years since the Work Programme was launched, nearly 900,000 people on the programme haven’t even started a job. That means three quarters of the unemployed people on the scheme haven’t even started a job, and half of young people have still to get a single day’s work out of it, at a time when almost a million young people are unemployed.

This is a disaster for those who are out of work and a disaster for the taxpayer who has to foot our growing benefits bill which is now £20 billion higher than the Government planned.