Whatever works (From The Northern Echo)

Whatever works

3:04pm Friday 10th February 2012 in Letters

THE Department for Works and Pensions have banned work programme providers from publishing their target results until next October and no prizes for guessing why.

By next October, the Work Programme (WP) will be 18 months old.

Providers were given Government contracts last June on the understanding 40 per cent of all WP participants would be found sustainable employment, but early indications say that figure is as low as five per cent.

The promise of high-quality training is also way down on expectations and no better than it was in the Eighties when my father was put on a Government scheme.

He was given an extra tenner a week on top of his benefit for travelling but his boss,who owned a large hardware store, treated him like trash. He was taught no skills and spent the entire time as an unpaid skivvy brushing floors, making the tea and nipping to the local corner shop to buy the other workers smokes and biscuits. He had no option to put up with it as he was terrified of losing his dole.

His boss was paid £300 a week to train him but that never happened. A nice little earner for the boss who made his fortune from the backs of the young unemployed.

That was in 1989, when the Tories were in power; 23 years later and back to Tory rule it’s the same old story: a poor quality Work Programme with no jobs and a training scheme more concerned about targets than developing real skills.

Margaret Thatcher promised so many things for the unemployed when my father was a young man, but all she delivered was three million on the dole. The way David Cameron is running the country into the ground there will be four million on the dole by this time next year.

Stephanie Finnegan, Normanby.