The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has today published its first performance report on the government's Work Programme. Unfortunately, it is hopelessly uninformative.

All it tells us it that since June 2011, 370,000 people have been referred by Jobcentre Plus to this £5bn payment-by-results programme delivered by 15 contractors – most of them private companies. About 90% of these referrals have actually started or been "attached" to a provider .

Just over 5% of referrals (20,000) are on employment support allowance (ESA) – the new benefit replacing incapacity benefit. This is a smaller proportion than expected . It possibly tells us that the systems for getting people on to ESA and then the Work Programme are still a bit problematic, but it doesn't tell us much more.

Without data about how many people have started in work and have stayed there, this report provides no meaningful insight into whether the Work Programme is working. The DWP says this information will follow in the autumn. It is suggested that this lag in reporting is because it takes time to help someone find a job and the payments to providers are linked to them keeping someone in work for months, if not years.

At an operational level, however, providers will be measuring their performance on a daily basis. Every one of them will produce, internally, detailed weekly reports tracking employment outcomes against carefully modelled targets. The only reason we are not allowed to have these in the public domain is because the employment minister, Chris Grayling, has said in meetings with contractors that he does not want to provide Labour with ammunition to beat him up about his programme's failure, in the same way he used to attack them. He insists, in short, on putting his own political position ahead of the lives of hundreds of thousands of unemployed people.

The public accounts committee attempted to get behind this smokescreen at its inquiry into the Work Programme last week. However, both contractors and the DWP steadfastly refused to reveal how well, or badly, the programme is performing. It makes it impossible to determine the extent to which this vital welfare-to-work initiative is simply creaming off the easy to help and parking the rest.

Failing to get at meaningful data, the committee reverted to an insistent barrage of questions about the amount of money being creamed off by the contractors. One provider, in particular, appeared to be behaving like the fattest of cats, pouring many millions of dividend cream into its own bowl. Most of these contracts have been awarded to privately owned companies, some with overseas ownership. It is impossible to quantify to what extent these profits have siphoned off money that could have been spent on reducing unemployment instead.

In the early years of Labour's New Deal welfare-to-work programme contractors were paid largely on the basis of the numbers of people referred to them and how long they kept their bums on jobseeking seats. These were cushy contracts with, at times, questionable quality and impact.

Under the Work Programme providers only get paid if one of their jobseekers finds a job and then stays in it. It is possible that they will fall flat on their collective face, especially since most successful contractors offered to deliver for huge discounts. If they fail, it will be to the detriment of workless individuals, their families and communities. The cats argue that since they bear the risk, they have the right to a creamy return. Even in an outcome-funded world, however, doesn't the state want control over the proportion of total expenditure actually invested in frontline services? There are a number of ways that this could be achieved.

If contracts were awarded with a requirement for "open book accounting" then we could build a shared understanding of what it really costs to deliver the right assistance. What, for example, is the optimal caseload of jobseekers per employment adviser?

Understanding the cost of the service would also enable the commissioner to incentivise, and target assistance at, people furthest from the work place and to track and put a cap on profits. This would, however, demand a seismic shift in the approach of the DWP. It would need to accept a role as steward of their marketplace, sharing responsibility with contractors for their impact. Contracts would also have to be flexible, with payment terms periodically reviewed to ensure maximum bang for each buck. In hard economic times, and particularly in unemployment hot spots , we need to pay more.

An independent regulator for welfare to work could stand apart from the vested interests of both minister and contractor and be accountable for policing the performance of these programmes.

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