Government urged to overhaul Work Programme and refocus on offering support to mentally ill people instead of putting pressure on them to find jobs

The government’s flagship welfare to work programme is failing tens of thousands of disabled and ill jobseekers, charities have said.



Ministers claimed latest official statistics showed the Work Programme was transforming the lives of many long-term unemployed jobseekers. But charities said the £5bn scheme was struggling to help people who had been on incapacity benefit to find work.

Companies delivering the Work Programme admitted it had been hard to find employment for many jobseekers in this category and more investment was needed to prepare them to move off benefits and into work.

The government has pledged to help a million more disabled people into work by 2020. A successful Work Programme, which has so far taken on 300,000 people on employment and support allowance (ESA, the successor to incapacity benefit) will be key to meeting this aspiration.

However, Mind, the mental health charity, said that just 9% of people with mental health problems currently claiming ESA had found a job after being attached to the Work Programme.

Tom Pollard, policy and campaigns manager at Mind, said: “It’s high time the government faced up to the fact that their current approach just isn’t working for people with mental health problems and needs a fundamental rethink.

“Mind is calling on employment minister Priti Patel to radically overhaul the benefits system, to one with less focus on pressurising people and greater investment in tailored, personalised support.

“We want everyone with a mental health problem who is currently on the Work Programme taken off this scheme and offered support which acknowledges and addresses the challenges they face in getting and keeping a job.”

Paul Bivand, the associate director of statistics and analysis at the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion, said there had been little improvement in the programme’s performance in getting people off ESA and into work.

For example, although Work Programme companies were expected by the government to get 41% of ESA claimants who had volunteered for the scheme into work, just 10% of these people had got jobs, said Bivand.

Even where there were low expectations, performance had been poor. Companies were expected to get jobs for just 8.6% of ESA claimants who had been previously on incapacity benefit and out of the job market for years. But just 4% had found work.

A performance briefing by the ERSA, the trade body for Work Programme provider companies and charities, said: “It should be remembered that many of the jobseekers in this group will never have received intensive employment support before and are a considerable distance from the labour market.

“Performance in this group is rising, but it is going to take far longer to help these jobseekers back into employment.”

The Department for Work and Pensions said previous government back-to-work schemes had not done enough for disabled people or those with mental health problems. The Work Programme provided “flexible support so they have the right skills for when they are ready to rejoin the workforce”, it said.

The ERSA said that overall 731,000 individual jobseekers had entered work through the Work Programme since it began in June 2011.

Elliot Dunster, the head of policy, research and public affairs for the disability charity Scope, said: “These figures show the Work Programme isn’t working for disabled people who are pushing hard to find jobs and get on at work, but continue to face huge barriers.”