Sarah left college in 2011, aged 19, with minimal qualifications and has struggled to find work. Now, she is what is called a “returner”, one of the thousands of people who spent two years on the government’s flagship Work Programme and still failed to find a job.

We first came across Sarah earlier this year at a south London jobcentre as part of the work we are doing with young unemployed people. It was clear she was still, after all this time, fundamentally unprepared for the job market. For example, she didn’t have maths or English GCSEs, which meant most employers wouldn’t consider her and she couldn’t do the apprenticeship on which she had set her heart. Sarah didn’t even have a standard covering letter to send out to employers, setting out the experience she has gained while signing on.

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Now we are working with Sarah to get her some basic maths and English qualifications and helping to rebuild her confidence, which is shot to pieces after so long on benefits.

The Work Programme did nothing for Sarah. She was simply parked for two years. It is scandalous, considering the vast sums of government money it receives, that the provider working with Sarah failed to spot her lack of basic qualifications and simply used her as free labour disguised as “work experience”. As Sarah put it to me last week, “I feel like I am starting again from scratch”.

Then there is Dominic, an able and articulate 19-year-old who wants to become a journalist. At his first Work Programme appointment he and other “customers” were told that “95% of people on benefits are unemployed because they don’t want a job”. The private provider involved promised to help Dominic break down the barriers that were preventing him from getting a job. The message was, in essence, that it was his own fault that he didn’t have a job and he would be helped to fix himself.

In reality, much of Dominic’s time on the Work Programme was spent avoiding “sanctions” – the withdrawal of benefits for failing to do enough to find work – and sitting unsupervised in front of a computer doing “job searches”. Dominic has finally found work in a bar, put himself on a part-time media course and started volunteering at a community magazine. Of the Work Programme, he says: “We were asked to perform a job search, which is literally sitting in front of the computers they provide and applying for jobs. I was told if I didn’t apply for at least one job while I was there I would be sanctioned. I was then told that if I was to be sanctioned and had my benefits stopped, I would still have to attend the Work Programme during the sanction period. If not, I would be further sanctioned.”

At his first appointment Dominic was told that ‘95% of people on benefits are unemployed because they don’t want a job’

Far from helping build confidence and prepare people for work, Dominic found that the Work Programme often just made life more difficult for already vulnerable people.

“The main aim is to place people in such an awful situation that they either make a make a minor mistake, for which they will be sanctioned, or they stop claiming of their own accord because they can no longer bear to be caught up in a broken system.” I don’t believe it was ever the intention of the coalition government to turn the Work Programme into a byzantine system of institutionalised bullying interrupted only by undirected “job searches”. But the truth is that charities such as ours, with a track record of helping young people into work, were cut out of the Work Programme bidding process in favour of giant companies. It is a terrible irony that we now find ourselves helping the brutalised people they left behind.