"Just one in eight people placed on flagship back to work scheme have found a lasting role"

The Daily Mail does the numbers...

Just one in eight people placed on the Government’s flagship employment scheme has been found a lasting job, official figures revealed yesterday.

Of the 1.2 million people who have started on the Work Programme since it was launched in June 2011, only 132,000 have had a job lasting more than six months – just 11 per cent of the total. But the Department for Work and Pensions insisted the true headline employment figure was 13 per cent rather than 11, as 118,000 people had not been on the scheme long enough to qualify as having had a lasting job.

The scheme, which has been personally championed by the Prime Minister, pays private sector firms such as A4e and G4S to find jobs for the long term unemployed.

Employment Minister Mark Hoban insisted the figures represented a ‘significant improvement’ in the performance of the £5 billion scheme to get the long-term unemployed back to work. In its first year it found jobs for just 2.3 per cent of people.

In the original version as published in the paper this morning, they neatly calculated that £5 billion divided by 132,000 is a nice round cost - to you, the taxpayer - of £40,000 per job.

If you apply common sense and assume that most of those 132,000 people would have found a job anyway, the true cost per marginal additional job is £100,000s of course.

Also noteable is the amount of Indian Bicycle Marketing coming from the Labour MPs, instead of saying "This is shit, we'd shut the whole thing down", they say "The Work Programme is a great idea but the Tories are running it really badly - if we were in charge, it would all be so much better." for which there is not a scrap of evidence.