"We have been forced to conclude

that a massive, unwieldy private-sector bureaucracy is no better, and sometimes worse, than a public-sector bureaucracy." says Martin Bright,  founder of The Creative Society, concerning said Society and its experience as a sub-contractor under the Work Programme 

"The terrible irony is that we are already mopping up after the WP. Over the past few days, charities like ours will have received calls from jobcentres telling them to prepare for people who have been through the WP and still not found a job. We will help them, of course. But there has to be a better way to get charities involved in work creation than using us as a last resort when all else has failed". 

One awaits the 'clarification' from an spokesperson from the DWP saying that the department is doing no such thing as having some fall back, get tougher with the unemployed who are 'making the Work Programme fail' regime and the telephone calls alleged are coming from individual job centres doing their own thing, etc. etc. because the Work Programme is an outstanding success, 'giving hope' to the unemployed, as Mark Hoban told us all only yesterday ..... Any way back to the Creative Society experience;

"Believe me, we tried to make it work. The WP was heralded as a great new dawn for the third sector. Released from the chains of central government, a whole new constellation of charities, businesses, social philanthropists (not to mention multinational security companies) would target the long-term unemployed. And, crucially, only be paid if they were successful. We formed a partnership to bid for a "prime" contract with a larger, not-for-profit organisation backed by a university. But, even together, we just weren't big enough to compete with the likes of A4e, G4S and Serco. When the contracts were awarded, we had to go through a further byzantine bidding process to persuade the big companies to partner with us: a huge distraction from our work with young people on the ground.

We eventually found ourselves in the supply chain of A4e and adapted a training programme we had used successfully with the Future Jobs fund. We were pretty chuffed with our training programme. Our "customers" loved it. A4e loved it – and used it as a model of good practice for providing young people with the basic interviewing, CV writing and networking skills they would need to find work. But gradually, and with huge regret, we realised there just weren't enough people coming through our doors to make the WP sustainable for us".

From which we might assume, given the inquiries coming from those Jobcentres, that that £30 million (which contrasts markedly with the £ billions set aside for the WP - being just under 4 times the dividend one Ms E Harrison paid herself as a reward for her organisations success on the WP) that someone somewhere found in the DWP budget for funding that "tidy up after the WP programme" may even go direct to the Creative Society and the like in return for helping out the WP "failures" rather than be 'filtered' through the likes of A4e first.

Update - June 19th.   Keen number crunchers wishing to discover for themselves just what a success the WP is will be pleased to know that the DWP has now released :- DWP Work Programme statistics, first release: November 2012 which despite the title only covers WP outcomes etc. up until end July 2012.