Ignoring for the moment whether it is true or not,

given recent DWP form on "statistics" but just assuming it is true, what was it that the Job Centre staff told these people?   Was it "if you get a job the cap simply won't apply to you at all, but if you don't get a job, it will?"

"The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) said that 12,000 claimants have found jobs over the last year, after being contacted by job centres.

The job centres warned them they might have their benefits capped if they did not find employment".

Benefit cap 'encourages job seekers'
More than 12,000 people have moved into work after being told about the benefits cap, the government says.

And just a little aside, because it bears being brought to everyone's attention, Labour having previously given the impression that "the cap" was desperately unfair, today their shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne was at pains to make clear that what is wrong with the cap is that it simply isn’t tough enough ...

"Liam Byrne MP, Labour's Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, responding to the benefit cap roll out today, said:

The benefit cap is a good idea in principle but its already fallen apart in practice. Ministers have bodged the rules so the cap won't affect Britain's 4,000 largest families and it does nothing to stop people living a life on welfare. The Government needs to go back to the drawing board, design a cap without holes and put a two year limit on the time you can spend on the dole, like Labour's compulsory jobs guarantee".

Liam lambasts "out of touch" DWP Minister over his comments on the increasing use of Food Banks ......

"Liam Byrne, the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said: “These comments show just how out of touch this Government is. The welfare revolution we were promised has failed. Unemployment is up, the benefits bill is soaring £20bn higher than planned, and food banks are growing by the day, yet the only ones getting any extra help from this Government are millionaires.”

I wonder why Liam fought shy of reminding us who it was that first brought this "out of touch former investment banker multi-millionaire" [pictured] into government welfare policy making - because they were so impressed by his ideas and grasp of the important detail?

Well at least we now know what "a success" is ....

because the Work Programme is a success, 'giving hope' to the unemployed, as Minister for Employment Mark Hoban told us all on the 17th of this month, and today the Department for Work and Pensions published the Work Programme statistical summary June 2013  which summary contains the latest Work Programme official statistics on referrals to the Work Programme, attachments to the Work Programme and Work Programme validated job outcomes and the numbers of sustainment payments (but no consolidated information at all on "actual cash sums involved") made to Work Programme "Prime" providers up to 31 March 2013, which tells us that:-

From June 1 2011 to March 31 2013

• There were 1.20 million referred to the Work Programme and 1.16 million attached to a provider;

• 132 thousand Job Outcome payments were made to providers, which represents 13.0% of eligible Referrals. 

Work and Pensions Minister Mark Hoban hailed the figures, saying the Work Programme was helping those written off by system get back into work:  "That is a lot of lives transformed as a consequence of this programme, people who have been able to achieve their aspiration to look after themselves and their family,***" he told BBC News.

Unsurprisingly perhaps the Labour Party sought to pour cold water on this clear and obvious to all success :-

Liam Byrne MP, Labour's Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, responding to today's Work Programme figures said:

"The Work Programme hasn't worked for over a million people.   Three years into the parliament and nearly nine out of ten people on this flagship programme have been failed. Worse of all, the government missed every single one of its minimum targets and in nearly half the country, the Work Programme is literally worse than doing nothing. No wonder the benefits bill is £21 billion higher than planned and no wonder the Chancellor himself was forced to attack 'under-performing' back to work programmes.   We can't go on like this. We desperately need a change of course starting with a compulsory jobs guarantee that would make sure everyone out of work long term would have to take a job after two years."

*** he probably means those lucky enough to actually have found some sort of work via the WP, but equally he could also be referring to the owners/shareholders in the Work Programme Prime Providers ...

Update : Thursday 27th pm.

The obviously deeply cynical Patrick Butler of the G, who rather than take the word of Mark Hoban and whatever other members of the Grand Alliance ranks who have been primed to go around telling everyone what a "roaring success" the WP is; has done some investigating and number-crunching of the published stats and, gosh, brave man wishes to dispute the Mark and Co version of what story those stats tell:-

The government's flagship welfare to work scheme has come under fire after official figures show it is still failing to help the most disadvantaged people into jobs.

Just 5.3% of people on incapacity benefit were helped into employment for at least six months by the Work Programme in its second year of operation, well below the government's minimum performance benchmark of 16.5%.

Providers also failed to meet the contractual benchmark for getting young people aged 18-24 off unemployment benefit and into jobs, and marginally missed the minimum target for getting jobless clients aged over 25 into sustained work.

Across the three jobseeker groups, successful job outcome levels stood at 24.9% against contracted levels of 27.5%.
 
Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation thinktank, even hinted that whilst the official figures represented "a big improvement on the first year of the programme, failure to meet the targets could put some work programme providers in danger of having their contracts terminated".  

But he quickly added, no doubt to reassure those ERSA members who had read that whilst quaffing coffee and biscuits, and suffered a choking fit; that "Poor performance against the DWP's minimum levels cannot be taken as evidence that providers are doing a bad job or that the scheme offers poor value for money: we simply do not know whether an alternative approach would fare better or worse in current economic conditions", and then went for some further muddying of the waters by concluding that "what it does show is that the scheme was poorly designed with serious consequences for long-term unemployed people"

"Ministers launched the £5bn work programme in 2011 with the explicit aim of getting 2.4m long term unemployed and sickness benefit recipients back into the job market".

Only 2.25 million short of "target" then ... and it would appear the improvement in WP outcomes will have to be "phenomenal" to get any where near it.  Something that Mark and Co appeared to acknowledge recently when they announced that get tougher with the unemployed who are 'making the Work Programme fail' regime

Liam's "rescue plans"

As well as discussing his recently published book on China, in an interview with the House Magazine Liam Byrne finds time to unveil some current labour thinking and his forward planning for 2015 :- Byrne After Reading

Byrne praises fellow Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who wrote recently of the need to admit that some people on the dole were ‘swinging the lead’ and some having children to maximise their benefits. 

“Simon Danczuk cut right through by giving a very honest and candid account not only of his own upbringing but what he sees in Rochdale. I represent the constituency in Britain, Hodge Hill up there [he points at a map on his wall], with the second highest unemployment in the country. All of our work in the constituency is in one way or another about getting people back to work.

“So what we see clearly is that there are a tiny minority who could be doing more and need to be confronted with some tough choices but there are far more people desperate for work, hungry for work and just shut out and let down by the system.”

And later, after a brief exposition of the present travails of Universal Credit and how Labour will sort those out :-

Byrne reveals he’s also looking at how to ‘rescue’ another flagship IDS project.

“We are doing work on the Work Programme 2.0 now. We have just sent quite a big document out to Labour local government over the last couple of weeks asking them for their views on how we radically localise DWP, based on a lot of research we have done in Canada and Germany over the last few months. In Canada and Germany and Australia you have got back-to-work programmes which are far more localised and we think that’s a good idea. We want to get inside how do we do that in Britain.”

But IDS believes in localism doesn’t he? “When he made his first speeches in Easterhouse, that’s precisely what he said. He then drew up one of the most Stalinist contracts that we’ve got in central government. People in local government are getting tired of it now. Let’s think about how we put schools, colleges, universities, councils and DWP on one team making a difference on the ground.”

Would that involve private sector too? “Definitely, definitely. We have great relationships with the welfare to work industry, who are also frustrated. A lot of them are thinking of not re-competing for the Work Programme because it has just not worked. The point is we are getting into a lot of those detailed planning discussions now. We are determined to be ready for government.”

"Just not worked" - that couldn't possibly be "hasn't seen them collar as much in sustainment payments for finding people 'long term work' because, er, they found hardly anyone 'sustained work'", could it?  

As we know from elsewhere Labour's "big idea" is the Compulsory Jobs Guarantee, whereby the taxpayer will 100% subsidise 25 hours work a week for 26 weeks for the "long term unemployed", who will have to take whatever position under this scheme they are offered, or lose entitlement to benefits.  And Liam appears to have confirmed that ERSA and its members will have a hand, and a stake, and we must assume a much better potential profit from being part of it.   

Oh come on now - do play fair!

Guardian Headline: Jobseekers challenge benefits block

Guardian sub-heading: Lawyers say Iain Duncan Smith undermined jobseekers' rights with legislation allowing DWP to ignore court judgments

Iain Duncan Smith and parliament have conspired to undermine the basic rights of hundreds of thousands of jobseekers by enacting retrospective emergency legislation, according to the contents of a legal filing sent to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Lawyers acting on behalf of three jobseekers including Cait Reilly – the unemployed graduate forced to work unpaid in Poundland – are hoping to overturn a controversial law introduced by the DWP in March which allowed the department to ignore court judgments awarding more than £100m in benefits rebates to a quarter of a million jobseekers.

DWP eh?  Iain Duncan Smith eh?   Say no more!   Er, hang on a minute though...

With support from Labour, the jobseekers (back to work schemes) bill was rushed through parliament in just three days in order to strike down a ruling from three appeal court judges who found that half a dozen of the government's employment schemes, which made jobseekers work unpaid under threat of having benefits stripped, were operating outside of the law.

With support from Labour? Surely not!

"What's so wrong with 'creative statistics"" asks a bewildered Grant Shapps

"Picky Picky Picky Bureaucrats once again making everything unnecessarily difficult and complicated by this insistence on factual facts as opposed to propagandist fiction" says Conservative Party Chairman, adding "no wonder this country is in such a mess, when a respected government Minister gets upbraided for putting his name to a SpAd generated fairy tale designed to reinforce the shirkers, skivers, scroungers and cheats message the party has never peddled".

(Ha ha ha ha, it's that man again Update) The BBC are now running a piece about Grant's number-juggling which is drawn to your attention largely because it contains a marvellous quote from Iain Duncan Smith clone Liam Byrne:

Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said: "This is a government that doesn't like to let the facts get in the way of a good story... but it really is outrageous that the Tories have been caught yet again misusing statistics for their own ends."

Yes, it truly is outrageous when governments get caught fabricating evidence. Thankfully, the Labour administration 1997 - 2010 was never guilty of such a thing, and certainly never got caught out doing it, then or since.

Update Update - Some even better Liam Byrne on the official One Nation: The Labour Party site.

"some significant doubts about the quality of the new regime statistics"

Spare a thought for Iain Duncan Smith,  and indeed his junior ministers at the Department of Work and Pensions,  who, as if they aren't burdened enough by having to deal with one needless problem getting in the way of their broadcasting  their success in the mission to solve unemployment, and also having to contend with running needless enquiries into the non-existence of targets up pop two more.

First up some damn fool members of the judiciary have decided  that members of the public ought to be allowed to know which employers and organisations are being public spirited enough to provide work experience places, something which says the DWP the employers and organisations doing it, no doubt through reasons of modesty, do not wish to publicise.

And secondly; having gone to the trouble of establishing beyond peradventure via a rigorous internal enquiry that there aren't any "targets" of any sort operating on the matter of "sanctioning benefit recipients and claimants" the department has now it seems uncovered a few possible inconsistencies in some data it was due to publish on the impact on the issuing of "sanctions" following changes to its procedures last October, and has had to delay publication of these for an as yet unspecified period. 

A similar fate appears to have befallen the data it collects on Employment Support Allowance - the replacement for Incapacity Benefit - claimants and recipients, and the fate of former IB recipients on being given the Work Capability Assessment by Atos, to see whether they qualify for either of the two tiers of ESA, or were simply pulling a fast one all along, something the present government and indeed their predecessors who actually brought in Atos and the WCA have repeatedly said at least a million IB recipients were and are.

So, tough times at the DWP.   On the matter of that judicial decision that despite the wishes of the work experience providers to remain so far as possible anonymous, the public should be allowed to know who they are Iain Duncan Smith might wish to seek another special out of the way meeting with his opposite number in the Labour ranks, Liam Byrne about "another deal” around having some hurriedly introduced retrospective legislation that puts every single aspect of the Work Programme firmly out of the reach of meddling members of the electorate and the damned judiciary...

... and possibly Parliamentary Select Committees too... a matter on which under the deal Labour will once again have a "whipped abstention" on the legislation to ensure it passes quickly and without fuss which Liam will explain via an article on his personal website has been done in order to extract a concession from I D S whereby anyone on the Work Programme breaching the new "confidentiality rules" that will be brought in as part of that retrospective legislation which bar them from ever letting anyone at all know where they are doing or have done some "work experience" that anyone who fails to abide by those confidentiality rules wont have their benefits suspended for more than 12 months as a punishment.

On the matter of those damned stats, well the call has gone out for someone experienced in the matter of presentation to come lend a hand.

Liam Byrne or Iain Duncan Smith?

Click here to find out:

That's why we need a different approach [to welfare] founded on three principles.

First, people must be better off in work than living on benefits. We would make work pay by... supporting employers who pay the living wage. Second, we would match rights with responsibilities. We would ensure that no adult will be able to be live on the dole for over two years and no young person for over a year. They will be offered a real job with real training, real prospects and real responsibility...

Third, we must do more to strengthen the old principle of contribution: there are lots of people right now who feel they pay an awful lot more in than they ever get back. That should change. We should start by letting councils give priority in social housing allocations to those who work and contribute to their community.

We believe Britain can only overcome the enormous challenges we face if all of us – from top to bottom – play our part.

H/t Bob E.

Er Liam .. about that

"We're fundamentally different to this bunch of horrible, nasty, benefit grabbing, benefit removing, forced labour and illegal sanctions bastards" um, stance..."

Forgive me for saying so, but it doesn't quite square with your Party backing them on a emergency vote to approve retrospective legislation to avoid having to "compensate" people they've been er less than honest to by using legislative powers that didn't exist to apply illegal sanctions does it .. or maybe it does, I never can quite get my head around the intricate complexities of politics...

Or maybe the G have been hearing noises via "crossed grapevines" - which if it was the case I would have expected someone on "your side" - say the shadow Work and Pensions secretary, to be hurriedly at least tweeting "The G story is rubbish, no way would we" ... but so far nothing from you since your web-site posting on Monday -

Work Scheme refunds could cost millions
Posted on 11 March 2013 | No comments yet

Liam Byrne MP, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, responding to reports in the Daily Telegraph that ‘Work Scheme refunds could cost millions’, said:

“Bungling DWP ministers have turned the Work Programme into a West Coast mainline-style fiasco. Hundreds of thousands of sanctions might now be illegal because Iain Duncan Smith messed up the regulations and now the taxpayer might be on the hook for over £100 million.

“It simply beggars belief that this Government is now so incompetent it can’t even organise a simple work experience scheme. We’ll be demanding ministers come to Parliament urgently to explain themselves.”

Demanding they come explain themselves? In return for a promise to back their emergency legislation which removes the obligation to make amends to those affected by that "illegal sanctions" incompetence..?

"The Guardian understands that Labour will support the fast-tracked bill with some further safeguards and that negotiations with the coalition are ongoing"

A DWP spokesperson said: "This legislation will protect taxpayers and make sure we won't be paying back money to people who didn't do enough to find work."

That "we aren't going to pay up JSA that was withheld from claimants under sanction for not agreeing to do something we didn't actually have the legal power to sanction them for not agreeing to do" would appear to run the risk of re-opening the debate on "what the Work Programme is actually for - to help make people seeking work better fitted to achieve that or just to punish them for not having a job" [whilst funnelling large quantities of taxpayer funds to ERSA members - but that's not the issue here] were there someone willing to take it up on the floor of the House but what do I know - Over to you Liam?

DWP seeks law change to avoid benefit repayments after Poundland ruling

The Department for Work and Pensions has introduced emergency legislation to reverse the outcome of a court of appeal decision and "protect the national economy" from a £130m payout to jobseekers deemed to have been unlawfully punished.

The retroactive legislation, published on Thursday evening and expected to be rushed through parliament on Tuesday, will effectively strike down a decision by three senior judges and deny benefit claimants an average payout of between £530 and £570 each.