Following weeks of allocations of fraud, welfare to work provider A4e faces further problems as figures reveal that it has only managed to get 3.5 per cent of its job seekers into long term roles.According to a Channel Four investigation, out of the 115,000 jobseekers that where referred to A4e in the tens months to May, only 4,020 secured jobs which lasted more than three months. Under the rules of its Government contract A4e has to place at least 5.5% of referrals into roles lasting more than 13 weeks in order to keep its contract.
In some areas the provider’s performance was far below this minimum requirement, such as in Thames Valley were only 2.8 per cent of job seekers were placed into jobs. A4e is the second biggest provider of the Government’s Welfare to Work Programme and has contracts in the East Midlands, East London, Merseyside and Lancashire, Thames Valley and South Yorkshire. Margaret Hodge, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee has called on the Government to release all the data on the performance of the Work Programme in its first year, referring to A4e’s results as “abysmal”.
