Work Programme's IT wasn't ready before launch - NAO

The National Audit Office has expressed concern over some of the risk management and ICT aspects of the government’s new Work Programme.

 

For a start, the IT project to support the Programme was “not fully functional when the Programme was launched,” it alleges - a consequence of which is that the Department for Work and Pensions won’t be able to carry out automatic checks to confirm that people who find work have stopped claiming benefits until March 2012 at the earliest.

 

The Department needs to ensure that improvements to the IT system are delivered on schedule, warns the NAO – and adds that in the meantime, “there is an increased risk of fraud and error going undetected”.

 

The study also points out that assumptions about the feasibility of the Programme might be “over-optimistic”. It thinks only 26% of the largest group of job seekers in the Programme will get jobs, compared to the Department’s estimate of 40.

 

Limiting factors it says may have been skipped over include the fact that some contractors in areas of high unemployment may struggle to meet nationally set targets. It is possible that one or more contractors will get into serious financial difficulty during the term of the contracts.

 

It also wonders why no alternatives to the Programme were considered as part of the business case, nor was it piloted to test assumptions. The speed of its implementation – just over a year – may have increased risk, it alleges.

 

“The Department for Work and Pensions has made a significant effort to learn the lessons of previous welfare to work programmes [but] it is too early to judge the success of the Work Programme, which will depend on whether the Department can get more people into work than previous programmes,” noted its head, Amyas Morse.

 

“The Department has set providers stretching performance targets and it needs to ensure that they do not cut corners to stay in profit, such as targeting easy to reach people, reducing service levels or treating sub-contractors unfairly.”

 

All in all it finds DWP’s processes for developing the IT system were slower than the speeded-up processes for managing the rest of the Work Programme. As a result, it should “identify the main lessons from this experience and, in line with current good practice [and] adopt a more agile and timely approach to managing IT”.

 

The first jobseekers joined the Work Programme in June 2011, with the Department estimating it will cost between £3bn and £5bn over the next five years to help 3.3m people.

 

But NAO does praise the Programme or its “number of innovative design features that address weaknesses in previous schemes”. Providers are paid primarily for the results they achieve in supporting people into employment so what the provider earns is tied to performance, it points out. It also adds that providers will receive higher rewards for supporting harder to help claimant groups into work and are paid partly out of the benefit savings they help to generate. There is thus more potential for competition between providers.

 

It offers support to unemployed people who have been claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance or Employment and Support Allowance to help them get and to keep jobs. The Programme is delivered through contractors.

 

There are 18 contractors with 40 separate contracts at this current time.