Few 'Big Society' groups in Work Programme

No councils and only five civil society organisations have been included in the Department for Work & Pensions list of 35 organisations who will be invited to bid for multi-million pound contracts through government’s flagship single Work Programme.
The DWP named the 35 preferred providers appointed to a new framework for the Work Programme, which is set to replace all the current welfare-to-work schemes. The organisations will be invited to tender for Work Programme contracts, operating over England’s nine regions as well as Scotland and Wales, to deliver jobs schemes from next summer, the DWP said.
The successful organisations include mainly large private sector providers, such as A4e, Serco, Seetec, Working Links and Reed in Partnership. But despite prime minister David Cameron’s promise that the Work Programme would provide a “Big Society solution” to worklessness, only five of the successful organisations - or 14% - are charities, voluntary groups or social enterprises.
These are environmental social enterprise BTCV, which has been chosen as a preferred bidder in the South West, the North West, Yorkshire & Humber and Wales; environmental regeneration charity Groundwork, which was chosen as a preferred bidder in the South West & Wales but failed in five other regions; the disability charity Rehab Group, which was successful in the South West and Wales but failed in bids for nine other regions; the disability charity the Shaw Trust, which was chosen as a preferred bidder in Wales but failed in seven other bids; and social enterprise the Wise Group, which was successful in it two bids for the North East and Scotland.
At the end of last month the department said that 91 organisations had submitted bids to be prime contractors in the new Work Programme.These included bids from Greenwich LBC, Dorset CC and Dudley MBC - all of which failed - meaning no councils are among the preferred bidders. Dudley, which had been selected as a prime provider in the delivery of the previous government’s Flexible New Deal, which the Work Programme will replace, could now be shut out of the delivery of welfare-to-work programmes in its area.
DWP has said the Work Programme contracts would likely be between £10-50m per year and up to seven years in length.
The low level of civil society involvement and the complete shut out of local authorities from the Work Programme comes just a week after decentralisation minister Greg Clark’s key policy advisor launched a stinging rebuke of DWP’s welfare reforms. Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Francis Davis, a fellow at the Young Foundation, said the Work Programme contracts were “so large that they in effect shut out the charitable and civic sectors from this part of the war on need and public sector reform”.
He said: “Extreme centralisation and transferring a public monopoly of work provision to private one will only stifle the most energetic at the outset, and in the process shrink the ‘big society’”.
Employment minister Chris Grayling said: “The Work Programme will be the biggest back to work scheme this country has seen, and will finally put an end to the one size fits all, Whitehall knows best approach.
“Those organisations from across the private and voluntary sectors that are on the framework being announced today will be given the freedom to use their skills and experience to do what actually works to help people off benefits and into jobs. And we’ll pay them by results – they must help people into long term sustained employment to get the full payment.”
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/erss-preferred-suppliers.pdf

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