"Restart scheme will cost more per person and help fewer of them than planned" say MPs

·       Restart participants face a duplicative and inefficient experience 

·       Scheme design meant many most in need were unable to access it 

·       DWP’s weak knowledge and management of contracted providers adds to difficulties  

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP’s) Restart scheme to help recover employment after the pandemic has ended up costing much more per person and helping far fewer long-term unemployed than planned, says the Public Accounts Committee in a report today. 

Accredited employment training providers were meant to give more tailored and intensive support than job centres to long-term unemployed benefit claimants, partially with a view to re-skilling people for a changed, post-pandemic economy. It was expected that the scheme would benefit society by £2.44 for every £1 spent on it, but Restart is now expected to cost significantly more per person than previous similar schemes. 

The pandemic surge in unemployment that DWP tried to plan for did not materialise in the way that was expected, and DWP work coaches referred about half as many long-term unemployed to the scheme as planned. This was often because of the same complex barriers that drive long-term unemployment benefit claims in the first place, meaning many of its intended participants were judged unsuitable for it: the very same things that keep people out of employment long term mean they cannot access the help being provided. 

The Committee has previously reported on DWP’s lack of knowledge of the benefit claimants it serves, and now says these same data gaps and issues have led to the problems in Restart. This now also extends to DWP’s knowledge of the providers it contracted to deliver the scheme, and how well they are performing in their areas or relative to each other. 

DWP says Restart will achieve its estimated return on the taxpayer investment if only six in a hundred participants find work which they would not have found without the scheme. However, any drop in that number and the scheme benefits quickly fall away.  Knowledge and evaluation failures mean DWP may be uncertain which of the people moving off long-term benefits into work will be attributable to the scheme.   

Flick Drummond MP, PAC lead on this inquiry, said: “Restart is giving effective targeted support to those who have been out of the workplace for some time following Covid. But there was far less demand than anticipated because the economy was stronger than expected, thanks to government pandemic support such as furlough and business grants. 

“DWP has taken on PAC’s earlier recommendations about renegotiating the contracts, but Restart does need to be tweaked to make sure that there is value for money for the taxpayer. It must work for individuals too, especially as there is evidence of duplication with forms between work coaches and the providers.  

“Restart is showing that people are moving into the workplace quicker than expected but there needs to be more transparency in reporting the data so that the effectiveness of the scheme can be better evaluated.” 

PAC report conclusions and recommendations 

7.      The impact of Restart will only be clear through transparent reporting and thorough evaluation. Based on its evaluation of the Work Programme, the Department expects Restart to provide benefits to the taxpayer of £2.44 for every £1 spent. It expects Restart to bring these benefits because it estimates that an extra 6 in 100 Restart participants will find sustained work above what would have happened anyway, but if this estimate is too high, then the benefits of the scheme will quickly fall away. Until recently the Department has only published data about its newer employment support schemes through answers to Parliamentary Questions. On 15 December 2022 the Department published an ‘ad hoc’ statistical release on Restart, which we welcome, but it is not clear that this is to be the first in a series of regular publications. The Department has plans to evaluate Restart, which we also welcome, but it is crucial that information required for stakeholders to peer review the progress and evaluation of the scheme is published. 

Recommendation 1: The Department should detail in its Treasury Minute response the information it plans to make public about the Restart scheme, while it is live and after it has completed its evaluation. This response should ensure that stakeholders, academics, parliament, and the public can regularly obtain details about how Restart is performing, can make informed comment about how the Department can build upon its contracting and management, and can peer review the evaluation of the scheme. 

8.      The Department has ended up paying more per Restart participant than for previous similar schemes, because it had to pay providers to rapidly build up capacity from a standing start and then did not need all that capacity. From 2010-11, when it was responding to the last economic crash, to 2020-21, the Department reduced expenditure on employment support from £2.9 billion a year to £300 million a year. So, when it announced details about Restart in November 2021, designed as a £2.9 billion scheme for 1.4 million people, it inevitably had to work with the market to build capacity and could not achieve as much competition on price as it otherwise might. However, the Department had significantly overestimated demand for Restart, partly because it expected there to be more eligible participants, and partly because it expected more of those eligible participants to be found suitable to start on the scheme. Providers had quickly built capacity for the high number of participants and now had costs they could not recover for things they did not need, such as leases on larger buildings than they would require given the reduced volumes. The Department did not plan for this scenario of lower demand, and it gave limited consideration to contractual mechanisms in the original Restart contracts to reduce costs or expand eligibility without renegotiations. As a result Restart is now expected to cost £2,429 per participant, making it significantly more expensive than the Work Programme, which cost the Department around £1,760 per participant. 

Recommendation 2: In its Treasury Minute response to this report, the Department should set out what lessons it has learnt from Restart about how it can better expand and reduce capacity for employment support as it is needed, at better value to the taxpayer. This should include an assessment of what standing capacity and capabilities it needs and whether it can better maintain the market between economic shocks.   

9.      The Department and providers are not working together and sharing information as effectively as they might to support participants into work. Both the Department and providers aim to provide coaching support to help participants into work. While it would have taken too long to link up the providers systems with the Universal Credit computer system so that all this information flowed automatically, the current information sharing arrangements make it harder for the Department’s work coaches and the providers’ Restart advisors to work together to move participants into work and may leave participants questioning the value of Restart. As a result, Restart participants face a duplicative and inefficient experience, where they have to tell Department work coaches in their fortnightly meetings what they are doing on Restart, and their Restart advisor what they are doing with the Department. Participants also have to give their Restart advisor lots of information that they have already given to the Department and have similar conversations with both their work coach and Restart advisor to identify barriers to work, and produce separate lists of actions they will take to overcome these barriers and move into employment. This list of actions is called an ‘action plan’ on Restart and a ‘claimant commitment’ with the Department.  

Recommendation 3: 

a.      The Department should ensure work coaches and Restart provider advisors always have access to key information about participants and their barriers to work, as well as the activities that participants have agreed with either their Restart provider or the Department to help move them into work. 

b.     The Department should undertake a review into how frequently participants are required to attend jobcentres while they are on Restart, to ensure attendance requirements on participants achieve the maximum value for money. 

10.The Department did not know enough about its claimants to understand what support they needed and how many eligible claimants would go on to participate in Restart. The Department’s work coaches know a lot about their claimants, but much of this information is recorded as freeform text on a person’s benefit claim. This makes it difficult for the Department to collate and consider this information when it designs employment support. As an example, the Department said it had recently learned from providers that around 45% of people going onto Restart in some areas have English as a second language. Individual work coaches will know this about their individual claimants, but this is not information that the Department can aggregate to inform providers or use to ensure it is purchasing the support that claimants most need. Similarly, the Department does not have a vulnerability flag in the UC system, or a flag to denote mental health problems. The Department had expected its work coaches to find 82% of system-suggested claimants to be suitable for Restart and in reality, work coaches have only found 43% to be suitable. The Department did not run trials to test these assumptions about how many people would be found suitable as it felt it did not have time, that work coaches did not know their claimants as well because of COVID-19 lockdowns, and because claimant circumstances would change between it running a trial and launching the scheme. 

Recommendation 4:  

a.      The Department should set out how it will improve its record keeping so that barriers to work faced by a claimant, such as language difficulties or health conditions, are recorded and can be aggregated in the Universal Credit system to understand the type and scale of support the Department needs to provide, and so that providers have the best possible understanding of how they can help participants. 

b.     The Department should seek to establish the level of capacity that it will require for future employment support provision before contracting for that provision, by running pilots of the provision or trials to assess the likely level of take up. 

11.The Department does not understand how well each of the individual 77 providers are delivering Restart compared to their peers. The Restart scheme is delivered by a complex network of prime contractors and their subcontractors across 12 different contract areas in England and Wales, with the aim to help participants into work against the backdrop of the labour market in their area. Half of the prime contractors, while being responsible for their own contract area, are also subcontractors in at least one other area. The largest providers have their own systems which they use to assess participants barriers to work, as a directory of available support, and as a system to manage meetings and interactions with participants. Despite this, the regular management information the Department collects about Restart is all based on the performance in the 12 contract areas and does not cover how well individual providers are contributing to this complex network of support. The Department can collect information about how well individual providers are performing but it does not do this routinely or collate such information. As a result, it does not know how well individual providers are adhering to the customer service standards it introduced to stop providers focusing efforts on participants who are easiest to help, or how well individual providers are performing in getting people into work. 

Recommendation 5: While Restart is running, the Department should do more to collate and assess how individual providers are performing to increase transparency and competition between providers, and to identify pockets of best practice that might otherwise be lost when performance is compiled into a package area level. The Department should then seek to use this information as part of its evaluation.    

12. Many claimants have complex barriers that prevent them from finding work, and some of these barriers may be better addressed through other means than an employment support scheme such as Restart. The Department’s work coaches must decide whether people from a system generated list of claimants are eligible and suitable for Restart. Work coaches decided not to refer 57% of the claimants on such lists. For the majority of these people, work coaches did not refer them to Restart because they felt they were unsuitable for the programme, most often because they had ‘complex barriers’ which can include homelessness, childcare needs and physical and mental health issues.  The Department has identified mental health issues as a particular barrier that many claimants must overcome to move into work. We are concerned about whether this represents ‘cost shunting’ to the Department, where failures in public services such as long waiting times for mental health appointments are effectively passed onto the Department to deal with as part of its efforts to get people into work, with neither the appropriate funding nor expertise to manage these challenges. The Department expects to publish a new White Paper on health and work early in 2023, and that part of this will include how the Department can work more closely with the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) and others to help people stay in work, and the Department also told us that it is working with DHSC on mental health provision. 

Recommendation 6: The Department should set out, in its Treasury Minute response:  

a.      Its understanding of how complex barriers such as mental health problems and homelessness, which might not traditionally sit with the Department, impact on people’s ability to find work and the associated cost of this to society and the exchequer.  

b.      How it will develop and use its knowledge of claimants to help government as a whole to take a joined up and effective approach to overcoming the ‘complex barriers’ that prevent people from finding and maintaining employment./ENDS 

Full details of the inquiry including evidence received and link to the underlying NAO report: The Restart Scheme for long-term unemployed people