The Westminster government is expecting the voluntary sector to provide an ever-increasing range of services as part of its Big Society initiative. To stimulate debate in this controversial area, we have invited Martin Sime, director of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, to write a monthly column. In this the first of these, he condemns the way the government's Work Programme has been handled in practice.Last week saw the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) award contracts for the Work Programme, designed to get unemployed people into jobs. From the outset, it was always going to be tough for non-profit groups to win the prime contractor status – payment is by results, pricing all but the largest organisations out of the market. But few expected the third sector to be carved out of the process to the extent that it has been.
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Out of 40 contracts across the UK worth around £5bn, only two went to not-for-profit groups. The rest all went to big business, with Scotland’s two prime contracts going to private companies. In line with the UK government’s Big Society drive, the DWP had insisted that at least 30 per cent of the work involved in delivering these contracts should be fulfilled by the third sector. Yet Igneus, one of the successful bidders in Scotland, has only given a commitment to deliver a mere 8 per cent of the service through the third sector. The other prime contractor in Scotland – Working Links – is offering just 6 per cent third sector involvement. This abysmal record shows that the DWP’s claim that the work programme provides “a massive boost for the Big Society” is far from the truth. These decisions were about cost, not expertise. Some may think that in these tough economic times, a focus on cost is inevitable. But it’s increasingly clear that the UK government’s approach has more to do with ideology than practicality. In Scotland, both the Labour Party and the SNP have committed to jobs schemes with the third sector at their heart. Labour promises 10,000 jobs through a Scottish Future Jobs Fund and the SNP in government have set up Community Jobs Scotland to deliver 2,000 jobs from this summer. The SNP’s programme is being led by SCVO and the Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition – it’s hard to see how this could be any more pro-third sector. Experience in welfare to work programmes over the last three decades has shown that it’s voluntary organisations, community groups and social enterprises that are best placed to get people from hard-to-reach groups into work. And research has time and again shown that we have higher success rates than the private sector. SCVO leads the Scottish Third Sector Consortium – a group of 300 organisations from across the third sector. The consortium successfully bid for and delivered 2,202 jobs for unemployed young people under the previous UK government’s Future Jobs Fund. Our successes are clear and organisations across the third sector want to do more. The private sector’s record on getting people into work, on the other hand, is worryingly poor. A recent investigation by Westminster’s public accounts committee showed some private providers got less than 15 per cent of clients into jobs. The dropout rate was even more marked – a quarter of the successful clients left their new jobs within 13 weeks. But the real tragedy here is not simply that some of Scotland’s excellent third sector organisations missed out on contracts and vital income – but that vulnerable people, far from the labour market and in need of expert preparation and support to get a job, will be sidelined at the expense of easy-to-place graduates. The third sector will be relegated to subcontracting. The big companies will pass on the more difficult work to us – placing those with addiction problems and mental ill-health into sustainable jobs – while they take a larger percentage in profits. But at least we now know what the Big Society really means – it means the third sector gets the crumbs off the table left by big business.Want to discuss other issues? Join the debate on our new Scottish Voices forum
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