> The £2.9bn Restart programme, launched by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak last year, is supposed to provide up to 12 months of support for people who are long-term unemployed to help them return to work.
> But figures released in response to a written parliamentary question from Labour’s shadow employment minister, Alison McGovern, show that only 16,180 of the 226,785 people who had started on the scheme had subsequently left it for reasons including starting a job or moving off universal credit’s intensive work-search regime.
McGovern:
> “Unfortunately, despite spending over £2.5bn on Restart, the government’s incompetent [Department for Work and Pensions] is better at farming out dud schemes to G4S and Serco than finding people work. It’s no surprise that these figures show that this government’s failure is most pronounced in the north-west and Greater Manchester.”
If the scheme is anything like its predecessors from previous decades, it would be hopelessly naive to think it more than a bung to provide low cost drudge labour to businesses while inflicting a hostile environment on benefit claimants, dressed up as “help for the ~~workshy scroun~~ unfortunate unemployed”, that could be sold to party conferences, gullible TV interviewers, and the general public at election time.
Oh dear. That money would have been best just split between every person. lol what a waste.
Of course they’re not finding work for people. These schemes are not about finding work for the unemployed. They’re about placing onerous conditions on claimants so the DWP has an excuse to sanction them.
Am currently unemployed due to having to support my two kids.
I bailled on UC, was tired of the passive aggressive messages on the journal and the whole attitude looking down on people who genuinely need help.
If anyone needs a commercial Electrican in the SE who can only work school hours hit me up.
I have 5k left in my savings…
Imagine how much bigger of a difference that money could have made if it was spent on say, mental health services for the long term unemployed instead. I would bet all my money on that being a more effective strategy to get people into work if they are able to. We need UBI.
I’m an employer, and I’m going to say something wildly unpopular here.
There are a tonne of people in this country who are completely unemployable.
At 93% failure rate it must have been actively bad. I know they were just funnelling money to their mates, but you would expect them to have a better success rate by accident than this.
I went to one a frw years ago, even though i did 8 hours a week i had to quit that job before they helped me, was an absolute farce so i walked out.
The people at the job centre are doing their best but they don’t understand the job market.
I signed on a few years ago. I went to my job coach meetings twice before my coach said ‘better use of our time if we do this by phone’. 3 min phone all every 2 weeks was all.
Now, when I first got there we had a laugh:
Her: what do you do?
Me: I’m a salesman
H: oh great. What do you sell?
M: cyber security products and services
H: oh, IT sales
M: no. Not IT sales per se. That’s too generic
I found my own job without the job centre but I had to jump through hoops for my UC.
There were people at the job centre on the few occasions I had to attend who simply didn’t give a fuck about work. They hadn’t done their journals and they knew there was nothing that would be done about it. The system and the people are failing each other through their mutual apathy.
I’ve been on UC for 9 months, part of the restart scheme for around 3 months now. I’m not even sure why they put me on it seeing as I was only unemployed for 6 months, is that considered long term? Anyway I had no option. So far I’ve talked to my Restart person maybe 5 times. She suggests jobs that I clearly am not right for. The job centre has sanctioned me £180 for not attending several appointments because of covid (despite receiving texts explicitly saying not to attend a meeting if you have symptoms). The lady assigned to me is a lovely lady but she clearly has no idea how to help me with getting a job.
Hate the whole system, job center employees getting a bonus for people they get off the system by any means. People being sanctioned for not filling in forms properly, turning up 5mins late cuz of the bus, etc.
I got sanctioned for being late by 5mins, my excuse wasn’t good enough. I had an accident on the way so went straight into the Drs surgery which is 2min walk from the job center, got bandaged up within 2mins of entering the place and then went straight to my appointment.
Turns out having my white top covered in mostly still wet blood, my hand bandaged wasn’t proof enough…so even if I had got straight there, they would have kicked me out for bleeding all over the place or gave me the bill for clean up. Sanctioned for 3 months…this was a few years ago but still same government in charge
I was on JSA/UC for a few months in the past and ended up finding a job without any help from them.
Their support was (likely still is) appalling and they used to try to get me on “voluntary” 8 hour, 5 day a week placements at places I had zero interest in and threatened sanctions if I didn’t go to them – never attended any of them and told my work coach I will not work 40 hour weeks for free.
Never once got me any assistance with job interviews or applying for jobs (despite asking multiple times if I could have someone help me with my CV), and work coaches tell me they would help me get a CSCS card which they’d always have an excuse to not actually do.
For employees that get bonuses if they sign someone off they sure don’t seem to want to do that.
I think this is a massive issue for young people. 5 years ago I graduated and not only did I struggle to find work, I struggled to even find out what kind of work I could even do.
It was so difficult finding jobs I ended up overseas, got a masters degree and I’m pursuing a second. The only reason I’m able to (hopefully) find work and a field in the UK I want is because a friend ended up in that industry, one I didn’t even know existed.
Maybe part of the blame should be on me, but when people ask young people “what do you want to do” and they barely even know what jobs are out there or what they need to do them, you can’t blame them when they answer “I don’t know”
If we didn’t piss away so much money on nonsense we could genuinely afford UBI.
I don’t get how Conservative voters are okay with this. Isn’t their whole *thing* meant to be “financial responsibility, low taxes and spending public money wisely” – When in reality the taxes are still high as fuck and all the money is completely spaffed up the wall.
I’m currently on restart with a company called FedCap.
So far they’ve been good with me, but for a lot of things their hands are tied.
Now before the pandemic hit I was on the work and health program with Ingeus, they destroyed my mental health completely, I was literally on the point of ending it all when the Covid lockdowns came in, if not for Covid I wouldn’t be here now typing this.
Best of luck to all those on restart, hope you get through it in one piece.
lol cheaper to give the unemployed money – and to teach them real skills. Or to help foodbanks.
Instead they are giving money over to G4S and Serco
*“We’ve got the highest rate now of economic inactivity, of worklessness, due to long-term ill health that we’ve had in 20 years. That’s long Covid, that’s NHS waiting lists, that’s mental health problems getting worse during the pandemic. We’re not doing anything to address any of these factors that have driven the fall in the labour force that’s driving economic inactivity, that’s leading to labour shortages. Instead, the money’s simply going back to the Treasury because unemployment is so low.”*
I could be misunderstanding this.. but does this essentially mean that ‘unemployment’ is lower because the figures have simply moved into ‘worklessness due to health’ rather than because more people are actually working?
Chucked it into a calculator and it’s £154,511 per person that made it to work XD, and I bet a large majority of these got little to no *actual* benefit from the scheme, and just happened to find work while on it…
Boris will pat himself on the back, the mps will ask for (and get) a raise, meanwhile I spent 30 minutes on the floor of A&E screaming in agony last week because my appendix was about to explode but couldn’t get seen quickly due to a severe lack of staff (and ended up with just 2 of an expected 5 nurses on my ward before surgery… 1 of them had to be brought in from another ward)
Surprised they haven’t tried to bring back the Y.T.S. and Y.O.P. schemes, total rip offs.
How this government is so bad at utilising it’s money 90% of the time is beyond me.
Actually, it’s not. It’s the fact that we keep letting them do it.
Basically, it turns out sending people on “Courses” does fuck all. When I was forced to do these courses, it tended to be the same bullshit. “How do a CV, how to job hunt, consider other jobs etc…” This is merely a token waste of cash and I won’t be surprised if they bring back the fucking workfare bullshit that saw the like of Poundland exploit free labour with the vague promise of an interview. Yes, a fucking interview. Not a job, a fucking interview.
the people in charge of this scheme are not just incompetent. they arent even just terrible people. they area manifest affront to the basics of morals, ethics and basic human decency.
It is hilarious that Tories refuse to adjust their plans when they previously failed.
A decade ago I was on JSA regularly when fighting for ESA. I spent a good while on JSA and wasn’t having much luck with finding work due to disabilities. The government rules meant X amount of months on JSA meant going to one of the providers for help. These were the most useless things possible that wasted everyone’s time and tax payer’s money.
In the end I did 3 different providers doing these schemes and not a single person I met during them got a job because of them and they actively made seeking work harder.
The best of the schemes saw me one a week or two go for a short appointment with someone and they first went through my CV to check if it could be improved and then just gave me tips. Very hands off but nice and supportive, they openly knew they couldn’t really offer much help so they didn’t pretend otherwise.
The worst one had me coming into their office every weekday from 9 til about 3pm and having to sit in an office as a group searching online for jobs. If you have ever searched for jobs you know more than an hour a day is going to lead to seeing yesterday’s search. They forced me to apply to jobs I clearly wasn’t qualified for and then after weeks of coming in to an office to waste time they then assigned me “volunteer work” as work placement. I was then working 4 days a week full time in a charity shop while being paid JSA which was £50pw at the time. They mainly used me for manual labour as the staff was mostly women, only a few times was on Till, so I was usually moving lots of bags and boxes out back and upstairs or going in the van to drop off bags and collect things elsewhere. Needless to say it definitely didn’t help me find work and made my JSA stretch less as I needed packed lunches as I’d be out in the van for the whole day.
We have seen half a dozen versions of these in the last 12 years. A private company gets a government contract and doesn’t give results. The money would be better spent helping actually train job seekers and the money spent on these schemes could easily cover the cost of the benefits the person claims so they end up making each person twice as costly to the tax payer just to give money to a private company.
If these schemes really wanted to work the funding would work alongside the people, I remember when I was a bit younger and I had a clear idea of what job and career path I wanted, if the job centre hadn’t wasted funds trying to get me on shite like fork lift courses and instead had went along with funding the things that fit with my history and experience, it would have been smoother and cheaper. But no. Obviously the tories know whats best.
Britain can no longer govern itself and is in dire need of colonisation
Could have just given those same 16,000 £36k for the next 5 years…
Out of touch and clueless political elite throwing mud at a wall and hoping it sticks
On a positive note the company’s we subcontracted this scheme out to’s books are looking great right now. Every cloud and all that.
Guts already ripped clean out . Aye good Swim in a vat of acid sounds appealing
In other news, consultancy firms to the government are now £2.9bn richer
I was on Kickstart and it was an absolute joke, employee stop contacting us so I had no work to do so I spent 80% of my time trying to whatever I could so I wasn’t slacking and could keep mu self busy but I wasn’t doing what was advertised, I didn’t really learn anything new that I didn’t know before. It was awful, fortunately I managed to find a job afterwards but it was a waste of 5 months of my life
Let me guess, Brits aspire to more than picking fruit, Amazon pisshouses and chicken packing factories.
Spending 2.9 billion in a year to force a tiny number of people into work = good financial policy
Spending 2.9 billion a year to give people on benefits a better financial situation and a stable platform to find a job from = reckless Spending, socialism, budget breaking
It’s not about the money, and it’s not about helping people, it’s about looking like you’re helping, but without threatening the imbalance of power between employers and employees
Another Boris Johnson FAILURE.
It is never ending till BORIS JOHNSON has resigned.
Wondered if we were ever going to hear of this again once it was launched
It comes as absolutely no surprise after reading the comments that a lots of posters in this sub have first hand experience with these courses.
It explains a lot.
They set up a website to help identify possible
new career paths right? Multiple choice and it would recommend what you would be good doing.
I got a Farrier. Which I looked up is someone who re-shoes horses.
I’m from London. I’ve never touched a horse. I’ve only ever seen them at football games.
Fuckwits.
Why don’t they retrain to cyber?
If it’s the one’s who contacted me they’re hopeless.
Fuck me, I’m going to die without ever living in my own space… that is so much money…
39 comments
> The £2.9bn Restart programme, launched by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak last year, is supposed to provide up to 12 months of support for people who are long-term unemployed to help them return to work.
> But figures released in response to a written parliamentary question from Labour’s shadow employment minister, Alison McGovern, show that only 16,180 of the 226,785 people who had started on the scheme had subsequently left it for reasons including starting a job or moving off universal credit’s intensive work-search regime.
McGovern:
> “Unfortunately, despite spending over £2.5bn on Restart, the government’s incompetent [Department for Work and Pensions] is better at farming out dud schemes to G4S and Serco than finding people work. It’s no surprise that these figures show that this government’s failure is most pronounced in the north-west and Greater Manchester.”
If the scheme is anything like its predecessors from previous decades, it would be hopelessly naive to think it more than a bung to provide low cost drudge labour to businesses while inflicting a hostile environment on benefit claimants, dressed up as “help for the ~~workshy scroun~~ unfortunate unemployed”, that could be sold to party conferences, gullible TV interviewers, and the general public at election time.
Oh dear. That money would have been best just split between every person. lol what a waste.
Of course they’re not finding work for people. These schemes are not about finding work for the unemployed. They’re about placing onerous conditions on claimants so the DWP has an excuse to sanction them.
Am currently unemployed due to having to support my two kids.
I bailled on UC, was tired of the passive aggressive messages on the journal and the whole attitude looking down on people who genuinely need help.
If anyone needs a commercial Electrican in the SE who can only work school hours hit me up.
I have 5k left in my savings…
Imagine how much bigger of a difference that money could have made if it was spent on say, mental health services for the long term unemployed instead. I would bet all my money on that being a more effective strategy to get people into work if they are able to. We need UBI.
I’m an employer, and I’m going to say something wildly unpopular here.
There are a tonne of people in this country who are completely unemployable.
At 93% failure rate it must have been actively bad. I know they were just funnelling money to their mates, but you would expect them to have a better success rate by accident than this.
I went to one a frw years ago, even though i did 8 hours a week i had to quit that job before they helped me, was an absolute farce so i walked out.
The people at the job centre are doing their best but they don’t understand the job market.
I signed on a few years ago. I went to my job coach meetings twice before my coach said ‘better use of our time if we do this by phone’. 3 min phone all every 2 weeks was all.
Now, when I first got there we had a laugh:
Her: what do you do?
Me: I’m a salesman
H: oh great. What do you sell?
M: cyber security products and services
H: oh, IT sales
M: no. Not IT sales per se. That’s too generic
I found my own job without the job centre but I had to jump through hoops for my UC.
There were people at the job centre on the few occasions I had to attend who simply didn’t give a fuck about work. They hadn’t done their journals and they knew there was nothing that would be done about it. The system and the people are failing each other through their mutual apathy.
I’ve been on UC for 9 months, part of the restart scheme for around 3 months now. I’m not even sure why they put me on it seeing as I was only unemployed for 6 months, is that considered long term? Anyway I had no option. So far I’ve talked to my Restart person maybe 5 times. She suggests jobs that I clearly am not right for. The job centre has sanctioned me £180 for not attending several appointments because of covid (despite receiving texts explicitly saying not to attend a meeting if you have symptoms). The lady assigned to me is a lovely lady but she clearly has no idea how to help me with getting a job.
Hate the whole system, job center employees getting a bonus for people they get off the system by any means. People being sanctioned for not filling in forms properly, turning up 5mins late cuz of the bus, etc.
I got sanctioned for being late by 5mins, my excuse wasn’t good enough. I had an accident on the way so went straight into the Drs surgery which is 2min walk from the job center, got bandaged up within 2mins of entering the place and then went straight to my appointment.
Turns out having my white top covered in mostly still wet blood, my hand bandaged wasn’t proof enough…so even if I had got straight there, they would have kicked me out for bleeding all over the place or gave me the bill for clean up. Sanctioned for 3 months…this was a few years ago but still same government in charge
I was on JSA/UC for a few months in the past and ended up finding a job without any help from them.
Their support was (likely still is) appalling and they used to try to get me on “voluntary” 8 hour, 5 day a week placements at places I had zero interest in and threatened sanctions if I didn’t go to them – never attended any of them and told my work coach I will not work 40 hour weeks for free.
Never once got me any assistance with job interviews or applying for jobs (despite asking multiple times if I could have someone help me with my CV), and work coaches tell me they would help me get a CSCS card which they’d always have an excuse to not actually do.
For employees that get bonuses if they sign someone off they sure don’t seem to want to do that.
I think this is a massive issue for young people. 5 years ago I graduated and not only did I struggle to find work, I struggled to even find out what kind of work I could even do.
It was so difficult finding jobs I ended up overseas, got a masters degree and I’m pursuing a second. The only reason I’m able to (hopefully) find work and a field in the UK I want is because a friend ended up in that industry, one I didn’t even know existed.
Maybe part of the blame should be on me, but when people ask young people “what do you want to do” and they barely even know what jobs are out there or what they need to do them, you can’t blame them when they answer “I don’t know”
If we didn’t piss away so much money on nonsense we could genuinely afford UBI.
I don’t get how Conservative voters are okay with this. Isn’t their whole *thing* meant to be “financial responsibility, low taxes and spending public money wisely” – When in reality the taxes are still high as fuck and all the money is completely spaffed up the wall.
I’m currently on restart with a company called FedCap.
So far they’ve been good with me, but for a lot of things their hands are tied.
Now before the pandemic hit I was on the work and health program with Ingeus, they destroyed my mental health completely, I was literally on the point of ending it all when the Covid lockdowns came in, if not for Covid I wouldn’t be here now typing this.
Best of luck to all those on restart, hope you get through it in one piece.
lol cheaper to give the unemployed money – and to teach them real skills. Or to help foodbanks.
Instead they are giving money over to G4S and Serco
*“We’ve got the highest rate now of economic inactivity, of worklessness, due to long-term ill health that we’ve had in 20 years. That’s long Covid, that’s NHS waiting lists, that’s mental health problems getting worse during the pandemic. We’re not doing anything to address any of these factors that have driven the fall in the labour force that’s driving economic inactivity, that’s leading to labour shortages. Instead, the money’s simply going back to the Treasury because unemployment is so low.”*
I could be misunderstanding this.. but does this essentially mean that ‘unemployment’ is lower because the figures have simply moved into ‘worklessness due to health’ rather than because more people are actually working?
Chucked it into a calculator and it’s £154,511 per person that made it to work XD, and I bet a large majority of these got little to no *actual* benefit from the scheme, and just happened to find work while on it…
Boris will pat himself on the back, the mps will ask for (and get) a raise, meanwhile I spent 30 minutes on the floor of A&E screaming in agony last week because my appendix was about to explode but couldn’t get seen quickly due to a severe lack of staff (and ended up with just 2 of an expected 5 nurses on my ward before surgery… 1 of them had to be brought in from another ward)
Surprised they haven’t tried to bring back the Y.T.S. and Y.O.P. schemes, total rip offs.
How this government is so bad at utilising it’s money 90% of the time is beyond me.
Actually, it’s not. It’s the fact that we keep letting them do it.
Basically, it turns out sending people on “Courses” does fuck all. When I was forced to do these courses, it tended to be the same bullshit. “How do a CV, how to job hunt, consider other jobs etc…” This is merely a token waste of cash and I won’t be surprised if they bring back the fucking workfare bullshit that saw the like of Poundland exploit free labour with the vague promise of an interview. Yes, a fucking interview. Not a job, a fucking interview.
the people in charge of this scheme are not just incompetent. they arent even just terrible people. they area manifest affront to the basics of morals, ethics and basic human decency.
It is hilarious that Tories refuse to adjust their plans when they previously failed.
A decade ago I was on JSA regularly when fighting for ESA. I spent a good while on JSA and wasn’t having much luck with finding work due to disabilities. The government rules meant X amount of months on JSA meant going to one of the providers for help. These were the most useless things possible that wasted everyone’s time and tax payer’s money.
In the end I did 3 different providers doing these schemes and not a single person I met during them got a job because of them and they actively made seeking work harder.
The best of the schemes saw me one a week or two go for a short appointment with someone and they first went through my CV to check if it could be improved and then just gave me tips. Very hands off but nice and supportive, they openly knew they couldn’t really offer much help so they didn’t pretend otherwise.
The worst one had me coming into their office every weekday from 9 til about 3pm and having to sit in an office as a group searching online for jobs. If you have ever searched for jobs you know more than an hour a day is going to lead to seeing yesterday’s search. They forced me to apply to jobs I clearly wasn’t qualified for and then after weeks of coming in to an office to waste time they then assigned me “volunteer work” as work placement. I was then working 4 days a week full time in a charity shop while being paid JSA which was £50pw at the time. They mainly used me for manual labour as the staff was mostly women, only a few times was on Till, so I was usually moving lots of bags and boxes out back and upstairs or going in the van to drop off bags and collect things elsewhere. Needless to say it definitely didn’t help me find work and made my JSA stretch less as I needed packed lunches as I’d be out in the van for the whole day.
We have seen half a dozen versions of these in the last 12 years. A private company gets a government contract and doesn’t give results. The money would be better spent helping actually train job seekers and the money spent on these schemes could easily cover the cost of the benefits the person claims so they end up making each person twice as costly to the tax payer just to give money to a private company.
If these schemes really wanted to work the funding would work alongside the people, I remember when I was a bit younger and I had a clear idea of what job and career path I wanted, if the job centre hadn’t wasted funds trying to get me on shite like fork lift courses and instead had went along with funding the things that fit with my history and experience, it would have been smoother and cheaper. But no. Obviously the tories know whats best.
Britain can no longer govern itself and is in dire need of colonisation
Could have just given those same 16,000 £36k for the next 5 years…
Out of touch and clueless political elite throwing mud at a wall and hoping it sticks
On a positive note the company’s we subcontracted this scheme out to’s books are looking great right now. Every cloud and all that.
Guts already ripped clean out . Aye good Swim in a vat of acid sounds appealing
In other news, consultancy firms to the government are now £2.9bn richer
I was on Kickstart and it was an absolute joke, employee stop contacting us so I had no work to do so I spent 80% of my time trying to whatever I could so I wasn’t slacking and could keep mu self busy but I wasn’t doing what was advertised, I didn’t really learn anything new that I didn’t know before. It was awful, fortunately I managed to find a job afterwards but it was a waste of 5 months of my life
Let me guess, Brits aspire to more than picking fruit, Amazon pisshouses and chicken packing factories.
Spending 2.9 billion in a year to force a tiny number of people into work = good financial policy
Spending 2.9 billion a year to give people on benefits a better financial situation and a stable platform to find a job from = reckless Spending, socialism, budget breaking
It’s not about the money, and it’s not about helping people, it’s about looking like you’re helping, but without threatening the imbalance of power between employers and employees
Another Boris Johnson FAILURE.
It is never ending till BORIS JOHNSON has resigned.
Wondered if we were ever going to hear of this again once it was launched
It comes as absolutely no surprise after reading the comments that a lots of posters in this sub have first hand experience with these courses.
It explains a lot.
They set up a website to help identify possible
new career paths right? Multiple choice and it would recommend what you would be good doing.
I got a Farrier. Which I looked up is someone who re-shoes horses.
I’m from London. I’ve never touched a horse. I’ve only ever seen them at football games.
Fuckwits.
Why don’t they retrain to cyber?
If it’s the one’s who contacted me they’re hopeless.
Fuck me, I’m going to die without ever living in my own space… that is so much money…