Written question asked by Nicholas Brown (Labour) on Monday, 20 February 2012, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Wednesday, 22 February 2012. It was answered by Lord Grayling (Conservative) on Monday, 5 March 2012 on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions.

Employment Schemes

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what information he has on differences in performance of different Work Programme providers.

Answer: The Department is working to guidelines set by the UK Statistics Authority to ensure we are able to publish statistics that are accurate and meet the required high quality standards.The Work programme is a two-year programme that started in June 2011, it is therefore too early to make any comparisons in performance at this stage. DWP has however published the first official statistics on Work programme referrals and attachments and these are available via this link:"http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/index.php?paqe=wp"We intend to publish official statistics on job outcomes, our key measure of success, from autumn 2012. This will enable a comparison of performance between providers.

Secondary information