Incoming - New Deal and Programme Centre performance
As covered in this previous story, I asked the DWP for contract performance statistics on current provisions back in February. They did not respond within the legally required time, so, following a reminder request, I issued a formal request for an internal review of the lack of response to the initial request.
The deadline for responding to the request for a review passed some weeks ago. This means that the DWP are not only breaking the law by not responding to my initial request, but also breaking the part of the law designed to catch breaches of the law.
Given that the DWP have displayed both a complete lack of courtesy and disregard for their legal obligations, I've taken the liberty of obtaining the figures through other means. Next week I'll be publishing analysis and performance figures for all New Deal and Programme Centre contracts across the UK. These figures are being sent out to all providers on a monthly basis anyway, so they're not truly 'secret' and won't come as much of a surprise to most people. However, they've not been shared with a lot of people who would find them very useful in understanding what's going on in welfare-to-work delivery.
Comments
Note that, although this is critical of the DWP's openness, there do appear to be moves to open up information about contracts and delivery as part of FND roll-out. So, longer term there may be absolutely wonderful things coming up. The secrecy about existing programmes seems a bit odd though, and the lack of response to repeated requests for widely circulated, easily sendable information is disheartening.
OK, I've totally futzed this one. Various technical difficulties and other issues have left me without the time to put a proper analysis together this week. I'll put one together over the weekend and publish on Monday/Tuesday. Apologies for the inconvenience!
Daniel, I have just came back from posting a complaint to ICO regarding DWP failing to comply with my Freedom of Information Act request. It seems their department who deal with this are deliberately avoiding such requests. I thought it may have been because they are working overtime because of the FND concerns etc. however they have their own department who deal with nothing else other than that.
Both the analysis and the source files can now be found here.
Daniel
It would be good if you could include P2W stats too. The Primes are particularly precious about this so it would be good to see what the actual performance is. I totally agree with your comments on FoI as you have already picked up on the rumours are rife and it would be a very foolhardy organisation to start recruiting front line managers to manage FND if they don't know whether they are successful in bids wouldn't it.....!!!! So with that said lets see if the recent spate of recruitment in fact measures up to the successful bidders....Methinks they will!?!
I'd love to include Pathways stats, but the providers have been rather tightfisted about sharing them so far. The DWP has been ignoring all my FoI requests, reminders, and review requests on the topic, in violation of their legal obligations.
So a quick reminder to providers: feel free to send them across, anonymity guaranteed!
does anyone know who Mentor are trading as in the UK?