Traffic Light performance for all provisions

Update 13/1 - now with analysis of the figures! The DWP have sent Alan Cave's traffic light reports through. I've extracted the main summary page below, and the Excel file is at the bottom of this story.

Performance for different groups

Total CEP is the average performance of ALL contracted employment programmes. As you can see, the referrals, throughflow and spending are all roughly on target overall - contracts that are running above and below target roughly even each other out.

The average performance of ANY DWP contract is about 62.5% of the tendered job outcomes rate. This means that if someone has agreed a contract to move 50 out of every 100 people sent to them into work, the chances are they're only getting around 31 into a job. Each of the remaining categories is broken down into different provisions below.

The figures in brackets next to the title of each graph show the percentage of budget

LTU - long term unemployed

This shows performance for New Deals, Private Sector Leads and Employment Zones, i.e. the provisions people go into if they stay on Jobseeker's Allowance for too long.

The JER% figures shows how well providers are actually performing - the Jobs line is an absolute figure and gets warped by the number of Starts. PSLs and EZs are actually running very well, getting lots of people into work for the agreed cost or less. The New Deals are a bit of a nightmare though. This article may give some background as to why they're underperforming.

Disability programmes

RTCs and NDDP are pootling along just fine, and Workstep is performing astoundingly well compared to its contracted targets with a job entry rate at 225% of its target amount. Some other quick notes:

• Pathways to Work is performing abysmally. Given that this is the first major programme under the new Commissioning Strategy, this is not an auspicious omen for Flexible New Deal. It may also be causing major financial problems for Pathways providers as payment is mostly based on this performance. Note that Jobcentre delivery is NOT included in these figures, they are only for Provider-led Pathways. This discussion offers some clues as to the problems being faced on the ground.
• Work Prep, Workstep and Job Introductions are being replaced by a new disability programme. We're writing an article on this at the moment, so feel free to get in touch if you have any thoughts.

Voluntary New Deals

New Deal for Lone Parents and New Deal for Partners, both of which are running under target. NDLP is particularly unfortunate.

Others

Programme Centres are traditionally the most cost-effective producer of job outcomes the DWP can get. It makes very little sense that they're so far below target, unless competition for contracts and tightening up of evidence criteria have forced providers to massively overpromise. The customer base shouldn't have changed substantially in the past year or so, although the entry criteria do tend to vary between long-term unemployed and all claimants from Day One of claim.

What does it all mean?

There are a number of wrinkles that affect these results:

1. Overpromising - The main one is that, as discussed in the New Deal performance analysis from a while back, the DWP's commissioning approach of a few years ago actively encouraged overpromising by providers, which inevitably leads to poor performance against contract
2. Evidence requirements - A tightening up of outcomes claims that hit New Deal and Programme Centre performance figures has just recently been reversed
3. Only the hardcore were left - Anecdotally, the overall job readiness of customers decreased dramatically as the employment rates increased. Only the harder-to-help clients were left, which may also explain the focus on hardest-to-help groups in recent provisions such as Pathways to Work
4. Pathways to Work - Pathways is not affected by the wrinkles that hit New Deal and other provisions. However, the performance figures only cover the time before the introduction of Employment Support Allowance. Performance should improve somewhat once the teething troubles from that changeover start to bed in. Fixing the current dire performance would also require that the referral problems from the DWP and its doctors sort themselves out, that contracts are varied to take account of the tougher jobs market, and that providers didn't vastly overpromise to begin with
5. Recession - The recession will dramatically change both the supply and demand sides of employment provision. The number and job readiness of customers are likely to increase dramatically, and the absence of structural unemployment in this recession (i.e. no mining towns losing their only employer) means that jobs should be available, albeit in much shorter supply in the near term

Finally, it's important to realise that poor performance figures don't necessarily mean that providers are doing a bad job. It could mean, and in at least some of these provisions does mean, that there is a large gap between what people say in bids and what they actually deliver. This is important because it (1) raises questions about the overall quality of contract procurement and management by the DWP, (2) makes it difficult to tell whether delivery is going well or not, and (3) will bankrupt providers if it continues under the new Commissioning Strategy, which pays against these targets. It could also lead to a pervasive feeling of not-being-good-enough among providers, and any job adviser can tell you about the effects of low self esteem on people's performance.