The government's Work Programme only managed to get 3.6% of the people on the scheme off benefits and into secure employment in its first 14 months, the Public Accounts Committee said.

The government said it was "early days" for the scheme and the committee's report had painted a "skewed picture".

But Labour said the programme was "worse than doing nothing".

The 3.6% of claimants on the scheme who had moved off benefits into sustained employment between June 2011 and July 2012 was a mark well below the target of 11.9% that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) expected to achieve, the MPs said.

The committee's report pointed out that it was also below the official estimate of how many of those claimants would have found work anyway if the programme had never been launched.

Shocker!

It's a [LIFTED] mess. The trouble is that there are feckless [LIFTED] that don't want to work and there are areas where there are very few jobs, unfortunately the party politics as ever tries to blanket the whole nation. I personally hate the jobless work shy twats that seem to make up most of the unemployed round here, but that doesn't mean I'm unsympathetic to the large cities that simply don't have the employment that was on offer from the industrial revolution until post modernisation finally came into fruition over the last 30 odd years.

We have a really high unemployment rate in the bay.
I really have no idea if there are people milking the system; if there are I don't blame them, because there's not really many options here. We don't have industry, we live off tourists. What do you do for the other 8 months of the year?