With Kickstarter underway, attention is now turning to help for the unemployed over-25s

The government has promised more help to the UK’s record number of unemployed people. Its flagship for young jobseekers, Kickstart, is up and running. But the sister scheme, the Restart Programme, is still only out for tender.

In itself, this gives away the different approach the government is taking with jobseekers over 25. Kickstart in many ways emulates Labour’s post-crash Future Jobs Fund but with prime contractors currently bidding to deliver Restart, the grown-up sibling starts to sound more like the 2010 coalition government’s Work Programme – something not welcomed by all.

Gordon Brown has criticised the government for dragging its heels and fears help will not arrive until too late: “The Restart programme was supposed to offer a job to those who have been out of work for 12 months. By the time men and women are offered places this summer and autumn, thousands will have been out of work for 18 months.”

There is certainly an urgent need for an offer to meet the requirements of older jobseekers. Many have already had to deal with the culture shock of navigating the benefits system and living on a few hundred pounds a month. In terms of finding new jobs, many feel as daunted as longer-term unemployed people who often see themselves as unemployable. Despite their recent work history, many have not had to apply for work in years. Even getting a CV up-to-date can be hard if no-one has asked you what you have to offer for a couple of decades.

The £2.9 billon Restart Programme was announced during the Spending Review in November. Prime contractors, who are currently bidding for contracts across twelve areas of the UK, will be expected to offer up to twelve months’ ‘enhanced’ and ‘tailored’ support to Universal Credit claimants who have been unemployed for twelve months or more.

As with the Work Programme, the DWP is calling on lead contractors to work with employers and delivery partners, although a Commons Select Committee acknowledged that sub-contractors to the previous programme had been “underused” and “received a raw deal”. It will be a shorter scheme of three years, not five, but contractors will again be paid on results, which is something the former COO of Ingeus, Richard Johnson, argued led to “parking and creaming”. In other words, as companies were only paid for people finding work, they focussed on the ‘easiest’ cases and side-lined the more difficult to help.

Drawing on past experience, employment support experts are warning that help for jobseekers can vary in quality and say scale is no indicator of capability. At the early stages of the Work Programme, which was introduced in 2011, prime contractors were frequently reporting success rates of an appalling five per cent. Meanwhile, pre-existing community programmes often working with harder to reach groups were posting work rates of twenty per cent or higher. Even then, Primes were accused of claiming payment on results for jobseekers who helped themselves into work. There were frequent reports of ‘support’, entailing being kept in a room and given a newspaper’s recruitment section to work through.

“There is always a risk that contracts drive behaviours. If there is low-hanging fruit, contractors will catch it,” says Lynsey Sweeney, Managing Director at Communities That Work (CTW). Working primarily with social landlords, CTW helps partners support tenants and residents into employment.

“The long-term and most disadvantaged are least likely to benefit from mainstream and large-scale programmes,” Lynsey adds. She says something like Restart is definitely needed with a million more people now on the dole but fears it won’t touch the longer-term unemployed. Lynsey is also concerned that the Restart Programme looks a bit like the “Work Programme 2.0” and is particularly worried about the mandation elements. Threatening benefit sanctions for non-participation often penalises those least able to understand the rules or with more chaotic lives.

“We hope the aspiration to be truly local bears fruit,” Lynsey says. “The nature of housing associations means that they are very local so can therefore offer person-led employment support. There is a real challenge to do that at scale. We know complex partnerships are needed to deliver that.”

The Restart Programme is due to go live this summer.