The government’s flagship scheme to tackle long-term unemployment has so far found a job for only 7% of the people enrolled. The £2.9bn Restart programme, launched by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak last year, is supposed to provide up to 12 months of support for people who are long-term unemployed to help them return to work.
But figures released in response to a written parliamentary question from Labour’s shadow employment minister, Alison McGovern, show that only 16,180 of the 226,785 people who had started on the scheme had subsequently left it for reasons including starting a job or moving off universal credit’s intensive work-search regime.
