This is a not a bad article in some respects, but there are some serious flaws in it as well, but the key section is here:
blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-w...re-prove-worth/17957
The government rightly says that more than a quarter of a million people have found a job and stayed in it for at least three or six months – the minimum needed to trigger a payment to the provider, depending on which benefit was being claimed.
That’s just over 250,000 people out of 1,482,500 job seekers, so a success rate of 17 per cent.
Is that good or bad? It’s difficult to put into context, but there are a number of obvious comparisons we can make.
The number of people who completed the full two years of the Work Programme without finding work and got sent back to the job centre was 352,000 – almost 100,000 more than the number who found a job.
And it’s true to say that more people have had their benefits stopped by DWP as a punishment for various misdemeanours than have found work through the Work Programme.
More than half a million people were “sanctioned” between October 2012 and June 2013. About 174,000 of these had their payments stopped for failing to participate in the Work Programme or other training schemes during that time.
Sanctioned or failed to find a job for nearly one-million people, found a job for 250,000. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and say that if they'd done nothing at all some people would have found a job anyway.
