London - Private companies running a flagship government employment scheme have put only 3.5% of clients into sustainable jobs, statistics published on Tuesday showed.
The British coalition government's Work Programme, launched in June 2011 to help the long-term unemployed find work, divides the country into regions, with each comprising a range of private, public and voluntary sector organisations.
The government is looking to roll out the model of payment-by-results across other parts of the public sector, including prisons.
The statistics were expected to be poor after various leaks showed the programme slowly "descending into chaos" as one source put it.
Unemployment is now slowly falling despite a stagnation in GDP, a phenomenon that has become known as the "productivity puzzle".