Recommendation 3

The Department plans to evaluate Kickstart but has not set out clearly enough the measures of success, or reported regularly enough on how the scheme is progressing. The Department plans to evaluate the impact Kickstart has on participants’ long-term employment outcomes, comparing participants’ future employment and time on benefits to similar non-participants. In a job creation scheme like Kickstart there is a risk that some of the jobs funded would be created anyway, or will have other negative effects in the economy, such as job losses elsewhere. The Department does not expect its evaluation to robustly capture Kickstart’s impact on the wider economy, and so it will not know whether its assertion that Kickstart creates genuinely new economic activity is correct. We were surprised by the Department’s apparent lack of curiosity about how much value Kickstart jobs add to the economy and to the employers that participate. Despite our September 2021 recommendation that the Department publish more timely, granular data on its employment support programmes through a quarterly statistical update, it was not until November 2021 that the Department provided detailed, local authority and constituency data on local uptake of Kickstart by employers and participants, and then only in response to a Parliamentary Question. Recommendation: The Department should: • set out how, on all its major employment support programmes, it will report progress as it goes along, beginning with Kickstart. It should publish performance data on its programmes on its website on a regular basis, rather than on an ad hoc basis solely as answers to parliamentary questions; • ensure that plans for frequent and granular reporting are built into the design of future employment support schemes, including any proposals that feature in the ‘recession plan’ recommended earlier; and • ensure its Kickstart evaluation covers as robustly as possible all of the expected impacts of Kickstart that are given in the