THE Queen’s speech offered nothing for the unemployed (Echo, May 8).

In a few weeks’ time the Government’s flagship Work Programme will be two years old. Thousands of unemployed in the North-East will leave the programme no further on than when they first started.

In this time, there has been one set of performance figures six months ago, which showed a failure rate of 97.5 per cent.

Naturally, the Government is in no hurry to release the next set of figures which were due out last March and are set to be worse still The Work Programme failed because it was structured on the false presumption that private agencies could conjure up jobs that Job Centre Plus could not.

But it ended up a costly mirrorimage of your average job centre S Finnegan, Normanby.