Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people participated in the Sector-based work academy programme in each of the last 5 years.

Statistical releases on sector-based work academies, covering participation by those on legacy unemployment benefits, began in 2011 and ended in 2017.

These statistics can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/employment-schemes-work-experience-sector-based-work-academy-and-skills-conditionality-starts-to-november-2017 The scheme was relaunched as ‘SWAP’ in July 2020 as part of the government’s Plan for Jobs.

The breakdown of these starts by financial year is displayed in the following table:

Table 1: SWAP starts