The UK has been a high profile policy innovator in welfare-to-work provision that has led in the
Coalition government’s Work Programme to a fully outsourced, ‘black box’ model with payments
based overwhelmingly on job outcome results. A perennial fear in such programmes is providers’
incentives to ‘cream’ and ‘park’ claimants and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have
sought to mitigate such provider behaviours through Work Programme design, particularly via the use
of claimant groups and differential pricing. In this paper we draw on a qualitative study of providers in
the programme, alongside quantitative analysis of published performance data to explore evidence
around creaming and parking. The combination of the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests
that creaming and parking are widespread and systematically embedded within the Work Programme
and we argue that they are driven by a combination of intense cost-pressures and extremely ambitious
performance targets, alongside overly diverse claimant groups and inadequately calibrated
differentiated payment levels.