Ministers are desperate to present the work experience programme as helping young people to find work (Government U-turn on work scheme, 1 March), suggesting that nobody could disagree with that. But that is not all the work experience programme does. A constituent who works for one of the big retail chains asked her manager if she could do extra hours, but he said he did not want to give more work to people he had to pay at full rate, because he could meet his needs with people on work experience who were getting jobseeker's allowance and to whom he paid nothing.
The taxpayers are providing free labour for big employers, particularly in retail and hospitality, while their low-paid employees lose overtime and often the chance to work the additional hours required from this April to qualify for tax credits. The guidance issued to Department for Work and Pensions staff managing the work experience scheme does say Jobcentre Plus has a responsibility to ensure the abuse of "using the placement to cover a busy period" does not take place, but I have not spotted anything about preventing wholesale job substitution! Even if company chief executives say this is not what they are doing, it must be almost impossible for them to monitor how individual store managers are responding to a government offer of free labour. All the systems Iain Duncan Smith has so proudly brought in seem all too open to abuse.
Fiona Mactaggart MP
Labour, Slough
• I left school in the 1950s and, like nearly every other male of my age, was immediately drafted on to the welfare-to-work programme run by the then government. The programme lasted for two years, we had no choice where it would take place or what we would be required to do. We did know we would be ordered about wherever we went, in my case to Cyprus, and that we would be paid a pittance in addition to very basic food and accommodation. We also knew that if we did not like the programme and opted out before the two years were up, we could look forward to spending time in some form of penal institution. This welfare-to-work programme was known as National Service. Plus ça change, maybe?
Harry Galbraith
Peel, Isle of Man