A Wanganui business leader is defending work schemes for the unemployed - despite a low success rate.
Latest figures show that only about one third of those people on the schemes in the Wanganui-Taranaki region ended up in work.
Employment training schemes funded by Work & Income NZ (Winz) to get beneficiaries into jobs have cost a nationwide $50.9 million since 2012 - and that's to fund subsidies alone.
Of that total, $2.92 million has been spent in Wanganui-Taranaki paying wage subsidies to employers. That accounts for 261 people in the region going through the new Winz training courses, with only about a third finding jobs.
Nationally, Winz's new Flexi-Wages and Skills For Industry programmes have achieved just a 36 per cent employment success rate eight weeks after course completion.