Stop the Abuse and blatant profiteering of the Return to Work Programme

Companies, such as Close Protection UK, are openly abusing and profiteering from the Return to Work Programme as highlighted by the Guardian. Tighter guidelines, controls and conditions must be set on who and how the Programme is used, and how unemployed people are treated.
Long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth, along with poorly paid apprentices, to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant. All as part of the government's Work Programme.
They were originally told they would be paid but when they got to the coach on Saturday night they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.
They had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant, had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.
One told how people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday. "We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them," she said. "We followed them under London Bridge and that's where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing."
They were woken at 5.30am and supplied with boots, combat trousers and polo shirts. They told the women they were getting ready in a minibus around the corner but it was locked so they had to get undressed in public in the freezing cold and rain. The men changed under the bridge.
No-one should be treated in such a way: expected to sleep under a bridge with no privacy or even basic facilities, either unpaid or on an "apprentice" salary of just £2.80 p/hr, under the threat of having their benefit stopped or on the vague promise that they "might" get some paid work afterwards.
Close Protection UK won huge contracts to supply security for the Jubilee and the Olympics but are doing so by openly abusing the system and mistreating people in the name of money, using the age old tactic of taking on cheap/unpaid labour as apprentices that they have no intention of keeping on and paying properly.