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Police have launched a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud at the UK’s largest government-funded apprenticeship provider....
“A formal criminal investigation has been launched into 3aaa,” a police spokesman said. “This follows a number of allegations of fraud that have been made by the Department for Education against the firm. Officers from Derbyshire constabulary’s specialist fraud investigation team will now begin the process of making formal inquiries into these allegations.”

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The firm, which received £31m of government money last year, was placed into compulsory liquidation in October 2018... It is the second time the DfE has investigated alleged wrongdoing at 3aaa. A previous investigation in 2016 by the auditing firm KPMG found that 3aaa had been overestimating its apprenticeship success rate.

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That the government thought it possible to make a profit for shareholders from this process seems beyond satire. Yet the joke was on the voters. Against repeated warnings from civil servants about the potential risks to public safety, the then justice secretary Chris Grayling rushed through a botched partial privatisation of the service in 2014.

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The result was as bad as many predicted. The numbers recalled to prison for breaching licence conditions skyrocketed; the taxpayer lost out to the tune of £500m; some private providers gamed the system while others went bust.

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