Ask for complaints against Prime Contractors
This may help infer your answer!

The "high level categories" they likely refer to are the Prime contractors. I am not surprised they did not clarify this in the response as they do not wish an FOI request against this data. Strongly recommend you resubmit this.

The A4e information may be buried in the response as they obviously have this data given their response in the cost of sorting.

You may find some nuggets there!

Thank you, EA:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/co...

The requester has a good case to ask for a review of the decision not to provide the information on the grounds of cost.
All complaints would be digitised, so it would be easy to put in a search for A4e. In a matter of seconds there would be a reply: "xxx cases found" - with a list of them.
In any case, even if the complaints were only in hard-copy ( extremely unlikely ) it still would not take the 3.5 days claimed to answer the question 'How many complaints...'
Therefore, a request for a review is indicated.
As for the details of each case, this could possibly be contentious, as each would require careful reading, and, as part of the processing, redaction of personal details.
As for the outcome of each case, this too would not take more a few minutes, as the outcomes would definitely be stored electronically, so making redactions, if necessary, quick and easy.
It is recommended to ask for a review of the decision not to provide the information requested, on the above grounds, and to prioritise the provision of the information to numbers of complaints and their outcomes, with details of complaints provided up to the financial limit, on the assumption that there are no digital / electronic records of the complaint details, which is highly unlikely.

This is a total lie, each area has a department called "Third Party Provisions Team" within the DWP. Their role is to evaluate complaints received against third party providers and act to find them valid or invalid.

They also work with individual providers such as A4e and others such as Ingeus for example, so will have documented numbers of cases against each service provider. I have asked my Jobcentre this same question and they answered it for me, they told me how many complaints A4e had received in their area, how many were upheld, and how many were refused as being invalid.

From this we know they are lying, if Jobcentres can provide this information the DWP will at least have a record of each provider in each area.