What's happened to A4e?

That was a question a friend asked me recently.  And then a rather rude anonymous commenter said more or less the same thing.  The answer is, I don't know because it's all gone very quiet.  There were two recent ads for jobs with A4e in the prison education service in the south of England.  They're using the agency Randstad to advertise these jobs, which means, unusually for A4e, that the salaries are given.  But that's about it.  Nothing more has been heard about the Slough fraud case.  Over the course of a year, from February 2012 to February this year, a total of 11 people from the Slough A4e office have been arrested over allegations of fraud that were apparently brought to light by A4e itself.  The legal process in this country can grind very slowly, but this is getting a bit silly.  No more financial information is available; accounts and returns are only published once a year.  The last lot showed the company in deep trouble.  And A4e is definitely not courting publicity at the moment.
There are contracts out there.  G4S have just got the contract to run two support centres for rape and sex attack victims in the West Midlands.  But most of the action is in areas of activity where A4e doesn't have a track record, and the pickings are slim.
There's a lot riding on the Work Programme for the company.  Unless they have started making a reasonable profit they're really in trouble.  We'll have some indication of this next month.

IDS in bother again

It's another bad patch for Iain Duncan Smith.  Those pesky judges in the Upper Tribunal have ruled that the Work Capability Assessment, which tests whether people are fit for employment, is inadequate when it comes to people with certain mental conditions, like autism, which mean they lack insight.  It puts them at a substantial disadvantage when trying to navigate the process.  Under the present system the claimants are expected to put together the medical evidence themselves, but the lawyers argued that it should be the government's responsibility.  Now, a reasonable response to this ruling, you would think, would be a statement that the DWP accepts it and will put things right.  But not the DWP.  The Huffington Post publishes the tweets from the DWP press office: "We disagree with today's ruling...".  So they'll appeal and stall.
IDS can avoid personal responsibility for that one, but not for the "misuse" of statistics recently.  Now we learn that he is to be "grilled" (not literally, sadly) by the Work & Pensions Select Committee as they "examine the way DWP releases benefit statistics to the media".  For a summary, see the New Statesman article here.  Should be interesting.

The Work Programme - not working

The Work and Pensions Committee has reported on the Work Programme, and its verdict is that it's not working for the long term unemployed and the most disadvantaged.  The official account of it is here.  The main points which I've picked out of it are:

• The government spent about £248m less than it anticipated on the WP in 2012 / 13 because the results were poorer than they expected.  
• They support the "black box" approach (they shouldn't) but they want it balanced by minimum service standards.  They point out that the providers are allowed to set their own standards which are currently "so vague as to allow providers to virtually ignore some jobseekers if they so choose".
• There are no figures for the numbers being referred to specialist sub-contractors.
• They want "a review of Work Programme sanctioning activity as a matter of urgency".

The media have picked up on various aspects of the report.  The Mirror quotes the committee's chair, Dame Anne Begg, who said, "Too often, the reality seems to be Work Programme advisers swamped by caseloads of 120 to 180 jobseekers, and employers deluged with poorly matched CVs and under-prepared candidates."  This is significant.  We know that people are being made to apply for jobs they know they can't possibly get, and suspect that WP advisers are sending out CVs off their own bats.

The Telegraph picks out the fact that the WP is "failing single parents".  The Independent talks about the problem of people who are "parked" because they're too difficult to help.  The BBC news website picks up the "poorly matched CVs" point.

The BBC's Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning ran an item on the report - but bodged it as usual.  They had a homeless man, Billy, whose experience of the WP was horrible.  He'd been sanctioned for missing an appointment which had actually been cancelled.  The interviewer, Sarah Montague, didn't know enough to bring this out, and Kirsty McHugh for the ERSA (the industry's trade body) was able to get away with blaming Jobcentre Plus for the "mistake".  McHugh has copied the politicians' technique of talking fast and throwing out misleading "facts".  She talked about 300,000 people being "helped into jobs" so far.  When Montague questioned whether these were long-term jobs the answer was a fudge.  And McHugh even stated that if a number of short-term jobs added up to 6 months, this was an outcome.  Is it?  Does anyone know whether the providers get paid for this?

I really hope that journalists (and I know that there are some who read this blog) will get the facts straight when the figures are finally published.

There have been some critical reactions to the Centre for Social Justice's report on "welfare ghettos".  Chris Goulden of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation picks the CSJ's figures to bits in an excellent article on the Foundation's website, and insists that it's not people's attitudes which drive worklessness, but what he calls "decayed job markets".  There's an angry response to the report by the leader of Birmingham City Council,  in the Birmingham Mail.  He talks about "character assassination" and emphasises the lack of jobs.  The Guardian went to Hull, to the offices of the WP subcontractor Pertemps, and concluded that the jobs simply weren't there.  But, of course, that's not the message which the government wants put out.  Blame the victims, it's so much easier than doing something positive.

A lesson in propaganda

The latest exercise in propaganda by combined right-wing forces in this country is a classic of its kind.
It starts with a report by the Centre for Social Justice, the "think-tank" set up by Iain Duncan Smith and run by his adviser Philippa Stroud.  This is reported in detail by the Telegraph.  The phrase "welfare ghettos" is prominent.  That's important.  The word "ghetto" is innocent enough in its original meaning ("a part of a city, esp. a slum area, occupied by a minority group or groups") but of course it's a very loaded word now.  The report is full of figures purporting to show that almost 7 million people live in these "welfare ghettos" where more than half the working age population is dependent on benefits.
I haven't looked at the report itself, but I suppose that the Telegraph has reported it faithfully.  If so, there are a great many question marks over it.  It talks about "areas" of various cities.  How is an area defined?  At one point they talk about "neighbourhoods"; again, how do you define that?  This isn't nit-picking.  You can draw lines on a map to produce whatever figures you want.  48 charities were consulted.  96% of them (why can't they just say "46 charities"?) said that "they had come across families where unemployment was intergenerational".  All that means is that both the kids and the parents were out of work.  It tells us nothing else - certainly not how many families were involved.
They do make an important point about aspiration.  Lots of youngsters do not expect to ever have a job, and don't aspire to anything better than they have now, except to become a celebrity.  But the CSJ manage to link that with the benefits cap.
The Express's account is less nuanced, as you would expect.  The headline is "Welcome to the benefit ghettos where the majority live on state handouts".  There's a photo of a young woman pushing a toddler in a buggy; we are, of course, meant to take the point about teenage single mothers.  There is a familiar response from the DWP about welfare reforms improving the lives of these people.
The Mail is, as usual, hysterical.  It uses the same phraseology about "benefit ghettos" but there are graphics for those who need pictures with their reading.  My earlier point about the definition of an area is important in  the context of the Mail's version.  They list 6 places where there are a large number of "neighbourhoods" with more than 30% unemployed.  But to say that there are "nearly 70 neighbourhoods" in Liverpool" in this state is a nonsense.  Are we talking about a large housing estate or a small street?  The article ends by saying that the CSJ is working on a follow-up report with its recommendations.
So a minister's pet think-tank comes up with a report with the message which the minister wants to convey, and the right-wing press runs with it in its own inimitable way.  Goebbels would be proud.

Workfare - the government must come clean

The DWP refused Freedom of Information requests to reveal the organisations which were using free labour under the various schemes dubbed "workfare".  The Information Commissioner said they had to.  The DWP refused again, on the grounds that it would cause "damage to commercial interests", and charities would suffer from the "adverse publicity".  Now a tribunal led by three judges has ruled that the DWP must comply and publish the list.  (See the Guardian)
While the Boycott Workfare group is justifiably triumphant, I don't think they should rejoice too soon.  This government doesn't regard such legal rulings as binding.  As the Guardian says, they could appeal to the high court or use a ministerial veto to ban publication.  My bet would be that the list never will be published.
The DWP seems to assume that if they have to reveal the organisations taking part in these schemes it will effectively bring them to an end.  And that means, they say, that the firms paid to organise them would have to sack staff and lose money.  Ingeus said it would lose £1m in revenue, and Seetec said they would have to sack 53 people.  (A4e don't seem to have been asked.)  So the taxpayer is paying millions to force people into working for their benefits.  Crazy, isn't it?  There's another interesting fact in the Guardian piece.  The current Chief Executive of Ingeus is Dean James, who is a former senior DWP civil servant.  How very cosy.

Sanctions statistics - they're not going to publish them

Today was supposed to be the day the updated stats for JSA sanctions were published.  But the DWP has decided not to publish them.  In an announcement the DWP said that there were "significant doubts around the quality of the statistics relating to the new regime".  So they're going to work on them and publish them at some point in the future.
The new series of stats is to run from October 2012 to January 2013, and "include a breakdown by Jobcentre Plus office".  So why there's doubt about their "quality" is anybody's guess.  An article in the Scottish Daily Record quoted figures for April 2012 (yes, last year).  4,680 claimants in Scotland had their benefits stopped in that month, compared to 500 in the same month in 2009.  The article quotes the concerns of Citizens Advice Scotland about both the numbers being punished and the "unreasonable or unfair" nature of many of the cases.
So one wonders why the DWP is so concerned not to publish updated figures.

The only game in town

A4e "welcomes" the new contracts to be issued by Chris Grayling for "offender rehabilitation", or so they say on their website.  These contracts will privatise a chunk of the work of the Probation Service, and they're set to be on a Payment by Results basis.  PbR is not a model the outsourcing companies like; but it seems to be the only game in town at the moment.  The Work Programme hasn't been a good advertisement for it, and Mark Hoban (more about him later) has reiterated that the worst-performing providers will be penalised by losing "up to 5%" of their new referrals.  It's hard to see that as a punishment.  The providers have complained that they have too many referrals and not enough money to do anything useful with them.  Hoban is talking tough, saying that he's willing to see providers go out of business if they can't deliver on the contracts they signed.  But if any of the big companies, including A4e, went bust it would cause big problems, as the remaining providers would be expected to pick up the business.

The Telegraph reports that Mark Hoban has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the MPs' second homes scam.  He sold his London flat, funded partly through the MPs' expenses system, in November with a profit of £144,000.  He's only been asked to repay £11,332, because that's all that's due since the new system kicked in.  The article, somewhat tongue in cheek, ends by describing Hoban as the minister "at the forefront of trying to get more people off benefits and into work".  It really does point up the hypocrisy of politicians who milk the system while vilifying the poorest.

Two more articles I'll simply recommend without comment.  The first is in the Guardian: "Recession is a good time to exploit cheap labour, says Cameron aide".  The second, also in the Guardian, is by Nick Cohen: "Lies, damned lies and Iain Duncan Smith".

Finally, a demonstration of how the right-wing press works hand in glove with the government, this time to denigrate the BBC.  The Express has splashed an account of a book which purports to show left-wing bias in the Beeb.