Friday 6 March 2015

More on the A4e sell-off

Not a great deal more, to be honest.  But this piece on Education Investor suggests that the company could be sold off "in chunks", which would make sense.  There will be companies like Interserve keen to buy up the welfare-to-work business, while outfits already in the OLASS field might want what's left of the prison education side of things.  Both this piece and the FT article have the suggestion that a group of northern colleges (Newcastle College?) is interested.
Why now?  The articles talk about A4e being "mired in scandal"; but there have been scandals for years, none of them anywhere near the scale of Serco's or G4S's.  Both point out that the company's finances are recovering from the pre-tax loss of £11.5m in the 2013 year.  But this sale has been on the cards for a while.  A4e hit a peak around 2011, with a presence in 11 countries and Emma Harrison riding high as its chairman as well as owner.  That went spectacularly wrong when she took nearly £10m out of the company in one year prior to stepping down as chairman and bowing out of her government role.  Since then she has not received a dividend and the company has got back into the black by getting out of all overseas business except in Australia and not going after contracts on which it knows it would lose money.  If Harrison is to make anything further from A4e she has to sell it off now.

6 comments:

  1. At a guess,the only reason that anybody would be interested in A4E are the current contracts and future contracts,not in actually providing the services that they entail.
    And as usual the unemployed will be the last thing considered.

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  2. Perhaps they could stick a4e on eBay, I bid £2.78

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  3. Sick of the Work Programme7 March 2015 at 06:20

    If A4e is sold, I wonder if some of the staff will lose their jobs? How ironic that they could then find themselves down at the Jobcentre and, if they end up out of work for a significant amount of time, being subjected to a 'Welfare to Work' scheme. They will then discover what it feels like to receive next to no support with getting back into work!

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    1. Not sure about that. I did get told by my one of my A4e Advisors that their position of employment is safe, due to it being a Government Contract. eg. they were called Seetec before A4e. I as a job seeker, at the time, was commenting on the abundance of vacancies being advertised by various job sites.

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  4. So,,, A4e is being sold off by Deloitte, who also run a work programme scheme with Ingeus.. Would Ingeus buy a4e.?

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  5. No as Deloitte don't have anything to do with Ingeus now and Ingeus wouldn't want to associate with a4e I don't imagine as they seem pretty good.

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