Watching A4e

Round-up, 27 January 2012

2012-01-27T06:04:00.000-08:00

A few points from the week's news.

First, we read that A4e aims to get in on the legal services market. An article on the Legalfutures site describes how the company wants to enter the market which is being opened up to firms which are not the traditional legal service providers. "Chris Peel, A4e’s director of advice services, told a report published yesterday on new thinking in legal services: 'The reason why we are keen to expand on our traditional socially excluded client base is that if you look at our core business – getting people back into long-term sustainable employment – we are contributing to the “coping classes”. We’re shifting people out of legal aid eligibility. It’s a natural extension of our offer.' " They would partner with law firms, as they do now, and their existing advice services would seem to be a natural basis for the new business. However, one of the advantages of working with A4e which Peel offers is worrying: “a route to the market through diagnosing the needs of existing customers”. Does that mean that people who go to A4e-run advice services will be referred on to the paid-for A4e legal firm? It would be a big step for A4e. Instead of getting its cash from the public purse, as now, it would be making profits directly in a competitive market.

Second, Mark Lovell is using the Huffington Post site as a vehicle for him to contradict the prevailing view. This month he's talking about the plight of voluntary sector subcontractors, organisations which have been complaining that they're not getting the referrals and they're not getting paid. Lovell says that "we directly protect our Specialist Intervention partners by removing PBR requirements". A4e doesn't pay them to achieve job outcomes, but to provide specialist services.

Thirdly, back to whether the Work Programme can work. The Guardian has a blog piece by Paul Swinney which provides some interesting statistics showing the vastly different unemployment situations in different regions. He argues that there must be a "geographic angle" to the WP. Two reports from the North West of England (where A4e has a WP contract) show the particular difficulties. One from Wigan gives what it calls "shocking figures" and says that, "Only 23 per cent of those attending the work programme do not have any barriers to finding sustained employment. More than 44 per cent have two or more barriers in their way to finding a job." Now, we could argue about what "barriers" means; after all, we know that the biggest barrier to getting a job is being unemployed, and mental health problems are often brought on by unemployment. But the point is being made that there are local factors which have to be addressed. The other piece, on the PublicFinance site has major implications for WP providers. Liverpool is likely to have a directly elected mayor, and in the agreement being drawn up with Whitehall the mayor would "take greater control of the government’s flagship back-to-work scheme". They want an expanded scheme in which "unemployed people would be supported for longer with the aim of ensuring they gain a qualification. Jobcentre Plus would also be given more autonomy in the city." Where would that leave the providers like A4e?

Strange figures

2012-01-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

I'm puzzled. While the projected figures for the Work Programme are being questioned there are contradictory figures being put out for the performance of Flexible New Deal. On the one hand, there's the document put out by the DWP which we mentioned the other day,entitled "Ad hoc analysis of Flexible New Deal costs" dated January 2012. This gives a table of outcome statistics which shows 407,690 starts (excluding re-referrals) and 49,740 sustained jobs of 26-30 weeks, over 16 hours a week. That's 12.2%. Isn't it? But in response to a question from Stephen Timms MP, Chris Grayling provided, on 20 January, a table of results broken down by provider for jobs lasting 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. And the 6 month figures average to 16%. A4e averaged 15% over its 5 contracts. So which one is right?

You might say it doesn't matter much, since even the larger figure is appalling. But then let's look at a piece in the Guardian by Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation. He points out that for the WP the "non-intervention performance", i.e. the figure the DWP estimates will get jobs without any input at all, is 30%. Just think about that. And ask why the WP is being promoted as the solution to everything. Leave people alone and 30% will get work.

I don't normally bother any more with the daft advice given by Hayley Taylor, that most famous of A4e's alumni, but the latest question-and-answer on her site makes me cross. A 59-year-old, very experienced in admin, IT, management and as a JCP advisor has applied for lots of jobs and got some interviews, but hasn't found work. What should she do? Taylor says, " I think to remove any dates that relate to your age being worked out by a prospective employer is something I would reccomend." I know we've argued about this before, but how on earth do you keep dates out of an application form? And how do you construct a CV which gives no clue as to your age? Anyway, says Taylor, you're getting interviews so you must be doing something wrong at the interview. "Work on this area and I feel you will suceed." So it's this poor woman's fault. How helpful. It couldn't just be that they pick somebody younger, could it? I'd like to think that there was better advice being dished out by WP providers, but somehow I doubt it. By the way, there's a film on Vimeo called Hayley's Top 5 CV Tips. I can't bear to watch it.

It won't work

2012-01-24T01:16:00.000-08:00

It's in all the papers this morning; a damning report on the Work Programme by the National Audit Office. The Telegraph reports it straightforwardly. It says that only 26% of those referred to the programme will get work, not the 40% forecast. "Fewer people than expected are being referred on to the work programme in the 'harder to help' category, as providers scramble to cover upfront costs by helping the easiest set of jobless back to work, such as the highly qualified or experienced, to ensure they collect money under the contracts." Some providers will get into serious financial difficulties. The government paid out £63 million to terminate the FND contracts, only to give the WP contracts to the same companies. The Financial Times points out that some companies offered price discounts to get the contracts. Not surprisingly, the industry says it doesn't recognise the figures. And Chris Grayling says it's all guesswork, and it's all right because it's the companies which are taking the risk, not the taxpayer. No, Mr Grayling, it's the unemployed who are taking the risk. He also says that the providers will be able to release "limited information" before the official release of data in March; so watch out for loads of spin - numbers of job outcomes without any start figures. What's important about this, of course, is that the government is waving the Work Programme as the solution to everything, especially in its determination to reduce welfare benefits.

No one has yet related this to the release of figures for Flexible New Deal by the DWP. They show that the total cost (money paid out to providers) was £770m. The percentage of "sustained" jobs to number of starts was 12.2%. Yes, just 12.2%.

Do you remember an exercise you used to do at school called "comprehension"? You had to read a piece of text and then answer questions to show you'd understood it. Well, if you were any good at that you might like to try reading a submission A4e made to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee on community budgets and tell me what the point of it is.

People helping people?

2012-01-22T00:32:00.000-08:00

Emma Harrison hasn't been much in the media lately. Perhaps questions about A4e's profits would be embarrassing. But her pet project, Working Families Everywhere, is still alive in a few places, and Emma has been in Poole, Dorset, where the council took on four "family champions". The write-up in the Bournemouth Daily Echo is a classic of spin. We learn that Harrison was "appointed by David Cameron to spearhead People Helping People". That's obviously Harrison's name for it, not Cameron's. She visited a children's centre and said, "There are jobs out there." Well, that's encouraging. A couple of long-term unemployed are quoted, keen to get back into work, and one says that people don't know where to start. Which, of course, begs the question of what the various expensive schemes run by A4e and others have been doing. But the confusion about Harrison's project is evident. One woman says, "We need to get everybody back out into the community and helping each other" Harrison has implied before that if you can push people into volunteering you've succeeded in making them "working families". You haven't, of course.

There's a continuing chorus of complaints from the voluntary sector about their role in the Work Programme. They don't like the "cherry-picking" which is going on and means that only the hardest to help are being referred to them. And they don't like having to wait for months to be paid what little they can earn. Chris Grayling's response is to tell them that they signed contracts and knew what they were getting into. Which is more credible than Iain Duncan Smith's assertion that his welfare cuts are about helping people rather than punishing them.

A4e's accounts - revelations

2012-01-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

The Telegraph has just published an article headed "A4e pays £1m to former chief executive". That was the pay-out to Robert Martin, who left A4e in September 2010 after 3 years with them. The million was on top of £304,000 remuneration. The Telegraph has had a good look at the accounts, which show that A4e's top management got £4.7m and the company also paid out £11m in dividends. (Since Emma Harrison owns 85% of the shares that's £9.35m to her.)

It's well worth reading the article. The paper has kept a neutral tone but the facts are all there.

Update

2012-01-16T08:58:00.000-08:00

Two brief updates. The first is about Cait Reilly, the young woman who is challenging the system of forcing people to work for their benefits. The Guardian has published an article by her explaining the background and her reasons. I gather that such well-informed social commentators as Jan Moir and Vanessa Feltz have turned their guns on her. There's a vast number of comments under the article, of course. Where would we be without the Guardian and Private Eye?

Secondly, A4e has responded to the barrage of criticism about the role of the voluntary sector in the Work Programme by publishing a number of testimonials from their partners. It's on one of their many websites, A4e Voice.

A test case

2012-01-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

A young graduate called Cait Reilly is pursuing a legal case against the government which will be of great significance to all unemployed people. Read the story in the Mail Online first. Her case is that it was against her human rights to be forced, on pain of losing her benefits, to work for two weeks at Poundland stacking shelves. This meant that she had to stop volunteering at a museum, in a role that was related to the work she wanted to do. The comments which follow reflect the lack of sympathy of Mail readers, and the thuggishness of many of them. Then read the version in the Express. They have brought in Tory MP Philip Davies who was a senior manager at Asda, having worked his way up from shelf-stacking. Unsurprisingly, he is gung-ho about the system. There is a statement which no doubt the case will challenge: "Anecdotal evidence suggests Poundland is one of the best employers at converting work experience into jobs." The lawyers "are understood to be fighting separate rules under which the long-term unemployed can be required to do up to six months’ unpaid work. Her solicitor Jim Duffy said: 'The Government has created, without Parliamentary authority, a complex array of schemes that allow job centres to force people into futile, unpaid labour for weeks or months at a time.' "

If I had to bet on the outcome, I would think she will lose. It will be argued that the scheme she was put on by the Jobcentre, the "sector-based work academy", was voluntary and she knew what she was getting into. Anyway, the government can't afford to lose this one; too much hangs on it. Ironically, the Independent carries a piece about the firms (including Asda) which have signed up to new rules about interns. "The Government is sending out new guidance saying interns who do 'real jobs' must receive at least the legal minimum." Wait for the twist of logic which says that it doesn't apply if you're claiming benefits.

Bumper year for A4e

2012-01-11T03:44:00.000-08:00

£15 million - that's the pre-tax profit enjoyed by A4e last year, up by a third on the previous year. Revenue increased from £190.1m to £234.3m, and it was the company's most successful year ever. "Welfare to work" contracts account for about half of that.

Has the tax-payer had £234.3m worth of value?

Andrew Dutton - and those "workshy" figures

2012-01-06T14:46:00.000-08:00

Andrew Dutton, A4e's group CEO, has written a piece for Director magazine which deserves careful scrutiny.

He starts by saying that "Businesses have a moral obligation to get the long-term jobless back into work", and continues that it disappoints him "that there is a genuine view that the unemployed are workshy and feckless. They simply are not." Good. I couldn't agree more. How has that perception come about, I wonder. But, according to Dutton, firms which have an online application process automatically filter out unemployed people. That's chilling if you're desperately looking for work and being told that you have to make a minimum number of applications. "Directors tell me," says Dutton, "they have a bottom line to hit and because they need the best people, dipping into the unemployment pool isn't what they want to do." So far, we can applaud his honesty. He is exhorting companies to shed their prejudices and work with A4e to "cut their costs of acquiring new employees and be more certain about getting someone who is more culturally aligned to the business." (I'm not at all sure what that last phrase means.)

But there's a paragraph which is questionable. "While it is true often that the long-term unemployed have barriers that do need to be overcome – confidence, low self-esteem, mental health or childcare issues –companies like ours clear those obstacles long before candidates go in front of an employer." How often is often? It is true that a good advisor can motivate people who have lost confidence; but what can they do about mental health issues? As for childcare - well, Hayley Taylor, who learned her trade with A4e, recently advised someone who was worried about childcare that she should never mention this to an employer and worry about it only when she was offered a job, at which point relatives and friends would step in to help. Perhaps that's how you clear the obstacle.

Dutton is straightforward about the fact that A4e is a business, not a charity, and describes the payment model. He wants employers to demonstrate some corporate responsibility and start employing the unemployed. No one could quarrel with that. But at the coalface, as advisors try to get people into work (are they still on commission for job outcomes?) doesn't it reinforce the suspicion that providers have every reason to focus on those who have been unemployed for the shortest time? And what mention is there of "upskilling"? The longer someone is out of work, the more outdated their skills and experience become. Unless A4e and the others are prepared to fund relevant training Dutton'e exhortations will probably be ignored.

Back to that piece in the Daily Mail and the Express which stated that 50% of claimants had signed off or not turned up for MWA and justified the description of "workshy". The FullFact website has examined this claim. The DWP told them that it hasn't released any figures. The only attribution is the Mail's "a source close to the programme". So it's worthless and malicious propaganda. Surprise, surprise.

50% are workshy?

2012-01-05T05:53:00.000-08:00

There's an article in the Express today which raises some interesting questions. You have to get past the headline "Workshy are Exposed" and get to the figures (which are suspiciously round numbers). "A report has revealed that 20 per cent of people ordered to take part in a four-week community project scheme stopped claiming state handouts." Translated, I suppose this means that 20% of those directed onto Mandatory Work-related Activity signed off rather than comply. Then, "Another 30 per cent of people in the pilot project were stripped of their £67.50 a week unemployment benefit after failing to turn up." Which adds up to the "half of people claiming unemployment benefit (who) would prefer to lose their benefits than take part in unpaid work". That's a big saving on the benefits bill.

Assuming that the figures are more or less accurate, what's going on? I know that when I was unemployed I would not have had a choice; I could not have foregone my unemployment benefit without rapidly becoming homeless and destitute. Clearly some people are not in that position. I have met people who were "signing on" even though they did not need the money. They were being kept by someone else, or they had enough money to tide them over. They signed on because they wanted their NI contributions paid, and because they could. I met others who were almost certainly working in the black economy. Yet even these didn't drop out of the New Deal 13-week programme, and some went on work placements. So what's going on? Your thoughts please - but note that I won't publish anything that simply rants against the system. We can take that as read.

Turf Wars?

2012-01-03T07:48:00.000-08:00

We reported back in October that the winners of the contracts to use ESF money to tackle "entrenched worklessness" had been announced. Why, then, has it taken until today for the government to put out a press release about it?

The basic details come in a piece from the Press Association. It is announced as a coherent scheme to "be delivered by a mixture of public, private and voluntary organisations which will be paid by results" but is still confused about the distinction between the "£448 million for councils to send in trouble-shooters to such families over the next four years" and the new £200 million ESF money going to the private companies. It will be payment by results. The news media, as usual, have put their own spin on this basic announcement, without doing any research of their own."The Daily Mail, bless 'em, have the headline "Charities and private firms to be paid £15,000 to turn around each 'Shameless' family". The excuse for that, apparently, is some rubbish on Channel 4, and the Mail is determined to make the label stick. The piece focusses entirely on the new contracts, and they say that "Providers will be paid in three stages – when they have made a member of a troublemaking family sign up to a personal action plan, when the plan is completed, and finally when the individual has moved into employment. In total, a three-year contract will be worth up to £15,000 per family." The Telegraph has a more measured approach, and point out that 40% of the money is an "attachment fee" when the family sign up. (That's £6,000 before doing anything.) The BBC, striving to be neutral, says, "Eight specialist welfare-to-work firms have been appointed to help individuals overcome barriers to getting a job and staying in work. These include skills like timekeeping, writing a CV and job interviews."

What no one is explaining is how all these professionals are supposed to work together. The local councils have taken on, or redeployed, people to work specifically with these "troubled families"; some of these people are the remnants of Emma Harrison's "family champions". Now there are private companies involved as well. Are there going to be two, at least, people fighting over a family to claim the credit and the payment? How sad that A4e won't be involved.

What's in a name?

2012-01-02T00:14:00.000-08:00

A4e gets a mention in a piece in the Guardian about a school in Middlesborough which has been teaching kids how to set up and run businesses. A4e's role, apparently, was to co-ordinate the programme. Trouble is, the writer, Patrick Kingsley, initially described A4e as a "social enterprise". Someone quickly pointed out that it is not a social enterprise but a "straightforward, profit-making business". And to give the Guardian its due, they changed it straight away - to "social purpose company". But the Guardian has made this mistake before, so it shows how the wrong description has stuck. The official definition is: "a social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners' (DTI, 2002)." Clearly A4e doesn't fit that definition. But to call it, instead, a "social purpose company" (apparently Emma Harrison's idea) is to deliberately fudge the issue.

What hope for 2012?

2011-12-31T08:42:00.000-08:00

What does 2012 have in store? For A4e, who knows? They will certainly continue to bid for every contract going; and with this government intent on dismantling the whole notion of public service and privatising everything in sight, there will be no shortage of contracts. But there's a lot more competition now, in all the sectors once dominated by A4e. And the emphasis on payment by results (already jargonised as PBR) puts more pressure on the companies to deliver. The Work Programme has been criticised from the start, and the Financial Times keeps on the case. Far fewer people, it reports, will be referred from Incapacity Benefit or ESA than was forecast, and this impacts on the smaller organisations and charities who were signed up as sub-contractors for that purpose. But the numbers of referrals from JSA will substantially increase, as unemployment rises and the number of vacancies slumps. The government remains adamant that no figures will be produced until the spring. A4e will no doubt look to its overseas operations to provide profit. If anyone needs reminding of the scope of A4e's operations, look at their factsheet.

For those on the receiving end of the services of such companies as A4e, the prospects for 2012 look bleak. We already have Workfare, and no one is bothering to call it anything else. One council, Westminster, is going ahead with docking benefits from those deemed guilty of anti-social behaviour. Read the story in the Telegraph.

The most disturbing bit of this story: "Westminster is also considering docking the council tax benefits of people who are not making an effort to get a job. Cllr Roe said that for every Westminster resident on council tax benefits, there were 'seven vacancies in low-skilled jobs like shelf-stacking, waitressing and window cleaning. That implies at least some of those people were not working as hard as they could be to get jobs.' If agreed after a consultation, the proposals would come into force in just over a year and would affect all claimants except for pensioners." The implications of that are dreadful. It's a short step from that to what most Tories would really like - time-limited benefits. I'm not sure they would dare to bring it in this side of a general election, but it's on the cards. Another strong possibility is the privatisation of Jobcentre Plus.

Try to have a happy New Year!

Advising Goverment

2011-12-28T10:03:00.000-08:00

Always keen to advise the government, A4e has submitted a document on Debt Management to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It's a strange read in some ways; very consciously using the formal language of such documents whilst lapsing into clumsy phraseology from time to time. There also seems to be a section which has been chopped out. But it's the content that counts. What does A4e recommend?

"As providers of a wide range of front-line public services to the socially and financially excluded, A4e has rich experience of the multiple challenges people face in staying afloat." They know that people who are "unbanked" get trapped into high-interest loans. So the government should buy out this debt from the high-street lenders, and the debtors could repay it at a low rate of interest. I can't really see that happening. Interestingly, the document states that 50% of the clients of A4e's CLACs are repeat customers because they haven't changed the behaviour which keeps getting them into debt.

There's a paragraph which needs decoding. It's arguing for "a single interface" through which people can be referred for debt advice. I wonder who would run that.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-23T01:12:00.000-08:00

There's little going on at this time of year. A4e continues to put out good news stories; and each success that they trumpet is a real cause for celebration for the person concerned. But how the Work Programme is really working is still a secret. An MP asked how many of the over-50s had found jobs through it and was told by Chris Grayling that no figures would be issued until next spring.

Back in September we reported (thanks to Private Eye) that A4e had a £300k contract from the government to design future welfare contracts. The company has now publicised this on their "Insight" website. It's not a new experience for A4e, to be paid to design contracts which they can then successfully bid for. A4e designed the pilot programme for the FSA's money guidance service. Lo and behold, earlier this year they got the contract for the Money Advice Service. Let's be clear, A4e isn't the only private company on this profitable merry-go-round.

So now, to all my readers, have a peaceful Christmas.

Emma Harrison and troubled families

2011-12-15T00:07:00.000-08:00

Has Emma Harrison been shunted out of the picture in the "troubled families" scene? She was hailed as the solution to the problem of supposedly 120,000 of them after the riots, with her "Working Families Everywhere" scheme. Now Cameron is to announce £448m "to fund a national network of local authority teams charged with identifying 'chaotic families' and helping them address their problems." (Guardian) In charge of all this will be Louise Casey, with her "Troubled Familes Unit". The BBC nods to Harrison as the "family champion" but none of the other reports mention her.

With no real news from A4e (except that Roy Newey has been travelling - India and Latvia), it's the fact that 2.64 million are out of work that dominates the headlines. And still the government clings to the idea that the Work Programme will work some sort of magic. It's hard to see how. Many will go into "work placements" but most of those will not get real jobs. And what work there is, is often temporary. A young man recently appeared on a radio programme with Iain Duncan Smith in London, and said that despite his qualifications he could not get work. IDS promised to help him - and we learned today that he has indeed got a job and is thrilled to bits. But it's a temporary job, for the Christmas period.

A recent report showed that "just 20%" of those on the WP are being referred to the voluntary sector. That might just show that 80% don't need that specialist support. What we don't know is what is being done for that 80%. What actual skills training is happening?

Reasons to be cheerful

2011-12-07T01:11:00.000-08:00

Is it all gloom and doom for the Work Programme, or is Mark Lovell right to be cheerful?

On 1 December the Financial Times said that the WP was "hanging by a thread". The numbers of people out of work is forecast to rise, and Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation think-tank, said, "The combination of rising caseloads, falling labour demand, and the shift to 100 per cent outcome-based funding for providers is dire news for Work Programme viability." Mulheirn has warned before that WP providers could ask for a tax-payer bail-out if they can't make money. The director of another think-tank, Inclusion, says that "providers will be able to place an average of 7 per cent fewer people in work over the next five years than previously estimated." A spokesman for the DWP was determinedly upbeat: "even in these tough times there are jobs out there, with Jobcentre Plus taking 10,000 vacancies every working day."

Mark Lovell takes issue with this pessimism in a piece on A4e's website the next day. He is hampered by the fact that he is not supposed to publish outcome figures, but says that more than 7,000 people have got jobs via A4e since the launch of the WP. He says that, "Sustainment is higher than we forecast so far". We don't know, of course, what proportion of starts this represents. But he says that the money is coming in.

Bizarre PR

2011-11-30T03:48:00.000-08:00

We are used to A4e sprinkling PR pieces all over the internet, but the latest effort is particularly bizarre. Foodbuzz is a "food blog community" site; but this month A4e joined and on 23rd posted 14 links to pieces on its own website (which, of course, have nothing to do with food).

Note: they've now been removed - see comment below.

One of A4e's Business Improvement Managers has his CV on a jobs site. One intriguing statement on it is that in Flexible New Deal in his contract area he moved "over 45% of referred customers into full time employment". But the DWP has published the figures. In that particular area, between October 2009 and October 2011, A4e had 14,810 starts, of which 3,230 got short-term jobs and 2,150 got "sustained" jobs. Now, even if you add short and long-term together, it only comes to 36.3%. So I wonder where the 45% figure came from.

Lists, pamphlets and the WP

2011-11-29T01:21:00.000-08:00

Another of those lists of important people has been produced by the Big Issue in the North. A panel decided on the 50 most influential people in the region and, sure enough, A4e's Emma Harrison gets in at no. 13 (Sir Alex Ferguson is only 21st). It's a meaningless list of business people, politicians and other worthies, but no doubt those on it (and not on it) will find it important.

But while Harrison gets onto such lists, it's Mark Lovell who seeks to provide the intellectual underpinning for A4e's business. Harrison may be "advising" this government, but he is writing for a Labour party policy pamphlet on his current favourite subject of helping unemployed people to start their own businesses. This is something of a hostage to fortune for the Labour MPs who also contributed to the pamphlet. Recent governments have been happy to align themselves with business leaders to whom they have subsequently given large contracts; but it is a dangerous habit.

The reputation of many firms is staked on the Work Programme. We are not to have any figures until next March, so the evidence is largely anecdotal. We don't even know how many people have started on the WP. At least the Youth Contract fulfils Harrison's wish to get young people onto the programme earlier. But already we hear that several providers are unable to cope properly with the numbers of clients being referred, and that staff are inadequately trained. CVs are being sent out to employers without the knowledge, let alone permission, of the clients, and they are often one-size-fits-all CVs imposed on the clients. Has any actual training started? One area where we really need figures now is the companies taking people on work placements. Are there companies taking free labour on a large scale with no intention of employing people? The DWP should draw up a list of employers, number of placements and number of jobs.

Youth Contract, income and the voluntary sector

2011-11-25T05:53:00.000-08:00

The newly announced "youth contract" promises more profit opportunities for A4e and the other providers. Money is going into wage subsidies but it's all being done through the Work Programme and Grayling has said that providers will only be paid for long-term jobs, as usual. And it's threats as usual too. Don't take a placement or a job and you lose your benefit.

The Learning and Performance Insitute has compiled a list of the "top 50" UK training organisations. This is top only in the sense of fiscal success i.e. revenue. A4e comes second with revenue of £191m last year, only £4m behind Babcock International. Note that this is revenue, not profit, and presumably includes A4e's international business as well as its UK contracts. But it's a lot of money.

The complaints about the relationship of the voluntary organisations to the the private providers in the WP rumble on. But Kevin Curley, who has been the top professional in the voluntary sector (there are a lot of well-paid people running it) has weighed in. "He cited the Work Programme as a prime example (of strange relationships) , asking: 'Is this what an independent local voluntary sector should be doing in any case – helping G4S and A4e to maximise their profits from welfare-to-work schemes? Do we really want our relationship with the state brokered by the private sector?' "

Inspirational

2011-11-22T08:08:00.000-08:00

The CBI's Annual Conference recently held a panel debate with the title "Good for Britain, good for business, good for growth". A4e's Emma Harrison was on the panel. Two other members are also bosses of outsourcing companies (Circle Health and Apetito, which provides catering services to hospitals). So you can see why the word "good" was being stressed. The Yorkshire Post described Harrison as "chairman of Sheffield social purpose firm A4e, which gets people into work", and reports that "Ms Harrison urged firms to 'do well by doing good'." This is a familiar mantra of Harrison. It doesn't seem to have been her only contribution. Michael Gillick, boss of a company called Paritas Ltd, tweeted to her, "A colleague said your speech at the CBI conference was inspirational. Is it published anywhere?" Emma replied that they were filming so it could be on the CBI's website.

BBC cameras were in the Liverpool A4e office for a news item about the Work Programme shown on 7 November. A4e say that the two young people filmed are being followed by the reporter, Mark Easton. So can we expect that all the stops will be pulled out to get these two into jobs? I hope so, for their sakes. Meanwhile, another contract enables A4e to say that it is "assisting in helping service heroes start their own business". This involves money from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills awarded to the Royal British Legion to help service leavers start their own businesses. The RBL have naturally sub-contracted this to firms like A4e.

Emma Harrison on Newsnight - and volunteers

2011-11-15T14:39:00.000-08:00

Newsnight is currently running a major piece on youth unemployment. And in the introduction, up pops Emma Harrison, described as chairman of A4e and a government advisor. She says that the problem is entrenched, young people need one on one support, and they need it earlier. It's A4e's latest argument, that they should be put on the Work Programme well before the current 12 months period.

The young people in the studio discussion are not happy with the attitude of the Jobcentres. They talk about the demoralising effect of sending off hundreds of applications with no result. Chris Grayling talks about the government's work experience scheme, but the young people are not impressed. A young man who talks about the problems of expecting people to live on apprenticeship money when they don't have parents to depend on - he is ignored. Paxman talks about the effects of immigration. David Milliband favours the previous government's Future Jobs Fund, and a guarantee of a job. One man says work trials don't lead to jobs, but Grayling says that more than half do get jobs. He says that the WP is the answer to everything. It will match individuals to the vacancies. The discussion goes on, but gets nowhere.

The spat between the voluntary sector and the WP providers goes on. The Third Sector website expands on the story that A4e asked a local volunteer centre to provide people to work with their clients on CVs. It turns out that it was the Oxford A4e which asked for volunteers with good IT skills and a lot of patience. The volunteer centre refused because, without payment, it would be taking advantage of volunteers. The response of A4e's Nigel Lemmon is interesting: "We are investigating these allegations thoroughly. We only work with volunteer agencies where they are happy to work with us to support our customers back into work – improving the lives of those individuals and benefiting their communities." Dan Sumners of Volunteering England said that it was potentially exploitation to expect volunteers to help to deliver a service for a profit-making company. Yet there are voluntary sector organisations contracted to A4e and the others. So it apparently okay, as Lemmon suggests, for volunteers to be used if the organisation is getting paid.

Emma Harrison on workfare and the WCA

2011-11-14T00:49:00.000-08:00

It's hardly a surprise that Emma Harrison has a Facebook page - one of those you can "like" (only 327 people have, up to now). But there's an interesting exchange with someone who calls herself Willow Jacky, which ends in a statement of Emma's and A4e's position on a number of issues on A4e's website. The poster is concerned about "workfare" and about sick people being forced into the jobs market.

Harrison misses the poster's point about people being made to work for free in places like Tesco, and simply extols the benefits of working for such companies - "All employment provides really positive opportunities to develop." But then she goes on to talk about Workfare and its origins in America. She doesn't mention that the main point of Workfare is that it time-limits benefits, but she is right about its drawbacks, leaving many people in absolute destitution. But A4e's approach is much better. Evidence? None, of course.

On the second issue, Harrison states the government's line with approval, but agrees that "the current process is not adequate". Never fear, A4e is "working with the DWP to see if there is a better way of designing this process".

Weird and Wonderful - and IDS

2011-11-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

If you're curious about Thornbridge Hall, the Derbyshire mansion home of Emma Harrison, you can see it on the latest of Nigel Slater's "Simple Cooking" programmes. Slater went there to see a farmer, Tom Clarke, who farms wild boar there. We also met Jim Harrison, Emma's husband, who brews beer. The episode is called Weird and Wonderful.

Earlier today Iain Duncan Smith was on The World at One on Radio 4. It should be here. He was talking to people in Hackney about unemployment and what the government is doing about it. Naturally, everything is pinned on the Work Programme. The payment method will ensure its success. There was the usual casual statistic - there are half a million jobs in the Jobcentres each week. We need a dynamic workforce, he said. The representative of one organisation said they had not bid for the WP contracts because it was too risky, but would continue to help people. One man, with a criminal record, said it was hopeless and, when IDS disagreed, said he couldn't even get a work trial. Once again the solution was the WP, which would provide mentors to help him all the way. Another man, with a string of qualifications, said he couldn't find work either. IDS personally guaranteed that he could get him a job. (Of course he can; but that doesn't help all the others in the same position.) The interviewer asked him if it was fair that benefits are to go up in line with inflation (a line that other BBC people are also pushing). IDS said there were no plans to change that, but it was a long way short of a guarantee.

I wonder if he will come on next year to explain why the WP isn't delivering.

Mark Lovell v. Patrick Butler

2011-11-11T01:20:00.000-08:00

A4e's Mark Lovell has responded to the criticisms made by Patrick Butler of the Guardian in his piece The Work Programme: not working for young people. Butler had cited the case of a charity, New Deal of the Mind, which was signed up as a sub-contractor of A4e but had yet to receive any referrals. Lovell now uses the Huffington Post website to answer him and give us The Facts Behind the Work Programme. It's a long piece, but what it seems to boil down to is that they couldn't predict the numbers, it's taking a long time to set up, but the referrals will come. He also gives us his view on tacking youth unemployment - refer young people to the Work Programme sooner.

But Butler has moved on, picking up the story about charities being exploited by Work Programme providers. He has spoken to some of these voluntary organisations, and quotes Chris Grayling's insistence that the primes shouldn't be doing this. Butler wants contact with charities which believe they're being exploited and people who have been "covertly" referred to volunteer centres.

Volunteers and mandatory work

2011-11-10T00:40:00.000-08:00

The voluntary sector continues to complain bitterly about being let down by the prime providers of the Work Programme. Organisations were assured that, as sub-contractors, they would get referrals, but haven't. But they now say that the primes are "passing clients to volunteer centres without payment". A briefing paper by volunteering england (they don't believe in capital letters) names A4e among a number of providers which have referred people to a volunteer centre "without any prior contact" and with no suggestion of payment. It's not at all clear what's going on; but the providers have always been used to sending clients off to charities to "volunteer" and have probably continued to do that without realising that things have changed.

There are numerous stories about the mandatory "community work" for people who have been unemployed for two years or more. There's a straightforward summary in the Yorkshire Post and the Guardian expands on the story. It's left to the Telegraph to give a platform to the ultra-right wing "think tank", the Policy Exchange, to crow about this "experiment with workfare". I seem to remember that when this was originally touted it was as 6 months of actual paid work. That was always going to be difficult. And there's no suggestion of payment now, just benefit. For those who wish to get to grips with the details, the DWP has helpfully published the provider guidance. The scheme is known, cheerfully, as CAP.

Work Programme failure - and mutuals

2011-11-08T00:38:00.001-08:00

A4e appeared in the news yesterday on BBC as reporter Mark Easton went to Liverpool to look at how the Work Programme is working there. It was a frustratingly short piece, but got the essence of the problem. There are far too many people chasing far too few jobs. Two clients appeared; a young man with a criminal conviction, and a woman with qualifications. The only work available for the young man was shift work via an agency in a factory where conditions are notoriously bad. Easton put the point to the A4e manager that providers would inevitably cherry-pick, ignoring the hardest-to-help. All credit to the chap, he said that they didn't do that because it wouldn't be fair.

Patrick Butler of the Guardian keeps on the case with a piece about the failure of the WP to involve the voluntary sector as it's supposed to. A charity called New Deal of the Mind has a very good track record of getting young people into work in the arts and media. It is now signed up as a sub-contractor of A4e. But it hasn't had a single referral from A4e. Butler hasn't managed to get to the bottom of this situation, but there's some evidence that JCP isn't referring many young people onto the WP. The voluntary sector is caught in the trap of not being able to invoke the Merlin rules (which is supposed to ensure that primes treat their supply chain fairly) because they don't want to destroy the relationship they have, or want to have, with those primes.

There's an interesting piece on the Public Finance website. One of this government's big ideas was to push groups of public sector workers into forming "mutuals" - companies owned by their workers - and bidding for contracts. That last bit was rarely mentioned. But now the predictions of many people are starting to come true. A health sector mutual has lost out in bidding for a contract to a private company. This does not please Patrick Burns, director of something called the Employee Ownership Association. "If you don’t do something with the commissioning environment, then in five or ten years time you will not be dealing with mutuals, you will be dealing with (outsourcing companies) Serco, Capita and Virgin. Not that they are bad companies, but it’s not the point." Someone from the Cabinet Office pointed out that there are "expert mentors" in place to help "pathfinder mutuals". These mentors include A4e. At some point this is going to bring about another interesting situation.

Guardian wants stories

2011-11-04T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Guardian has just posted a request for stories about unpaid internships and the like. "Private companies contracted by the government to get the long term unemployed back into work are getting people to work for highly profitable supermarkets for weeks or face having their dole docked. The Department of Work and Pensions has also confirmed that government run job centres are recommending that unemployed youth take up long term 'work experience' to help them gain further skills. This work can also be unpaid." There's some confusion here, I think, between internships and the "work activity" which has been part of New Deal and its successors for a long time. But they want stories, so perhaps some of my regular readers would like to respond.

Round-up, 3 November 2011

2011-11-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

First, on Families Unlimited. The Guardian has published an amendment to its revelations about this, "Emma Harrison set up firm to pitch for government cash on project she devised". They now want to add, "Families Unlimited (the unincorporated Joint Venture set up by A4e and Gill Strachan Limited) has asked us to make clear that it was not set up solely for the purpose of bidding for European Social Fund (ESF) monies but rather to jointly develop and market their expertise in connection with the whole family/total person approach to worklessness including preparing for and submitting tenders for work with local Authorities and central government and if successful to undertake the provision of contracts. Further, we are happy to clarify that while Families Unlimited explored the possibility of acting as a sub contractor with a number of primes in bidding for ESF Funding they took a commercial decision not to do so." I'm not sure what this boils down to, other than that they are not now going for ESF sub-contracts.

There are a couple of conflicting takes on the Work Programme. One is an article in the Telegraph reporting Chris Grayling telling a business audience to use the WP providers as a kind of free recruitment agency. "They’ll get to know you and your business" he says. "They’ll get to know all the potential recruits. And they’ll bring you a small selection to choose from. Doesn’t that sound a better way to do business?” It sounds very reasonable, but is anyone else a little uneasy about the providers deciding who to put forward for a vacancy? A Labour MP, David Lammy, had a go at David Cameron about expecting the WP to be a cure-all when a tiny number of jobs are being chased by so many people. “You have described the work programme as ‘the biggest back to work programme since the 1930s’, but you know that the programme doesn’t create jobs, it merely links people up with vacancies. There are over 6,500 people unemployed in Tottenham and only 150 full time vacancies. What will your work programme do about that?” Cameron's response was to suggest that jobseekers look further afield, which didn't impress Lammy.

Google's revamp of its news feed means it's no longer possible to post links to stories. So here are a few which might interest readers. On 31 October the Telegraph reported "GPs to tell long-term jobless to find work". On 1 November the Express said, "Welfare plan 'may increase poverty'". On the same day the Guardian had a thoughtful piece called "What it's like to be young and looking for work in Britain" which looked at 10 real young people and their stories. Most important, perhaps, is a story from the BBC today. "Ministers 'consider alternatives' to 5.2 per cent benefits rise". Benefits should rise by that figure because it's the inflation figure on which all rises to benefits and pensions are based. But they think they can change the rules.

Family Champions - more confusion

2011-11-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

The Children and Young People Now website has an article on Emma Harrison's Family Champions scheme which makes the whole picture even more confusing. It's supposed to consist mainly of volunteers. But the pilot areas are not keen. Westminster doesn't want any volunteers, costing time and money to train. Hull won't make a decision for at least 6 months. Shepway is similarly holding back. And these are the areas which already have paid "family champions" in place. The article doesn't mention the private contractors with the ESF money who will be doing a similar job. So much for David Cameron's "plan to transform the lives of England’s 120,000 most troubled families by 2015." It seems unlikely that there'll be that army of volunteers, of "Emmas" as it was originally put. Big society stuff.

And where did that figure of 120,000 families come from? Any round number is suspicious, and that one was just plucked out of the air. Certainly there are a lot of very troubled families, but they are best dealt with by the existing charities working with local authorities.

Transparency

2011-10-31T10:08:00.000-07:00

Paul Maynard, MP for Blackpool North and Cleveleys, blogs that he is encouraged by his "discussion with a local representative from A4E here in Blackpool, who are running the Government’s Work Programme scheme here in the North West. Whilst I often here (sic) that there are no jobs out there, it was refreshing to hear a slightly more positive point of view. No-one pretends that we are in the midst of economic boom, but the patient accumulation of business contacts is ensuring that A4E is becoming a one-stop shop for many employers with vacancies to fill." He goes as far as telling people looking for work who are not on the Work Programme that they should give A4e a call. Well, let's hope he's right.

But we won't know how successful A4e and the other providers are until next March. That secrecy is understandable up to a point. Even if someone got a job on the very first day of the Work Programme they won't yet have been in the job for 6 months. And the DWP is going to use the figures to compare the providers in a region and reduce the number of clients to an obviously failing provider, so a running commentary on the figures wouldn't be helpful. But it means that we have no idea whether the hype matches the reality. And lack of transparency is one of the themes of an article on the Morning Star website by Solomon Hughes. In the name of "opening up public services", he says, Cameron is handing over the funding of public services to private investors. Hughes describes how A4e has been hired to design the contracts for schemes funded by social impact bonds, something we highlighted recently. While this hasn't been a secret, it's not something that the average person would think sensible. The article is well worth reading.

The Welfare State

2011-10-26T23:51:00.001-07:00

The BBC2 programme on the Welfare State tonight is being so well promoted that we don't have to watch it. I'm listening to part of it now on the Today programme. And Left Foot Forward has already analysed why Humphrys is wrong. I don't intend to watch, but feel free to comment if you do. "The age of entitlement", he says, "must be brought to an end."

I reported that Emma Harrison's Family Champions scheme was to consist entirely of volunteers. But Poole council in Dorset "has obtained funding to become part of the Working Families Everywhere Programme which provides one to one support to help families overcome unemployment and return to work." Three of these people will have contracts running to March 2013. How will that fit with the ESF contract, which is being run down there by something called Paragon Concord International?

"Lead Family Champion"

2011-10-19T09:06:00.000-07:00

Something called the Family and Parenting Institute (a think tank) gives space for Emma Harrison to plug her Working Families Everywhere campaign. The familiar message has been refined somewhat. "The difference in the Working Families Everywhere approach is on setting a single goal, in this case employment for at least one family member, and dealing with the other needs on the path to, or subsequent to, that goal." There's a great deal about Emma's qualifications for the role, and then the final paragraph is a triumph of Emma-speak. But we learn that these "family champions" will all be volunteers. That was inevitable. But there's nothing in this piece about the ESF contracts for private companies to do this work for profit. How will the volunteers fit into this strange mix of local council employees and private companies?

Meanwhile, Mark Lovell has been using the Huffington Post to publicise his vision of young people getting themselves out of unemployment by starting their own enterprises. One would think that the Prince's Trust didn't exist.

Those "entrenched worklessness" ESF contracts out

2011-10-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

The winners have been announced of those contracts which A4e couldn't bid for, after Emma Harrison convinced the government that her own "family champions" project was the way to go and said that she wouldn't make any money from it. The big winners are Reed, with 4 of the 12 areas. As usual, past failure is no bar to further contracts. EOS Works Ltd (formerly Fourstar) get 2 areas and there's one each for WISE Group, G4S, Skills Training UK, Twin Training International and Paragon Concord International. It will be interesting to see whether any of them will sub-contract to Families Unlimited, the outfit which Harrison set up with the former civil servant.

Another interesting aspect of this is the potential clash with Local Authority provision. Many LAs already have the organisation and staff in place and are doing this work, and yet are expected to pass families on to the private contractors. Most sensible people will think that the ESF money should have gone straight to the local councils, rather than have some sliced off for private profit.

You might be amused (or not) by the Daily Mail's take on all this. Hysterical, vicious and inaccurate.

An A4e degree

2011-10-15T00:27:00.001-07:00

Now A4e will soon be able to award degrees.

WalesOnline broke the story on 14 October in what was clearly a press release from Glyndwr University and A4e. "The company relationship is set to be launched in January with a means to achieving maximum participation in higher education from socially and economically disadvantaged sectors of society. It will take on innovative approaches to learning, tackling social exclusion and generational joblessness." There's more stuff about partnership, "re-skilling the workforce" and "transforming their lives". But it's not at all clear what the nature of this partnership is. For that, we had to wait till today and a piece in The Times Higher Education. "Glyndwr will train A4e staff so that they can give higher education to unemployed people" and will "validate higher education courses run by the international recruitment company, A4e." It's going to start in Wales but "Glyndwr might follow A4e’s business into Europe." Much the same piece appears in The Daily Post. The two organisations have not yet worked out the financial side of the deal but they hope to be up and running by January.

Let's not be entirely cynical. If this results in A4e being able to offer genuine degree-level courses to their unemployed clients, that can only be of benefit. The university, based in Wrexham, will not want to repeat the recent scandal surrounding the University of Wales which had been validating useless or non-existent courses for money. And A4e will want to be taken seriously in the higher education sector. But we'll have to wait and see.

Encouragement from Emma

2011-10-13T01:21:00.000-07:00

Lots of publicity about the latest unemployment figures, particularly the number of young people without work. The Sun headlines "Nearly 1m young people out of work" and adds that the over-65s have been hit too. Who does the Sun go to for a comment? Yes, Emma Harrison, who is described as "Govt's family champion" rather than as someone who has become a multi-millionnaire from contracts to get people back to work (and who describes herself on Twitter as "welfare and social reform thinker and doer, tv and radio face and voice"). A4e isn't mentioned in the Sun. And what does Emma have to say? Nothing much. "Whatever the situation, you mustn't give up or give in," and similar words of encouragement. Nobody except the government talks about the Work Programme at the moment. None of the "case studies" cited by the Sun, or any of the media, refer to the WP or to any previous scheme.

The Work Programme was supposed to address all the problems, including training needs. The private providers would pay for skills training because it would increase clients' chances of getting work and so the companies' chances of making a profit. But Chris Grayling has acknowledged that that isn't going to work by announcing the setting-up of "sector-based work academies". However, there is no indication of who is to run these "academies" (silly word). The obvious answer would be Further Education Colleges, which already provide this skills training. But I wouldn't be surprised if this is yet another contract opportunity for the likes of A4e.

Success and failure

2011-10-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

A Yorkshire publication, the Yorkshire Business Insider, reports that A4e's Emma Harrison is one of only ten women on its list of the 100 top working millionaires in the region. Hardly a surprise.

But there are more rumblings of discontent from the voluntary and other organisations which signed up to be sub-contractors in the Work Programme. Or haven't yet signed up, in some cases, where promised contracts have yet to be signed. Housing Associations were among the organisations which fell for the idea that they could earn money from the WP (although their tenants might think it was none of their business) but they are now finding that they are getting no referrals. An angry article on the Guardian's website reports that, "One housing association, Harvest Housing, was hoping for a small amount of work from A4E. But guess what? They got nothing and have chosen a different path." The writer, John Little, is less than complimentary about Emma Harrison and A4e. Patrick Butler, a regular Guardian columnist, writes on two reports by the voluntary sector and asks, "What is going wrong? Some primes claim they haven't been referred any "hard-to-reach" clients by jobcentres. It is said high numbers of appeals against work capability assessment tests have blocked the flow of these clients into the system. Others believe primes, overwhelmed by higher than expected numbers of jobless clients coming on to the books, are simply 'parking' vulnerable jobseekers and focusing solely on clients who are 'job ready' and easy to place." Butler cites the Social Market Foundation's concerns, back in August, that the WP was "at risk of financial collapse" and suggests that the most vulnerable are being pushed to the back of the queue.

The magical Work Programme

2011-10-06T05:20:00.000-07:00

The unemployed have received the sort of publicity that's normal at party conference time. Particularly for the Conservatives they serve two purposes; they epitomise what's wrong with the country, and show how tough and effective the government intends to be. It's all nonsense, of course. An article on Left Foot Forward shows how it's all "recycled rhetoric". And the Guardian's cartoonist, Steve Bell, showed his opinion with a cartoon called Absence of Work. (It's a parody of a painting by Ford Madox Brown called Work, which can be seen here.) The cartoon on line has attracted well over 300 comments.

The solution, of course, is the Work Programme, which is being touted as "revolutionary". Grayling even called it a giant "employment dating sevice". But both the government and the providers must be nervous (not to mention the clients). There's no sign of a leap in the number of jobs available, and without job vacancies there can be no results and no profits. The government has staked everything on this model of contracting - payment by results - and will not want to row back on that. Another problem is highlighted in an article on People Management. People working for the providers could be expected to reshuffle to another provider if their employer loses out on the contract in that area. But more than half of those made redundant by the process have decided to get out of the sector altogether. That loss of experienced staff can only lead to a lack of appropriately qualified people advising clients.

Still, right-wing politicians and their friends in the media continue to believe that if you get tougher on the unemployed and reduce the minimum wage you will, magically, get them to work.

More on that £300k contract

2011-09-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

Private Eye has pointed out that the £300k contract for A4e is about more than just investigating the effectiveness of SIBs. It's "to design the kind of contracts for which it will itself bid". The government is "putting its main welfare contractor in charge of designing welfare contracts". The Eye likens this to the PFI shambles. The contract documents can be found on the Contracts Finder website. They include A4e's proposal, and there are some interesting bits in that. "We were pioneers in implementing PBR (payment by results) contracts to deliver employment outcomes in Israel, and used what we learnt to influence UK government thinking in the development of both the flexible New Deal and the Work Programme." (That was the Israel contract which was so controversial because the British government was supposed to be against involvement in the occupied territories but helped A4e get the business.) The document goes on to boast about their " experience and expertise acquired over many years" and their investment in "specialist expertise to support whole-family based intervention at local level, through Families Unlimited." Other documentation shows that A4e will be involved in "knowledge transfer", and they will “organise a seminar to discuss lessons learnt with lead officials in Central Government” and prepare a “how-to guide to be used by future commissioners". Could a company get closer to government than that? Worth being excluded from the ESF contracts, perhaps. They will probably, though not certainly, be excluded from bidding on the 4 contracts they are currently helping to design, in Birmingham, Leicestershire, Hammersmith and Westminster, but when it's rolled out, it will all be up for grabs.

Meanwhile Roy Newey has been at a "Global Skills Summit" in India, where "A4e India has been working closely with the Government of India for delivering globally benchmarked skills for the bottom of pyramid clients on a pan-India basis. A4e India aims to create a Credible, collaborative, competency based and transparent skills training system with the government, private and third sector organisation partnerships." Also taking part was "Rt. Hon. David Blunkett, Member of Parliament, UK and A4e advisor".

A £300k contract

2011-09-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

We mentioned an A4e company, "A4e Insight", first in November 2009. This "research and consultancy arm" of A4e had provided consultancy on two projects, money guidance and "train to gain", in which it had a large financial interest. In February 2010 we wrote about another Insight consultancy project in which it had provided "due diligence" research on a competitor training and skills company. This curious task of selling consultancy on things in which you have, or may soon have, a vested interest continued when, in February this year, A4e was named as a mentor to start-up public sector mutuals. Now we have a report of another contract for A4e Insight. It's getting £300,000 from the Office for Civil Society to investigate the effectiveness of social impact bonds in four pilot areas. (See the Third Sector website)

This is Big Society stuff, the OCS first describing the project in August this year. We were told then that "The OCS is not funding the projects, but has made up to £300,000 available to offer technical support to the councils in order to design the new tender documents." Is this the same £300k going to A4e? Mark Lovell has written enthusiastically about SIBs. Does this compromise the objectivity of the research?

More stuff in more places

2011-09-23T14:24:00.000-07:00

A "national celebration of enterprise" has been held in Sheffield, with Peter Jones of "Dragons' Den" as the chief attraction. It's a big annual event apparently. There were government ministers there and - you guessed it - A4e's Emma Harrison, who "was introduced by Sheffield MP David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary". She "told the audience about her schooldays as 'the naughty girl' who failed her A-levels She set an ambition to become the world’s largest organisation that improves people’s lives with a business plan focusing on scope and geography – or 'more stuff in more places'. This year, her company is set to turn over £250m." (Yorkshire Post) I'm sure it was inspiring.

Most of the Work Programme prime contractors have, in the past, been content to let A4e do all the publicity-seeking. But it's a competitive business, and some of them are now honing their own PR. Ingeus (Australian) isn't shy. And now we have Maximus (American) putting out PR stuff about how they got the best results in Flexible New Deal. They were "top-ranked provider" - but nowhere in the piece are there any figures. I suspect that the figures for FND were so bad all round that no one wants to boast about them.

Emma Harrison once said that she had wanted to convert A4e into a mutual organisation but had found that the obstacles were too great. Perhaps she should talk to the people from Prospects, which has been doing welfare-to-work and similar stuff for 16 years and now has a WP contract. It started out as a company limited by guarantee (no shareholders) and has now turned itself into an employee-owned mutual.

In the run-up to the WP contracts, CDG was arguing, and organising conferences, for an army of volunteers to mentor the unemployed. It's now a sub-contractor of Maximus in West London, and is advertising for a "volunteer co-ordinator". It will be interesting to see how volunteers will be enticed to help make profits for business.

No news, good news and questions

2011-09-21T01:37:00.000-07:00

It's all quiet at the moment. As always, a subject is in the news for a while then drops out as if it had never been. G4S is advertising for an ESF Project Manager for the new contracts and has published its plans for the different regions. They don't seem to include Families Unlimited. Meanwhile the Working Families Everywhere website carries news, dated 13 September, of the Advisory Board meeting on 6 September, and promises to publish the minutes of the meeting when they're available. Should be interesting. But are we to assume that Emma Harrison's pet project will go ahead even when the ESF contracts are awarded? Will it just be volunteers, the paid people having been sacked or sent over to the contractors; and where will those volunteers stand in relation to the contractors?

A4e's Roy Newey has been getting excited about business prospects in Saudi Arabia and Latvia. But back in Britain the Radio 4 "Report" on the Work Programme brought out the fact that we can have no figures and no real idea of what's going on. It seems that the contractors are being deluged with clients and don't have time to do anything constructive with them. But they can still earn money. Some of those clients will get jobs - what Chris Grayling called the dead weight figure - owing nothing whatever to the private companies, but those companies will still get the payment.

Feedback wanted

2011-09-18T23:23:00.000-07:00

Perhaps my regular readers would care to check out my new website, Getting a job. I've put a link to it on the right as well. Let me know (politely, please) what I've missed out or got wrong, or whether it's a complete waste of time. You can comment through the contact form on the site or here.

"The Report" on the Work Programme

2011-09-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

Radio 4's "The Report" tonight on the Work Programme had a straightforward thesis: it is unlikely to succeed when it is being delivered by the same private companies which have failed on all previous welfare-to-work schemes.

They homed in on the Pathways to Work programme which failed so dismally for those companies. A4e and Reed, you remember, were interrogated by the Public Accounts Committee on why they had performed so much worse than Jobcentre Plus. Now, A4e's Nigel Lemmon ( Executive Director A4e Welfare) says that they did better in some areas than in others; but the programme pointed out that this was only on their own measures of performance. (Lemmon later on said that all the criticism of A4e was unfair.) Dan Finn, who is a professor of social inclusion, said that JCP did better because they had been doing the work for years - er, yes - and because they were in competition with the private sector. (No evidence was given for this, because there is no evidence.)

Then we got Hayley Taylor. But what she said was actually true; people are not realistic and the government has no comprehension of people's lives. A report from the DWP says that half the people on benefits are not looking for work. I haven't seen the report, so I don't know what that figure includes. There was an interview with Colin in Leeds, a graphics designer unemployed for 3 years, who described the poor facilities and lowest-common-denominator approach he has experienced on New Deal and FND. Then Hayley Taylor openly criticised her old employer, A4e, for the first time. She knew it was hopeless when she was faced with an 18-year-old who didn't want to work and a redundant 55-year-old who was desperate for a job and was expected to deliver the same lesson to them in the same class. The impression was given that this was the reason she left A4e, whereas she seems to have left to star in her own show. Anyway, the programme pointed out that much of the criticism they had heard was about A4e, which seemed to have an unenviable reputation. Yet it got the second-largest share of the WP contracts. We heard from Martin who is with A4e for the second time; he was shattered to hear them telling him that his CV was no good, when it had been done by the same A4e people the first time around. He said he felt he was serving a prison sentence.

The presenter said that they had spoken to numerous people on the WP who feel that they are being ignored because there are too many people on the programme. They also complained about assumptions that every client was illiterate, innumerate and stupid. One commentator said that the big companies had all bid for the WP because that was all there was, and they all assumed that the government will have to step in and renegotiate when it goes wrong. Chris Grayling said that won't happen. The CE of the WISE Group complained that they had lost out on the contracts and had to lay off 40% of their staff. The presenter then said that they had a confidential document which shows that Ingeus offered a 60% discount for part of the contract, and they were not the only providers which had done this. Grayling denied that the government was putting price before quality. It was pointed out that only half the promised 40% of the work went to small companies and voluntary sector, and there were fears that the primes would cherry-pick the easiest customers and pass the hardest on to their sub-contractors. Finally, and significantly, the presenter said that everyone they had spbout oken to in their research wanted a job. All in all, this was a worthy attempt to present a serious programme about the Work Programme.

Here's the document about A4e's "Families Unlimited" project to get sub-contracts for the new workless families contracts. There's an American organisation with the same name. Perhaps they didn't know.

I'm thinking of setting up a website with practical advice for the unemployed; jobsearch, application forms, CVs, interviews etc. What do you think?

Business as usual

2011-09-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

Anyone who thought that A4e's embarrassment over the workless families contracts would prove a turning point in the company's fortunes is probably guilty of wishful thinking. It's business as usual. Roy Newey is in India with a trade delegation of training organisations, including some FE colleges, and he is quoted as saying, "eastern India provides exciting opportunities to further strengthen India-UK cooperation in skills and education sector." Mark Lovell has been in the US. I suspect that Emma Harrison will not be giving interviews for a while; but there's a piece in the Sun, (dated 1 September) which is straightforward PR for her; and the Sun, sadly, has a bigger circulation than the Guardian. And now the BBC is running an item about research into "problem families" which reminds us that Cameron "appointed Emma Harrison as a 'family champion' to lead a drive to get workless families back into employment" with not even a nod to the Guardian revelations. We won't get to know whether Harrison's cosy relationship with MPs has been damaged, but it won't affect the company's ability to win contracts in the future.

The Financial Times previews the Radio 4 programme on the Work Programme (Thursday 15 September, 8.00 pm). Chris Grayling denies that there will be any renegotiation of the contracts, although "providers now say privately that they intend to make cost savings if they are unable to meet targets, raising the spectre that very little will be spent on helping those going through the scheme." And with the sort of irony which leaves one shaking one's head in disbelief, the programme quotes Hayley Taylor as saying that the WP is "crude and often ineffective". " “Grouping people together is just not going to work because what someone who has been long term unemployed needs and what someone who has been newly made redundant needs are two totally different things,' she said." If that's the level of insight of the programme, with all those staff and clients whose views were solicited ignored, then it won't be worth listening to.

The Guardian article - questions

2011-09-12T00:53:00.000-07:00

On 7 September Emma Harrison tweeted: "First meet of cross party advisory group who are committed to helping all families become working families. Feisty determined bunch." The following day she said: "So good. I am seeing a real determination at cabinet level to help turn around the lives of 120,000 families by supporting them into work." And at the time she knew that she stood to make money from this.

If you haven't read the Guardian piece please do so. Now, let's assume that at the time Harrison set up her Working Families Everywhere project she didn't know that the government would come up with contracts, handed out to the usual suspects, to do the work. Perhaps she envisaged only that local councils would fund it with community budgets and she could bask in the prestige. But that would surely have been naive. This government's dogma is all about private profit. So perhaps she saw no hindrance to A4e getting in on the action. But in all the publicity she was manoevred into saying that she would not be making any money out of it. There is some confusion in the article. "Harrison told the Guardian she withdrew from bidding when the government announced the first tranche of contracts, worth £200m, in February. She said she had accepted the unpaid role but had been 'shocked' to learn there would be hundreds of millions of pounds in funding. 'Chris Grayling told me he had got £200m. It was a bit of a shock … I thought: 'Oh crikey, that makes me feel a bit awkward. We will have to withdraw (from the bidding).'" How could A4e have already bid before the contracts were announced? What had they bid for? Am I missing something?

But there was a way out of this dilemma, a way to make money. Set up something under a different name and go for sub-contracts. Not as lucrative, but better than nothing. The "partnership" with the "former civil servant who until this year was running the Department for Education's 'support services for families with multiple needs'" will not surprise those who follow the revolving door of business, civil servants and politicians in this government's administration. And the DWP is right, there is no legal impediment to this arrangement. But it could be a PR disaster. Cameron may well want to distance himself from Harrison, and the "advisory group" could decide that they've been conned. As for the families who are supposed to be the beneficiaries - well, they're irrelevant.

Stop press - "utterly unacceptable"

2011-09-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

A report in the Guardian today is a must-read for anyone interested in A4e.

"Emma Harrison set up firm to pitch for government cash on project she devised: The PM's 'families champion' helped to design job programme for troubled households for which her company has now bid" is the headline. It shows that Harrison, having said that A4e could not bid for the ESF contracts for helping workless families because it would be a conflict of interest, has set up a firm called "Families Unlimited", pitching itself as a potential sub-contractor for the work.

I await press (and your) comments on this - but read it!

The Work Programme proceeds

2011-09-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

The publicity surrounding Emma Harrison and her project is over, and attention turns back to the Work Programme. A4e continues to generate PR for itself, helped by the government. The Oxford Mail published a touching story about Chris Grayling's visit to A4e in Oxford and how he heard how "Furniture maker Shane Clarke got a new job four hours after visiting a 'giant employment dating service' in Oxford." The article details several other people who found work quickly; but the manager at Oxford wouldn't give figures for just how many people had found jobs since June, because that was "commercially sensitive". And the government doesn't have to give those figures until next year. It's not all plain sailing. In Runcorn and Widnes, where the WP is run by Ingeus and A4e, there have been delays caused by "data security issues" with A4e and a higher number of starts than expected. The article concludes with the statement that "So far 31 jobseekers have been seen (by A4e) but only 22% are considered ready for the workplace." This notion of "job-ready" appears to be common to all the providers, and up to a point it's sensible. But it does brand a huge number of people as not job-ready without detailing why.

Much has been made of the position of the voluntary sector (or Third Sector as some organisations prefer to be known) in the WP. Their involvement was guaranteed. Many were not enthusiastic, but needed the funding that sub-contracts could give them, and didn't want to see their work taken over by someone else. Now, various groups are feeling let down, with the work not materialising. One charity, Crisis, is particularly unhappy. Its Welfare Network Manager writes that "The reality of the Work Programme is proving to be quite different from what the government promised." He (or she) doesn't specify which prime they've been dealing with, but as well as getting much less than they believe is necessary to support a homeless person into employment but, "In addition, one contracter would only pay us for engaging with a client and job entry (the hard and expensive bit) whilst they would then themselves support the client for the year in work (the easy bit with the highest payment from DWP). There were also requests that we work with their clients using our own funding streams - with no financial reward for doing so."

The BBC is running a programme on Radio 4 next Thursday at 8.00 pm on the Work Programme. There's no indication of what line they're going to take. It can only be anecdotal. Let's hope it's fair.

Puzzles

2011-09-07T01:34:00.000-07:00

I am genuinely puzzled. Emma Harrison's stunt over Working Families Everywhere and family champions completely obscured the fact that contracts are coming out to provide such people with ESF money. And now Kent County Council are advertising for them in what they're calling a pilot until March 2013. The advert uses Harrison's slogans. But it also says that "there may be scope for an extension (after March 2013) depending on new funding becoming available". So when and where do these new DWP contracts apply? Since these people are currently employed by the councils, and would be TUPE'd over to the private contractors, there would seem to be nothing in it for Harrison except publicity; unless the volunteers she's trying to recruit are under her control, and that seems unlikely.

The website Children and Young People Now has tried to get some clarity from Harrison, but without much success. However, the piece does solve the puzzle of why Kent is joining in. Baroness Debbie Stedman-Scott is chief executive of charity Tomorrow's People and member of the Working Families Everywhere advisory board, and her group works in Maidstone, Kent. Helen Dent, chief executive of charity Family Action, repeats her scepticism about the whole scheme.

It would be useful if the journalists who are paid to research these things would sort it out. And pigs might fly.

There are times, just briefly, when I wonder whether I'm being unfair. Perhaps the bosses of A4e are genuinely more interested in helping people than in making money. Mark Lovell tweets: "Don't like profit motive - set up a social business and grow it globally. Compete, impact and force corporates and governments to change". And he's about to start an "Improving People's Lives" Fund. All very worthy. And unrecognisable to many of A4e's staff and clients. Another of his tweets is really interesting: "3,800 staff in our business - 63% female:male staffing ratio, higher outside UK. My 'boss' Emma and I have worked together for 20 yrs". Note the quotes around "boss". It has long been difficult to work out Harrison's real role in the company. There is a board of directors and a chief executive, so how much power does she have? Perhaps it's just useful to have her out there getting the publicity and cosying up to politicians while others get on with running the company.

Libel and an appeal

2011-09-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

If I was still a jobseeker (and thank God I'm not) I would be trying to instigate legal action against the Daily Express for libel. Yesterday they had to tone down a vicious piece about "workshy Britain". Today they've come back with two vile little pieces instead of one. One headed "4m Scrounging Families in Britain" reports the latest figures, with nothing whatever to justify the "scroungers" label. They quote their pals the Taxpayers' Alliance (which is simply a Tory-funded lobby group) on the subject of "over-generous benefits". Not content with that, there's an equally nasty piece headed "400 jobs up for grabs .... but nobody wants them". Apparently it's in Penzance. "A spokesman at the town’s Jobcentre blamed our soft-touch welfare state which has taken away the incentive to find work." This chap is not named, unsurprisingly. There's no analysis of what these vacancies are actually for - how many are not real jobs, for instance, or whether they require skills or experience which no one in the area has. No, it's just another way to traduce the unemployed. Just what is the editor's motive in this maniacal campaign?

I've been contacted by a Radio 4 journalist who is working on a programme about the government’s Work Programme, and wants to hear from people who are currently doing courses run by private providers such as A4E, Ingeus, Reed in Partnership, Seetec etc., or have recently been on FND. She would be interested to hear about the experiences of both clients and current or former staff of all the providers. Her email address is anna.meisel@bbc.co.uk and her telephone number is 07706154283. She assures me that all contacts will be treated in strict confidence.

Not entirely unrelated is a request from me to a few people who have posted comments on this blog in April, May and July this year which I have not published. Doncaster and Nottingham were mentioned. Please get in touch with me via a comment I will NOT publish.

Keep up, Private Eye

2011-09-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

It's good to see that Private Eye is still on A4e's case in the latest edition. But I'm beginning to think that the magazine is following this blog! In a piece entitled "A4E, B for balls" they point out, following Cameron citing Emma Harrison as the answer to all our problems, that A4e's record is far from good. They cite the less-than-brilliant Ofsted reports and the dreadful Pathways results. But the Eye is slipping. They say that Cameron was "wildly overstating Harrison's role" in the Working Families Everywhere scheme, which aims to find jobs for just 500 parents in the three areas, rather than the 120,000 families that Cameron talked about. Like Cameron, the Eye isn't aware of the contracts on the table using ESF money. And they talk about the 5 new contracts A4e has just won to deliver the "New Enterprise Allowance", querying the qualifications of providers like A4e and Avanta to do this when their experience is in dealing with employment rather than self-employment. Well yes, but what about all the other things that A4e do, in health and education?

The Guardian got into trouble for calling A4e a "social enterprise" and had to apologise. But they've done it again, in a comment piece by Merrick Cockell on Tuesday. The vast majority of people don't know the difference, but those who do are concerned that the reality of A4e as a private, profit-making company is being eroded by the ignorance of journalists.

The Work Programme is getting a lot of attention at the moment, with Chris Grayling telling us how it's going to save the country. But there's a surprisingly sympathetic piece in the Sun about the difficulty facing women with children trying to get back into work. There's a rather different attitude in the Express. The newsfeeds this morning led to a piece headlined "Workshy Britain" and starting "Britain's workshy culture was shown in all its glory today after the number of homes where no one is working held at nearly 4 million." Strangely, by late afternoon the link led to a revised article headed "Four million households live just on benefits". The invective has been toned down considerably, although we still read that "The figures will serve to place added pressure on Employment minister Chris Grayling to get Britain's workshy back into employment."

The bandwagon

2011-08-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

Lots of people are leaping aboard the bandwagon of solutions to unemployed trouble-makers, and displaying the usual ignorance, arrogance or naivete. All three are evident in a piece on supplymanagement.com by Rebecca Ellinor, who reports that the DWP believes it has "struck what it calls a ground-breaking commercial deal, with minimum cost to the tax-payer, and says this work is now an exemplar of procurement" with the Work Programme. It describes the speed and efficiency of the process; but neglects to mention that it's a procument process which ignores past failures by providers. Does any commercial enterprise operate like this?

The Financial Times takes a more intelligent stance in a piece by Chris Tighe. It highlights the way in which smaller, especially voluntary, organisations have been squeezed out of the Work Programme.

Then there are Social Impact Bonds. We reported on these some time ago, because A4e's Mark Lovell is very keen on them; and someone who is promoting these was on the Today programme a few days ago. The Cabinet Office describes them thus: "A major trial of an innovative new way to fund intensive help for families blighted by anti-social behaviour, crime, addiction and poor education was announced by Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society today. Social Impact Bonds lets people invest in social projects to address these issues and be paid a return if the projects are successful. Up to £40million could be raised by four Social Impact Bond pilots launched in Hammersmith & Fulham, Westminster, Birmingham and Leicestershire."

The Express, of course, shows its customary thoughtfulness with the headline "War on the Scroungers". It's actually commenting on a report by a think-tank, the IPPR, which has been out for some. And it's not quite what the Express portrays it as. The report says that those who have been unemployed for a year should have to take minimum-wage jobs; but these would be created by the government. And that's an admission that the jobs are not there unless the government creates them. The same IPPR report gets a very different treatment in the Telegraph, which focusses on the prediction that "around 100,000 people over 50 who lost their jobs at the start of Britain's economic crisis are now at risk of being forced to retire earlier than they planned. That will leave them living in retirement with a lower pension than they had hoped for."

It's left to the Guardian to strike a cynical note, with Alex Clark's piece inspired by Emma Harrison's publicity drive on family champions: "Be careful how you preach the benefits of the work ethic". It's a thoughtful critique of Harrison and her admirers, and, as always, the comments posted under the article are well worth reading.

The same can't be said for a piece in the Sheffield Telegraph, which is always sycophantic towards Harrison and A4e. Its article, "It’s not because they don’t want a job - it’s that they haven’t got a clue what to do next", is pure PR, and repeats the stuff she has said in her radio interviews.

I expect this bandwagon to roll on for a while yet.

Today Programme interview

2011-08-25T00:54:00.000-07:00

You're having your breakfast calmly when up pops Emma Harrison. There was a disgraceful interview on the Today programme this morning, Justin Webb completely without research or knowledge and pretty much fawning on the woman. The clichés were all there. "Poking" came up again. When Webb seemed about to murmur a challenge she talked over him. Webb said it was a "fantastic idea" but what happens when some members of families don't co-operate? She didn't tackle that, unsurprisingly, just talked about the benefits of working with whole families rather than individuals. She said that she had a cross-party parliamentary group advising her, and that all of them were going to be told that they had to volunteer to do help. Webb said she was a persuasive person - she said she was heading up a campaign.

It was as bad as it gets. Lovely free publicity. When are we going to get real journalism backed by real research?

Guardian piece by John Harris

2011-08-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

There's a comment piece in the Guardian by John Harris which will appeal to many of our readers. Of interest, too, are the comments which follow it, showing how the public is generally unsympathetic unless they have personal experience.

We can see clearly the confusion in the government's thinking over the unemployed, particularly over Mandatory Work Activity. On the one hand, it is supposed to help people back into the discipline of work and give them experience useful in securing a job. On the other hand, it is ensuring that people don't get benefits without having to work for them. Is this work experience or community service?

The piece also highlights the inevitability of employer exploitation. With a pool of free labour to draw on, some employers who want only unskilled labour will happily cut their wage bill even further.

Questions and doubts

2011-08-22T03:50:00.000-07:00

The papers are mostly cynical this morning about Emma Harrison's scheme, going with the "gimmick" line. The Yorkshire Post reports this but is slightly confused, saying that the initiative "will be" piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Westminster (it's already up an running in at least two of those areas). They have a quote from Harrison: “The thought scares a lot of politicians [who are asked to take part] because they don’t know how to do it but I have said ‘I’ll show you once and for all how this is done’. And they are very enthusiastic.” But the headline on the article is "Middle class in Hull urged to ‘adopt’ a jobless family". The only person from the Hull City Council they could find to comment was the deputy leader of the Lib Dems, who "cautiously" welcomed the initiative.

The next time anyone interviews Emma Harrison there are three questions I would like them to ask her:

Has A4e bid for the contracts the DWP is putting out, to use European Social Fund money to pay private companies to run the same scheme that you're promoting? Are you trying to pre-empt these contracts by getting your scheme up and running first?
You have argued in the past for "super-contracts" in which a private company would run all the services in a local authority area. Is this scheme a step on the way to that?
Given your company's record of missing targets by some distance in previous welfare-to-work contracts, why do you believe you will be any more successful with this?

There's a report out today by the Social Market Foundation, claiming that the Work Programme is at risk of financial collapse. They use the performance of the providers in Flexible New Deal to forecast that the DWP's expectations for the WP are over-optimistic. If the providers can't meet the minimum targets they will lose the contracts. They seem to be arguing for a better deal for the providers. But in an interview on the Today programme this morning Chris Grayling claimed that the WP was different from FND because providers have much greater freedom "to do what works". (This is disingenuous. They had the freedom under FND, and indeed under New Deal, to pay for such things as skills training.) Grayling said that the providers knew what they were doing when they bid for the contracts, and that there will be no re-negotiation. One interesting point was his statement that the minimum performance standard must be greater than the "dead weight" figure, those who would be expected to get jobs without any input from contractors.

That interview

2011-08-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, I wasted half an hour of my life listening to the Radio 5 Live interview [see a comment on the previous post for the link]. I agree with those who commented on it after my previous post.

Anita Anand was the right person to do the interview; Harrison has been on The Daily Politics twice so she knows what to ask. Anand was as sceptical as she could be without being downright hostile. The 19-year-old Tottenham man interviewing other young people was a good idea; most of them put the trouble down to the cuts rather than to "broken families". It was such a shame that, at the end of the piece, Harrison was allowed to interrupt and talk over the lad when he raised the point that, although she came across as having good intentions, her people didn't know how his communities lived, and again when he challenged her on "broken families" and being non-political.

Harrison insisted several times to Anand that she was "non-political". It was pointed out that she had dealt with politicians of both governments and she was asked if she had seen a difference. Yes, Brown's government was limited by what his people thought that they could do in practice. Now, she said, all ministers and advisers are going to take on a family. Who came up with the figure of 120,000 workless families? Government, she insisted, and then tried to bring it back to the personal. Anand queried why she was distancing herself from the politics of it. Again, Harrison said she was non-political and just improves people's lives around the world. How? The word "poking" was used three times. It's what happens to families when a lot of different agencies are working with them. Pushed by Anand on the how, Harrison told of the family she had spent an hour and a half with then suggested they go and help a charity down the road. This had been the start of an amazing transformation.

Anand was sceptical to the point of sarcasm, bringing it back to how exactly she, Anand, or someone like her, could get someone a job. There was a silly, but revealing, exchange in which Harrison wanted to show that there are jobs at the BBC (there aren't) and then suggested going into the shop down the road. It wasn't exactly convincing. anand turned to the money. Was harrison doing this for free. He company had made £200 million pounds. That was turnover, said Harrison, not profit, and local authorities were employing the family champions. Then we got the attempt by the young Tottenham man to question her, which she didn't allow. She said that she thought that people who had wrecked their communities should have to put it right.

Of the two text messages I heard quoted at the end of the piece (perhaps there were more at the end of the programme) one criticised Anand's negativity, the other said that Harrison was living in cloud-cuckoo land. I think this demonstrates the difficulty for TV and radio journalists. They are not allowed to go on the attack (unless they're called Andrew Neil) and so their subjects get away with it. Print journalists could do so much better, but don't bother.

The press coverage today is majoring on the fact that the scheme has been attacked as "gimmicky" and that "there appeared to be some confusion in Whitehall over the plan with employment minister Chris Grayling - who was also named among the volunteers - saying that he was not involved. 'I was rather surprised when I read this one. It was news to me that I was going to be in there,' he told Sky News." Still, Tim Loughton MP, a minister in the Department for Education, is signed up. And, gimmicky or not, it's great publicity.

PS: Anita Anand returned to the subject of family champions on The Westminster Hour, but the Tory MP wouldn't actually endorse the idea.

A genius for publicity

2011-08-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

I missed it; Emma Harrison was on Radio 5 Live this morning. "This week, David Cameron's said he's going to fastrack the scheme to help 120,000 'broken families'. Double Take speaks to Emma Harrison who runs the project." And it's not available on iplayer. But the publicity machine rolls on. According to a papers review on BBC News 24, Harrison is proposing that government ministers each take on the mentoring of a "troubled family". I can't find the newspaper article, but the female journalist who brought it up (I didn't catch her name) described Harrison as "inspirational". She certainly has a genius for keeping her name in the public eye - and for making contacts with government. And no one says, "Hang on a minute. Why have the results been so bad on the contracts you've had?"

Corrections, Private Eye and complaints

2011-08-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

The poor old Guardian got it wrong the other day in describing A4e as a "social enterprise" and the twittersphere was quick to point it out - as was the Social Enterprise Mark company. Today the Guardian has issued a correction: 'A panel that accompanied a report on the England riots, profiling Emma Harrison, chairman of A4E (Action for Employment), incorrectly referred to A4E as a "social enterprise". A4E describes itself as a "social purpose" company. The Social Enterprise Mark company asks us to make clear that the government defines social enterprises as "businesses with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community."'

Private Eye has another go at A4e in its latest edition. It's good to see the Eye catching up with this blog in looking at its Ofsted results and pointing out that it has never got a rating better than "satisfactory". They also look at the unsatisfactory results of "Train to Gain", another of A4e's contracts, and at the Pathways results - also described as unsatisfactory. Why then, asks the Eye, "does the government put so much faith in busted benefit-busters like A4e?" Good question. But we've pointed out before that the procurement process forbids taking into account previous performance. That would, anyway, exclude nearly all the contractors. And for the Work Programme only the biggest companies could bid; that was part of the design of the contracts.

I came across a post on the Consumer Action Group website in which a client currently with A4e complains long and loud about the "adviser" who drew up her CV (I just assume the poster is female, with no evidence!). She describes it as "illiterate and untruthful". The poster is clearly educated and articulate, so why would the "adviser" insist on writing the CV of a client who was better able to do it than him? A comment under the piece says that at Working Links the adviser let the client write her own CV but told her not to use the word "I". This seems to be the fashion now, at least according to these providers, and I don't know why. Your CV is your description of yourself; write it in the first person. That's how I wrote mine and it got me several jobs. However, this problem of advisers with much worse language skills than their clients has always been there, and it's becoming more acute as more people are being forced out of professional jobs. Expect more howls of anger.

More income, and shifting the focus

2011-08-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

The government's faith in private profit for curing society's ills is limitless, so there's more money for A4e and the others. We were told yesterday that from next March everybody coming out of prison will be met "at the prison gates" by Work Programme providers who will subject them to “ a tough process so that they find work and they stay on the straight and narrow” (reports Total Politics) This is daft on at least two counts. They certainly won't be met at the prison gates. The provider will probably arrange an interview in the jail before the offender's release. And note the assumption that putting them on the WP guarantees them a job. Most of the providers are operating a triage system; some clients need virtually no help to get a job; some need quite a bit of input and support; and a third group are pretty hopeless. Which category will the ex-cons be put into?

But that's not the only new source of income for A4e. Quietly, something called the New Enterprise Allowance has been rolled out whereby the unemployed can be financed to start up their own businesses. In 36 districts various organisations will be paid to run this scheme. A4e has secured the contracts for 5 of them. This fits well with Mark Lovell's recent stress on self-employment as the solution to lack of jobs.

Maybe it's been decided that it's time to take the spotlight off Emma Harrison and show that the company is not a one-woman band. The Yorkshire Post has published an interview with Mark Lovell. He talks about the history of the company and his part in it. No doubt the interviewer, Lizzie Murphy, thought she was being hard-hitting in raising "issues" like the fraud investigation and the lost laptop. She fails, however, to raise the real issue, the consistent failure to meet targets.

David Cameron's solution - Emma Harrison

2011-08-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

Can Emma Harrison cure our society's ills? Of course not. It's arguable that A4e is a symptom rather than the cure. But she has obviously made a great impression on David Cameron; we had the astonishing spectacle yesterday of the Prime Minister citing Harrison's "family champions" scheme as the answer to the problems thrown up by the riots.

The press this morning shows its usual lack of understanding and research (with the honourable exception of the Guardian). The Mail says: "Aides said Mr Cameron would order ministers to help his family champion, social entrepreneur Emma Harrison, who was appointed last year. Her plans will see police, social workers and jobcentres work together." Somewhat inaccurate.

The Telegraph simply reports what Cameron said without comment.

Only the Guardian is sceptical, with three articles. The first draws attention to the fact that funding for various family intervention projects has been cut. This is interesting because most of us were not aware that such projects existed; Harrison gave the impression that she had invented the concept (and Cameron appeared to believe her). The authors understand the current situation: " While the government said it would make available £200m from the European Social Fund to help fund the target, the rest would come from the early intervention grant, which is to be cut by 11% by next year and has funding for Sure Start, teenage pregnancy and youth centres to meet. Labour said Sure Start had been cut by 20%. A government source acknowledged that using these resources to fund Cameron's target could vary. They said: "It is for local authorities and their partners, including the voluntary sector, to decide how much they wish to prioritise on families with multiple problems in their area." It's a pity that they don't pick up on the fact that this ESF money is going to private companies bidding for contracts.

The second piece (by different writers) looks at the history of family intervention projects and talks to Trevor Moores, the recently retired head of child services in Westminster council (one of Harrison's pilot areas). He said that the problems were more complex than Cameron and Harrison make out. The piece then quotes Rhian Beynon of the charity Family Action who, as we have noted before, is highly sceptical of Harriosn's simplistic approach, and Katherine Rake, chief executive of the Family & Parenting Institute, who is similarly sceptical. Finally there's a brief cut-and-paste piece about Emma Harrison and the beginnings of her Working Families Everywhere programme. It says, "She will be paid by results and so aims to save the government money." This is confusing, but it highlights the confusion in Cameron's thinking. Harrison's scheme, and the ESF contracts she no doubt hopes to get, are about getting people into work, and this is the only criterion on which you could have "payment by results". As we noted yesterday, Cameron seems to equate "unemployed" with "anti-social".

Nobody has asked why WFE should be suucessful when A4e and other companies have already been paid many millions of pounds to get these people into work and failed.

It's all great publicity for Emma Harrison and A4e. But it will put them under greater scrutiny than ever before.

This time it's really A4e and the riots

2011-08-15T03:26:00.000-07:00

A report in the Telegraph - "UK and London riots: David Cameron vows to 'turn around' 125,000 troubled families by 2015". Yes, Cameron's response to the riots is a promise "to put 'rocket boosters' on a programme being developed by Emma Harrison, founder of the work programme contractor A4e, to tackle anti-social families." Brilliant. We thought that Harrison's scheme was about workless families, so presumably "workless" equals "anti-social". And we thought that the funding for this was coming from the European Social Fund and private companies have had to bid for the contracts. Perhaps Cameron doesn't know that. Or perhaps he means to put A4e in charge of another scheme on top of that. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

A4e and the riots (well, sort of)

2011-08-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

It's quiet in August; there are very few official meetings because all those who can afford to have gone on holiday. So there's nothing much to report, except to highlight this piece from the Islington Tribune. "A unique community marshalling scheme at Finsbury Park could become a blueprint for trouble-spots in the capital which are vulnerable to riots, it emerged this week." 20 guys patrol the area around Finsbury Park station in an initiative "jointly organised by Finsbury Park Business Forum and employment agency A4e." This scheme was publicised last year on the finsburyparkpeople website where we were told that "The new scheme will help not only travellers at the station, but also the unemployed men and women who will take on the marshalling jobs. Their wages will be paid by the Job Centre and employment service A4e." Something a bit odd there, perhaps? The writer doesn't understand work placements? The piece was later updated with a comment from the Chairman of the Business Forum: "The purpose ........ is for the unemployed to gain experience, skills and training in-order to enhance their employability. Our aim is to foster an environment that encourages mutual respect, self-development, and partnership, sense of self-worth, training and thereafter, employment for our Marshals." All very nice. But I wonder how many people realise that these marshals are not getting a wage. And I wonder how many of them feel deeply patronised by the implication that because they're unemployed they need to develop all those qualities, not having them already.

Some people deeply hate the Work Programme, just as they hated the various schemes which preceded it, whoever the providers are. I understand that. But there are some people who continue to claim that it's illegal, and will go on doing so whatever the government says. Some maintain that you can refuse to engage with the WP provided you write saying you believe i'ts illegal or something (whilst publishing disclaimers about encouraging people to do so.) Has anyone actually tested this yet? I've seen no evidence. And I would be very surprised. If you want to make a principled stand, do it in the knowledge that you're going to lose your benefits.

Explaining WFE

2011-08-04T04:21:00.000-07:00

Getting hard information about Emma Harrison's project Working Families Everywhere has been difficult. Our correspondent in Hull, one of the pilot areas, put in a Freedom of Information request to the Council but got a very uninformative reply. To a question about how participating families were selected, the reply was that it was "through a structured process of referral". According to a blog by Anna Gaunt (who is accompanying Ms Harrison) they were "meeting with families who had expressed an interest in having support on the road to employment." There's a strong clue, however, as to what's going on in a piece on the Working Families Everywhere website. It's in the form of a Q & A with John Bell, Policy Editor of ESF Works. What's that? It "exists to share the stories of the people, practice and policy that the European Social Fund in England supports." And its website has an interesting piece about the roll-out of Community Budgets. It explains that there have been 16 pilot schemes "tackling social problems around families with complex needs" and that there are 4 new pilots to develop this. "In response to this, the DWP invited companies on the Employment Related Support Services Framework to tender for ESF funding to work with families with multiple problems, helping them overcome these and break the cycle of intergenerational worklessness." It goes on: "Payment will be made mainly by results, on progress measures and job outcomes which move family members nearer to and into work and put families on the road to recovery. Bids must be made by 30th August, and a key element in their evaluation will be how well bidders have integrated partnership working with local authorities into their proposals." So that explains everything. Another big contract in the offing.

In the WFE piece Harrison again talks about "hidden jobs". The phrase was also used by a person from Working Links in a news item on BBC radio recently, talking about the Work Programme in Glasgow. It appears to mean that the providers forge relationships with employers and persuade them to take people on.

You'll be pleased to know that Emma Harrison is writing her autobiography.

What went wrong with FND

2011-08-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

An interesting evaluation of Flexible New Deal has been published by the Policy Studies Institute. (The link to the full report doesn't work.) It doesn't name providers, which is a shame. However, some of its findings are:

For the 18-24 year old group, it was less effective than New Deal.
It often didn't live up to the expectation that support would be individually tailored and personalised.
There was little innovation in the design of the service provided and "greater flexibility also appeared to have led to differences in the amount of support received (eg, variation in access to training and in-work support, and different rules on the payment of travel expenses)."
Some providers didn't meet the requirement that they should see clients once a fortnight and couldn't find "work-related activity" for all clients.
Finally, "The qualitative research identified several issues with regards to the effects and administration of sanctions, including poor timing and inconsistency of messages between Jobcentre Plus and providers, and staff believing long-term claimants were less likely to change their behaviour when faced with the prospect of losing money." I'd have to read the full report to be sure what that means, especially that last bit.

What's worrying is that the Work Programme is similar to FND in many respects.

Lying with statistics, and reforming welfare

2011-07-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

SICK BENEFITS: 75% ARE FAKING. Yes, that's the good old Express's headline. Call it vicious and disgusting and the owner, porn king Richard Desmond, would no doubt take it as a compliment. For the government's view of the figures, see the DWP website. Their figures show 39% of claimants were found "fit for work" and another 36% stopped claiming. For a very different take on this, see Left Foot Forward . Now, this is a complex subject with a long history, an it's not really relevant to this blog. What IS relevant is that a lot of people are now going to be forced onto the Work Programme, into the hands of providers who proved useless in getting such people into work on the Pathways programme.

I've just been listening to an interesting piece on Newsnight. James Purnell, who played his part in the Labour government's outsourcing of welfare-to-work, spoke about how Labour voters no longer back the welfare state. He talked to the pollster Peter Kellner, who said that people think it should be a contributory system, benefits in return for contributions, but they now see it not working that way. John Cruddas, another Labour MP, said that the old covenant had broken down. Purnell put forward his view that there should be a guarantee of a government-provided, minimum wage job for everyone out of work for a year, along with an obligation to take it. You would get a higher pension if you'd paid in all your life. In the studio he faced a Tory MP who talked nonsense, and a woman from a think tank who raised some questions. Essentially, Purnell said we should scrap the current system and go back to the drawing board, cutting out most of the minor benefits. The welfare state should be there to protect people. I would have liked to raised some questions about the role of the private sector.

Emma on how to get a job - and India

2011-07-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

There was a Youth Summit in Wirral, the constituency of Esther McVey MP (Con), and Emma Harrison spoke on how to get a job. The MP has obligingly posted this on her website. It's 6 minutes long, and I've listened to it so you don't have to. She tells the kids who are coming up to leaving school that they should ask themselves how they'd like to be described by, say, a journalist in 10 years time. It's the "have a dream" thing. She says that they should tell people what they want to do, and then they will be helped. She then has three practical tips. First, at interview go in with a smile, stand out. Second, always get someone who knows what they're doing to check your CV. And third, if you can't get a job, create your own job, set up a small business. She gets in the slogan: "My dream is to improve people's lives."

I suppose in 6 minutes it would be difficult to be any more helpful. But it's all a bit random. It's one thing to have a goal, but taking even the first step towards it is impossible for so many youngsters now. And why do Ms Harrison and A4e go on about CVs so much when for most jobs you don't need one? Better to teach people how to fill in an application form properly.

A4e is "improving people's lives" with big new business in India. Roy Newey has said today that he has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with an Indian company called Centum Learning "to train 120 million people". An MoU is not a contract, but it's the precursor to a contract. It will be interesting to see how profitable this will be.

WFE

2011-07-22T05:33:00.000-07:00

There's a new website for Working Families Everywhere.

Despite the usual hype, this project does not appear to be going to plan. Only 3 local authorities signed up, and 2 of those have not recruited new people but instead redeployed existing staff. Westminster may not even have got that far yet. If the participating authorities think that it works to have one person as the "key worker" for families which need support, there is no reason for them to continue to link to Ms Harrison's project. Are there really going to be contracts in this for A4e, or is it more about publicity for Emma Harrison? The site certainly appears to be a publicity vehicle for her. "We’ve pledged to help 100,000 families get back to work," she says, in the next five years. The words "to help" are crucial here. But her confidence that "this first stage of recruitment will allow us to start building an innovative network of Champions committed to making a real difference" is probably misplaced.

Advice from Hayley

2011-07-21T15:34:00.000-07:00

Nothing to do with A4e (except that Hayley Taylor used to work for them). But I saw this on her blog, and was concerned about the quality of the advice she was giving. Someone asked:

"Hello Hayley, I am 20 years of age and have been on JSA for about a year and a half on and of. In march i came to the end of the future job fund scheme where i was working in a primary school as a admin assistant. Now im back on JSA but im doing voluntry work in a hospital as a admin assistant, As im classed as internal i applied for a administrator position which is a doctor’s secretary and i have a interview tuesday! Which im really excited about but really nervous at the same time. It will be a pannel interview of three people which i know so it wont be so bad. But im just wondering what questions will they ask so i can prepare myself? And any tips you could give me please. Thank you x " [sic]

The answer from Ms Taylor:

"Congratulations, you are living proof that volunteering really does open doors and a world of opportunities, as now you are at interview stage!! It’s impossible for me to be specific with what questions you will be asked during your interview, but I would say that at 20 and without a vast amount of work history, the questions are likely to be more generic. Be sure to have enough copies of your C.V in order to offer one to each member of the panel, be clear on why you would like the position, and have a great answer prepared, smile, show enthusiasm, tell them you are willing and eager to learn, have at least two questions prepared to ask them, and don’t forget to thank them for their time when you leave. I wish you luck, and am sure you will be fantastic. Hayley x"

Now I really do hope the young woman gets (or got) the job. But it won't be on the advice from Ms Taylor. For most admin jobs you are likely to be given a test before the interview, at the computer or on paper, to show whether your English, maths and IT skills are adequate. This candidate would be unlikely to pass unless her poor English in this post is just carelessness which she can put right. You don't need to hand out copies of your CV. They've already got them, photocopied, in front of them. You will look rather foolish if you don't anticipate this. You don't know what questions you're going to be asked, but you do need to gen up on the nature of the business; they are not just going to ask about you, but about what you know, and I would have thought that would particularly apply to a medical secretary post; so do your homework.

It's a bit worrying, really.

Mark Lovell, Chris Grayling

2011-07-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

You may have heard of the Fabian Society. It dates back to 1884 and has always been about advancing democratic socialism. So what's that got to do with A4e? No idea, but they've sponsored an event for the Young Fabians on "Thinkers and Doers", along with Chukka Umunna, the Labour MP. Mark Lovell, who was there, has also been writing on finding work and on his current hobby-horse, banking for the poor. What he says is sensible, but we know that the sub-text is his desire for an A4e bank.

There's been a drip-drip of publicity about the Work Programme in general. Chris Grayling had to answer questions in Parliament on Monday and conformed that, "The Department expects to release statistics on referrals to the Work programme from spring 2012, and on job outcomes lasting three or six months from autumn 2012." So we won't get to know anything about outcomes for more than a year. Meanwhile, some news about another of the providers, Avanta. The Northern Echo carries a story about an induction day with the company on Teesside. The complainant is a graduate and distinctly unimpressed. Her story will be familiar to jobseekers who've had dealings with other providers. The Work Programme is being touted as individually designed provision, but this kind of one-size-fits-all induction is a way of swiftly refuting that.

Interesting debate

2011-07-16T14:56:00.000-07:00

I recommend this article in the Guardian, a "debate" between the the TUC's Brendan Barber and the Tory ideologue Philip Blond. The large number of comments it has attracted are also well worth reading.

More contract opportunities

2011-07-13T04:59:00.000-07:00

There's not a lot happening at the moment, at least publicly. A4e continues to scatter PR material around the internet, inclusing success stories. But, as usual, they don't bother to have these pieces proof-read, leading to amateurish efforts like this one. A piece about a youth summit in the North West had a new description of the boss of A4e - "BBC 1’s Emma Harrison".

Lost in all the furore about News International was the announcement by David Cameron of the privatisation of public services. The full paper is here. The Public Finance website has a report of his speech, and it's clear that the Work programme is being treated as the model for all the flogging-off of services. It's to be payment by results all the way. The latest announcement, which no doubt will interest A4e, is that key probation services are to be put out to tender (see the piece in the Guardian). Working Links has already said that it will be bidding. Mark Lovell was in talks with the Ministry of Justice yesterday.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

2011-07-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

A4e is advertising what looks like a fantastic job - Trainee Strategy & Policy Assistant. You'll need at least a 2:1 degree or a Masters, you'll be mingling with politicians and travelling abroad. An ideal opportunity. But there's something of a puzzle. A4e never gives salary figures but this doesn't mention pay at all. Despite saying, "We will expect you to roll up your sleeves and put a lot into your work. You will be used to that from things you have already achieved at school, university or elsewhere," there's not a whisper of remuneration, and I'm wondering if this is, in fact, an "internship", i.e. an unpaid job, although it doesn't say so directly.

Former A4e employee Hayley Taylor has a new job, a paid one. She "will front Fish4jobs’ regional job fairs, providing face-to-face advice to jobseekers and will host a series of online career workshops hosted by Fish4jobs with practical advice on writing an effective CV and giving a successful interview. Fish4jobs marketing director Sarah EL-Doori says: 'At Fish4jobs we want jobseekers to find the right job to match their skills and experience. Hayley is a fantastic ambassador for us with her practical approach and success rate at helping people find a new role.'"

There's work for A4e in Saudi Arabia. On 2 July Roy Newey tweeted that he was "very excited to get invite from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to design cost operate 5 new job placement centres - this year. Impressed with a4e." Now, lots of British companies make money in Saudi Arabia, so it would perhaps be unfair to single out A4e for criticism here. But when, on the same day, Newey says, "Amazing opportunities for a4e to learn and contribute to global ideas on improving people's lives. An honour to have a seat round the table," you feel that the slogan jars a little. But then he was off to meet the President of Pakistan.

Emma at the LGC

2011-06-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

A4e's Emma Harrison has been one of the plenary speakers at the Local Government Conference in Birmingham. (She's billed as Dr. Emma Harrison - not sure when she got her PhD.) Two tweets about it: "Great presentation by Emma Harrison urging UK to assist 'negative millionaires' in to work" and "Packed hall for this morning's plenary on boosting private sector growth. Dr Emma Harrison of A4E speaking". I wonder what a "negative millionaire" is. No, don't tell me. There's a report of the speech on localgov.co.uk which highlights Harrison's apparent expertise in the area of Local Enterprise Partnerships. She told delegates that if the government turned down a region's application for a LEP, the authorities and local business should go ahead and form one anyway. "The call for direct action by councils and businesses met with a great deal of approval within the audience." The article ends: "Ms Harrison – who is advising the prime minister on back-to-work programmes for the long-term unemployed - urged authorities to support as far as possible low-cost regimes designed to help the unemployed sustain work for charities and small businesses in order to make them ‘work ready’." Now, read that sentence again, slowly. It means that local councils should put money into charities and small businesses so that they can give work placements (not jobs) to the unemployed. Hmm. But this sort of event is all about networking and consolidating Harrison's image as the government's guru.

Mark Lovell has been to meetings in the Cabinet Office and has been invited to a Buckingham Palace garden party. Roy Newey, meanwhile, has been meeting the Chinese premier before setting off for India. It's all go!

Miscellany

2011-06-28T01:24:00.000-07:00

It's not always obvious that you're dealing with A4e.

Take Middlesborough Enterprise Gateway, marketed with the slogans "a fresh start" and "be your own boss". Nowhere on its website will you find A4e mentioned, but that's who is delivering this project. It's been running for over a year.

Then there's a video on the Flixel site, an interview with Dame Kelly Holmes. It's tagged as A4e and education. It's standard motivational stuff, follow your dreams etc. I admit I have a bit of a problem with it. The tiny minority of highly successful people tell us that we can achieve similar success, when the majority, however dedicated, won't.

It's the last Fairy Jobmother programme tonight, thank goodness. Not having watched this series, I don't know how deceptive it is. But we do know that interviews were arranged by Ms Taylor / the producers (see the Builders' Merchants Journal site), and that gives the impression that interviews and jobs are there for the taking. In fact, anyone with a long spell of unemployment on their CV is unlikely to clear even the first hurdle of an interview. Is that made clear?

Remember "Working Families Everywhere"? Only three local authorities signed up for it. Hull is employing 6 of the "family champions", but it seems likely that they are not new appointments but redeployed existing council staff. If this is the case, (and if it's true in Westminster as well) it rather takes the project out of Emma Harrison's hands. The "champions" are accountable to the councils, which can design the jobs.

Among the Best Companies

2011-06-23T01:18:00.000-07:00

There's a curious website called the Best Companies Guide which purports to analyse various factors which make A4e a good place to work (although it seems to come out at only 623 in the Best Companies Index). Nowhere on the site can I find just how many of the 3,388 staff were polled on this, but there's some interesting stuff here. "A4e Superstars [which] is an internal recognition programme", for instance. It's an incentive scheme which enables employees to rack up points which they can use to buy things from "a bespoke A4e rewards catalogue". It's an oddly old-fashioned attitude to management which treats employees in this way. The stuff under "My Team" and "Personal Growth" is equally interesting. One would have no clue from it that people are made redundant every time the contracts change.

There's a new contract in Northern Ireland. "A4e (Action for Employment) has been appointed in the Antrim contract area for the Department’s main adult return to work programme, which aims to assist unemployed and economically inactive people into sustained employment." It's not clear whether the Work Programme extends to Northern Ireland.

The Socialist magazine has a piece about A4e's "partnership with Finsbury Park Business Forum to provide wardens for the local tube and overground train and bus stations. These wardens are supplied by A4e from jobseekers who work in exchange for their benefits. They are doing work that had previously been done by Transport for London (TfL) staff." The writer, Neil Cafferky, says that 800 underground staff have been sacked and the unions are very unhappy about the unemployed being used to replace these jobs.

Engaging with employers - and housing

2011-06-16T04:59:00.000-07:00

An interesting piece in the People Management magazine, which is for HR professionals. CIPD chief executive Jackie Orme wants firms to think about how they can engage with the Work Programme, and she says that "there are solid business reasons to give opportunities to people who have previously been excluded by the labour market." This comes before a "round table" event involving Orme along with Chris Grayling, A4e's Andrew Dutton and a number of large employers. The piece doesn't say who convened this meeting or why, of the providers, only A4e is represented.

If it's such a good thing to employ people who have previously been excluded, one wonders why employers haven't thought of it before. Still, it's got to be a good thing if it results in people getting jobs. But one note of caution; does this mean that providers, in competition with each other, are signing up companies to offer preferential interviews to their clients? If so, how transparent will that be? There are some interesting implications here.

A4e's Jonty Olliff-Cooper has been at another round table, this time with Moat, a "social housing" provider. Now, I'll resist the temptation to rant about the pernicious concept of "social housing"; but the fact remains that around 60% (it may be more by now) of tenants in council or housing association properties are dependent on benefits. Olliff-Cooper says: “At A4e, every customer journey from welfare into work starts with a discussion about the breadth of problems they may face, not simply the status of their employment. We know, from the work we do every day, that housing is a concern for a significant number of people out of a job; given the changes in the sector for provisions in both employment and housing, it’s our responsibility to help make both of these things as accessible – and stable – as possible. Discussions with our partners and colleagues, like today’s roundtable, are an invaluable step towards achieving this, and helping improve people’s lives.” Is this, perhaps, the start of contracts between A4e and housing associations?

Doubts

2011-06-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

In all the publicity about the Work Programme it's been assumed that the inclusion of lots of voluntary sector organisations as sub-contractors is a good thing. Indeed, the government was adamant that they had to be part of it, and the people who've made a living out of running the sector have been desparate to be involved. But looking at the list of these organisations, I'm not so sure. Many of them are not the usual "third sector" big players which depend entirely on contracts from local or national government for their income. Some are small community projects. Others are respected organisations which people turn to for independent help and advice. The involvement of these organisations with the WP carries dangers for them. For one thing, they could find themselves under immense pressure. The primes are focussed squarely on the money, and if these groups do not contribute as much to the bottom line as expected they could be ditched. And they also run the risk of being seen as agents of private companies like Ingeus and A4e, and this could affect their image. I think we'll see more than a few of these organisations falling out of the WP in the next couple of years.

There are other concerns. The plan is that primes will genuinely compete with each other; if they fall below target they will lose share of the clientele to their rivals. But no one has said what will happen if they are all falling below target to the same degree, which is very likely. Remember also that these are 7-year contracts. If the government which succeeds this one wants to change them or abandon them they won't be able to without paying out a great deal of money.

We're used to A4e finding new and dafter ways of describing itself; but one which popped up this week is the most absurd yet. "A4e is a social purpose company with the sole aim to improve people's lives around the world. We do this by helping them to find work, skills, direction – or whatever it is they need." Roy Newey, having moved on from Saudi Arabia, is currently looking for business in Latvia.

All the coverage in the last few days has shown how little the media understand, or care, about the history of welfare-to-work. And that's also evident in a review of next week's Fairy Jobmother programme in the Hartlepool Mail. After calling the show "popular" and "innovative", the piece tells us that, "Hayley worked with the candidates featured in the show for two weeks and tried to instill the skills and motivation required to get back into work. As part of the show, she helps them with basic CV writing and job hunting skills before lining them up with interviews." So none of them, we must assume, had been on a New Deal or FND course, where private companies were paid to do this, and apparently failed. I bet we won't be told. And how does "lining them up with interviews", which they almost certainly wouldn't have got without the cameras, affect people's perceptions of the world of the unemployed?

Work Programme starts

2011-06-10T04:27:00.000-07:00

Loads of publicity today for the start of the Work Programme, most of it ill-informed. The BBC's Today programme on Radio 4 made a complete mess of it, with a dreadful interview of Chris Grayling by John Humphrys and then a brief discussion between a chap from the Work Foundation and one from CDG.

The print media are scarcely any better. As you'd expect, the Express leads with "A crackdown on benefits scroungers will be launched by ministers today" and continues in the same ignorant, not to say demented, vein. The Mail is actually rather better, but it loves the idea of "recruiting former Army officers to help instill discipline into young jobseekers".

The Telegraph takes a different line. Its writer, Louisa Peacock, asks how the scheme can succeed when it "is being delivered by the same old providers". She points out that PriceWaterhouseCoopers pulled out because it didn't think the scheme was financially viable. "If the same old providers haven't found a solution to this by now, what on earth can be different in this 'step change' of delivery?"

The BBC news website quotes A4e's Andrew Dutton, who "said it would look at removing the barriers that had been keeping people out of work. 'They [sic] may be debt issues or housing issues or problems within the family, legal issues around housing, but often very much around supporting them to really gain confidence,' he told the BBC."

The Guardian is thorough and balanced. Its writer, Patrick Wintour, cites the concerns of the Work Foundation "that in areas of Britain with the highest unemployment and fewest job vacancies, contractors will struggle".

Chris Grayling had an easy time on The Daily Politics. But when asked about the concerns that providers would focus their efforts on those areas of the country with the best job prospects, he said that there had been intense bidding and competition for all areas from the providers, so he was confident that wouldn't happen. The interview ended with a question about why the private sector was going to be better at this than the public sector. The answer was purely ideological.

Saudi Arabia and here

2011-06-09T05:01:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I was initially surprised to read that A4e is seeking business in Saudi Arabia. Roy Newey arrived there on 4 June and tweeted that he was " looking forward to meetings with government to support skills and employment programmes." Why should I think that this is a step too far? After all, it's just business, as it is for many other companies and governments who regard the nature of the Saudi regime as irrelevant to trade and profit.

There has been only one more review (that I've seen, anyway) of The Fairy Jobmother, and that's in the Independent. The writer, Laurie Penny, calls it "possibly the ghastliest piece of poverty porn ever made" and she doesn't get any more complimentary as the piece goes on! One could almost feel sorry for Hayley Taylor. If she had stopped after the US series she would have retained some dignity. This new series was obsolete before it began. There has been no reaction from those papers (the Mail and the Express, for instance) which have demonised the unemployed; perhaps it embarrasses even them. Most of the media have become bored with the concept and are turning to more intelligent examinations of the problems of poverty and unemployment.

There has just been another reminder of how history gets rewritten. Iain Duncan Smith has been on the radio defending his government against the criticisms of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He described the Work Programme as if it's a wholly new idea to involve the private and voluntary sectors in getting people back to work. Don't ever ask how well, or badly, the private sector has performed; just forget the last contract and give them the next one.

Reviews of The Fairy Jobmother - or lack of them

2011-06-08T07:56:00.000-07:00

I was steeling myself this morning to read reviews of that programme. But I can only find two.

There's a brief one in Metro. It talks about the "admirable empathy" of this "no-nonsense employment guru" and says that, "The combination of her pep talks and setting up interviews turned the future around for three of her volunteers. Even hopeless case Dave got a job in the end, but off his own bat. If Taylor could be rolled out across the nation’s Jobcentres, the benefits budget would be squashed in an instant."

The Guardian is dismissive. It's a tired formula, and the writer has fun with suggestions for more similar shows. The comments, however, are much more interesting. I particularly like one from someone called wishface.

It seems that this series is now old hat. Good.

That Panorama Programme

2011-06-07T03:24:00.000-07:00

Last night's Panorama programme about unemployment was, on the whole, fair. But there was one glaring omission.

First, we were told that a "revolution" is coming in getting people back to work, and the vox pops showed the prevailing attitudes. But then we were introduced to real people who actually did want to work. And we were shown a number of different schemes to train people for jobs, all of them locally run and funded. What about New Deal and Flexible New Deal, I wondered. FND has been run in North Wales by Serco and BCTV, so where were they? One young man, Adam, had been on something only identified as a "course". Was this FND? He had secured a work placement for himself, at Morrison's. He came away from that without a job, but was later offered 18 hours a week with the retailer. He took it. Another lad, Chris, had been sanctioned for refusing to apply for a particular job and was without his benefits for 6 months. His attitude is not that uncommon. While Chris Grayling, along with most people, believe that the unemployed have no right to be choosy, it's usually about maintaining some sort of control over your life.

The local MP, Chris Ruane, talked about the dangers of stigmatising the unemployed. He pointed out that 50% of the jobs in his constituency are in the public sector, and many of those jobs are going. The boss of Rehab, one of the new Work Programme contractors in the area, was cautious about the prospects of getting the long-term jobless back into work.

Why do these programmes shy away from naming the private contractors these days? Grayling is confident that the WP will succeed because it only pays out for sustainable jobs. (That wouldn't include Adam and his 18 hours a week.) It's as if the terrible record of the last 5 years is to be forgotten; the "revolution" will be successful.

Watch it if you must

2011-06-05T14:03:00.001-07:00

A new series of The Fairy Jobmother begins on Channel 4 on Tuesday 7 June. I won't be watching. I wouldn't waste a minute of my life on it. If you do, dear reader, do post your thoughts.

It's worth remembering how this particular piece of what's been termed "poverty porn" came about. Channel 4 screened Benefit Busters, three programmes which took a serious look at the issues surrounding the welfare-to-work industry. The first two were filmed in A4e offices. Who now remembers the scenes in Hull, of clients being insulted and given nothing useful to do, of the man who got a job only to have it come to an end after a week? No, it was the first programme, which saw Hayley Taylor haranguing single mothers in Doncaster, which impressed producers. Ms Taylor was a character. And so she became a star, leaving A4e for a whole new career, here and in the US.

So will she fix up more hopeless cases with jobs which they certainly wouldn't have got if the cameras weren't there? Will you be shown idle, feckless people as if they were typical of the unemployed? Probably.

The BBC Panorama programme tonight (Monday 6 June) ought to be more informative: "With the government promising a welfare revolution, getting people off benefits and into work, Panorama visits the seaside resort of Rhyl in North Wales. In some parts of the town, nearly half of the adult population are on benefits. The programme follows the real life stories of some of the unemployed there, and asks the government whether this battle can really be won." But will there be any mention of the New Deal and FND providers who have dealt with these people in the past? Probably not.

That A4e bank

2011-06-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

As Mark Lovell pushes for a financial and banking role for A4e, we should remember that their plans for a bank have a long history. I've described before how the plans came to nothing, but I've only just come across this lengthy piece in the Telegraph from September 2006. It describes, entirely uncritically, how A4e was "in talks with a major South African banking provider for the new service, which should have as many as 150 branches. Plans were submitted to the Financial Services Authority in London some months ago." (We know that this South African bank was Capitec, and that A4e actually set up Capitec UK.) "A4e said the venture was likely to cost between £50m and £100m in the first instance." £1m of public money was subsequently allocated for this venture by a section of the North West Regional Development Agency.

The writer of this piece, Christopher Hope, raises no doubts. He doesn't ask whether it's appropriate for this company to enter retail banking, targeting the very people it gets money from the government to help. But 2006 was the point at which insanity in the banking system was poised to crash and ruin us all. It doesn't seem very likely now that we'll see A4e Bank (or Capitec UK) branches on the High Street. But the ambition hasn't gone away. And when Lovell's latest thoughts on the subject are published in the Telegraph, will anyone go back 5 years and look at the history? I doubt it.

Andrew Dutton and income

2011-06-02T00:49:00.000-07:00

We're used to A4e sprinkling PR stuff all over the internet, but this piece is unusual in that it names Andrew Dutton as the "mastermind" behind A4e's growth to "an international, £250m-turnover powerhouse". The piece is in question-and-answer form, and Dutton has all the right phrases (like "social purpose company"), but there are some interesting figures. He says that welfare-to-work contributes 60% of their global revenue, but they have diversified into various other areas. He'll get some applause for saying, "Over 90 % of the people we come across want to work and have a job. They see it as part of what gives them identity. There is a tiny minority of people that sees being on benefits as a lifestyle. They are few and far between. But it's also part of our job to persuade those people that working has more benefits to staying at home. I do not subscribe to the view that a large proportion of our society is happy to sit on benefits." And in talking about competitive tendering he says that "the contracts currently under tender are worth £3-4bn collectively. Two years ago, competition was stiff but there was a multitude of relatively small players. We now turn over a quarter of billion pounds a year." He cites India as the biggest growth market for A4e, and is interesting on the subject of bringing in outside investment and the possibility of floating the company on the stock market. "The ultimate plan is to be a half-a-billion-turnover business by 2014, and generate revenues of £1bn by 2020. Being privately owned, we can take a long-term view. How we do that in terms of equity structure is still up for debate. I do know we'll have to open up the company to enable that level of growth, so we'll never rule out the option for an IPO."

So all this competitive tendering has, in reality, driven out the competition.

Now that the government is publishing a complete breakdown of its monthly spending we can see just how much A4e is getting at this site. I started to tally up how much they'd been paid already this year, but decided that life was too short. Suffice it to say that it's a lot!

Ambitions

2011-05-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

"More joined up services"; "link broader support services together"; "must become better integrated"; these are phrases from Mark Lovell's latest contribution to "Addressing the wider impact of debt", an article on Debt Management Today. He is pursuing A4e's goal of super-contracts, whereby the company would be the gateway to all services for the impoverished. "Access to these 'holistic' services," he writes, "should be through a unified, personalised view of the customer." He quotes a survey they did three years ago among their debt advice customers which produced results, which are blindingly obvious, about the personal implications of debt, and uses these to support the thesis.

It must be stressed again that any such bundling of services under one private company should be resisted strongly. People in trouble need access to impartial, expert help and advice, provided by the public sector or by not-for-profit organisations. They need to be able to find alternative sources of help if necessary, not be at the mercy of one person from a private company, and they need to be sure that no one has any financial stake in their fate.
In pursuit of the same goal Emma Harrison has got the Times interested in her Working Families Everywhere efforts. The paper will be following the "stories" of three long-term unemployed people she is mentoring. Now, the Times online is behind a paywall, and I have no intention of buying copies just to read this guff, so I'd be interested if anyone does see it.

I know that there are lots of people, organisations and websites out there which are (justifiably) very exercised about welfare-to-work. I wish some of them would look beyond this to the wider picture.

Justice

2011-05-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a posting on Twitter (no, nothing to do with a certain footballer) I see that A4e are seeking contracts from the Ministry of Justice, and were advertising for a Bid Director in that sector. The company brags that their turnover is nearly £200m "and we plan to double that". As is usual with A4e, no salary is given, but they want you to have experience in the criminal justice services sector. Don't rush to apply. The closing date was yesterday.

Two bits of news

2011-05-18T14:52:00.000-07:00

Two small news items including A4e.

The first is a piece in the Sheffield Star about the city's most profitable companies. A4e has moved from 12th place to 4th, it's profits having increased from £5.6m to £9.9m.

The second is a report on the BBC's news website about the young unemployed. It cites A4e's Vox Centre in Brixton (which the piece calls its "flagship centre") which trains youngsters in vocational skills for "entry-level" jobs. Since opening last June they haven't had any success in getting these youngsters into work.

Business Opportunities

2011-05-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

Blogger was read-only for a while and my last post was deleted, so here it is again:

A4's Mark Lovell has been talking to Citibank in pursuit of his banking ambitions, and is now looking at opportunities for business in higher education. Roy Newey is pursuing business in India and Pakistan, helped by the British taxpayer via UKTI. Emma Harrison was, a week ago, holding a meeting of family champions in London. The three pilot areas, you remember, were Hull, Blackpool and Westminster; but while Blackpool has advertised for 5 such champions, neither Hull nor Westminster have anything at all on their websites about it. Yet Harrison says that the meeting was of "the newly appointed and yet to be appointed Family Champions from Hull, Blackpool and Westminster", and claims that the local authorities are committed. Strange that they haven't told their residents.

Just a note about comments. From time to time I get comments from current or former A4e staff which are very critical of the company. I don't publish them, for various reasons, including the fact that Blogger doesn't allow me to edit them. But I do save them, so keep them coming. I'll do a digest at some point.

A4e Community Managers

2011-05-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

A fascinating job advert has appeared on the Third Sector website for A4e Community Managers. The job spec is very detailed and gives a clear picture of how A4e intends to get people onto their Work Programme. They are looking for voluntary referrals "by implementing a strategic community engagement strategy". The emphasis is on marketing the programme directly to residents of an area and through local voluntary and other organisations, and the Jobcentres. This is in reaction to the fact that A4e is in competition with other providers in their five areas and so has to go out and persuade all those concerned that A4e is the best. "To be considered for this role you must be able to demonstrate A4e’s ‘DNA’ – Trusted, Passionate, Driven, Brave, Friendly and Caring."

The unemployed can look forward to vigorous competition to sign them up. As with FND, it will be some time before there are any results on which to judge the providers.

Conscious Capitalism

2011-04-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

The voracious appetite for publicity that is characteristic of A4e and Emma Harrison sometimes appears ridiculous. But it does have an effect. They convince not only themselves but others who accept it all without question. Take, for instance, an article on the Huffington Post. The author, American Margaret Heffernan, came to the UK. "Our trip focused on companies that are good for people, the planet and profits. This is also variously called Conscious Capitalism or social entrepreneurship". And guess what she found? Her nine examples include Jamie Oliver's 15, Divine chocolate and, yes, A4e, which is, she says, "working with insane dedication to prove that everyone is employable if you take enough time and give enough attention. The unbelievable energy of A4E employees also testifies to how much difference a sense of purpose can make. You don't have to pay a fortune to get great performance from your people." Heffernan cites these companies as examples of greed being "supplanted by purpose". Which proves that the propaganda works.

But it's lost on the people in Edinburgh who are having a struggle with A4e. A group called Edinburgh Claimants supports people who have serious problems with officialdom. They have won the right to provide a representative to accompany claimants in interviews at the Jobcentre, with Atos, the local council, and even at two of the welfare-to-work providers in the area, Ingeus and JHP. But A4e won't co-operate. They refuse to have representatives there and sanction people if they try to insist. You can read the full story on http://www.edinburghagainstpoverty.org.uk/. Why? What do they want to hide? The Edinburgh group think that it's a matter of human rights, and I'm inclined to agree. I'm following this story with interest. Perhaps A4e are only practising "conscious capitalism".

Round-up, 22 April 2011

2011-04-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

There is a group in Edinburgh called the Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty which reports victories in what it calls its war against A4e. This is obviously not an impartial account, and I haven't seen any other reporting of it, so I can't vouch for its accuracy. How many people does the group represent, for example? But it's an interesting development.

I was amused by the title of an article in an Australian journal - "Therese Rein the $1.4bn queen of British welfare". Sounds like there's been a coup! Rein is the wife of a former Australian Prime Minister. The article reports that, as owner of Ingeus, she stands to make a great deal of money. The firm won all seven contracts that it bid for, giving it 23% of the market, while A4e only has 13%. Concerns are reported: "Two failed bidders shown details of the winning bids said they believed Ingeus had discounted its prices by up to 50 per cent in some areas. Perhaps the company was banking on the economies of scale that would come from being the largest provider, or maybe even hoping that the government would later be forced to raise the promised payments."

The big story of the last few days has been the announcement, as part of the election campaign, of figures purporting to show that more than 80,000 people are claiming incapacity benefits for being addicts, alcoholics or obese. No mention was made of addicts who are not on IB but on the smaller JSA. And, of course, the reporting played into the hands of the Tories who want to appeal to the Mail and Express readership. Instead of sensible discussion we had the usual chat from experts.

Meanwhile, Emma Harrison has been in discussions at the Swedish Embassy and Mark Lovell has been to a meeting with the Local Government Association about crisis loans, debt and public service reform.

More family champions

2011-04-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

Emma Harrison has announced that two other councils have joined Blackpool in piloting her Working Families Everywhere scheme. They are Hull and Westminster. Neither council seems to have told their electorates, since there's nothing on their websites. Perhaps they are reluctant to announce, at the same time as making hundreds of council workers redundant, that they are employing "family champions".

Mandatory Work Activity

2011-04-15T05:10:00.001-07:00

I don't know whether A4e bid for any of the Mandatory Work Activity (MWA) contracts, but they're not among the preferred bidders. Of the eleven areas, JHP has 3, Rehab, Seetec and Ingeus 2 each, and BEST and ESG one each.

It's going to be a controversial contract. It's meant to "encourage participants to gain a better understanding of the discipline and focus that is required for work and allow them to make a contribution to their community at the same time" (Indus Delta) and it's for those who haven't been co-operative with the system up to now.

Nice Work for Some

2011-04-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

Private Eye has been scrutinising some of the outsourcing companies again. It notes that Working Links, which got three Work Programme contracts, has been caught over-claiming job outcomes in Merseyside. The company claimed for 85 recent job starts which people had secured before any intervention by Working Links.

But the Eye is even more interested in the finances of A4e. Three of its directors are paid through schemes which are common enough for the highly paid but not available to the rest of us. "In the last two years international director Roy Newey has been paid £662,000 through a company called Roy Newey Ltd," says the article, and two non-executive directors had similar arrangements. It goes on: "Newey paid himself NIC-free dividends totalling £326,000".

A4e paid Emma Harrison and her husband's conference management company Andromeda Park Ltd £462,000 last year, another of the couple's companies, Thornbridge Ltd, £627,000 for the lease of a building, and £81,000 rent on a property owned by the couple's pension scheme. And that was before profits after tax for A4e of £6.2m." A4e is definitely improving some people's lives!

SIBs and ABS

2011-04-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

One of the problems which the Work Programme faced from the outset was that there was to be no, or very little, payment to the providers up front; they would have to stump up the money to finance it until the job outcomes started coming in - if they ever did. It's hugely risky, it excluded all but the biggest companies, and it drove even them into partnerships with other firms. But there's another model on the table, one which A4e's Mark Lovell is keen on. It's called Social Impact Bonds. There's an explanation and diagram here. Investors come in and put the money up to finance the providers' "interventions"; they work on the "target population", and the government repays the investors from the money saved by the success of the "interventions". Sounds reasonable. Certainly the private companies will get paid, and the risk is borne by people who can afford the gamble.

But the effect of this model is even worse than the current system. It further distances the state from those individuals who are seen as problems; they are not part of society, just nuisances who require intervention in their lives, and that intervention is a market in which financiers can invest.

Something else which interests Lovell is the Alternative Business Structure (ABS) for legal firms. It will come into operation this year, and allows any "fit and proper" person or company to own a legal services firm. It's been called "Tesco law" because supermarkets will be able provide legal services. There are lots of safeguards but it opens the sytem up to competition. And of course A4e is interested! They got into the Community Legal Advice business by partnering with an established legal firm, but if they can set up their own ABS a whole new market opens up. Lovell says that his focus is on what it could do for people on benefits and low incomes.

A social purpose company

2011-04-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

The approved description of A4e (approved, at least, by A4e) is "social purpose company". According to Mark Lovell on 3 February last year, "Over the last few years Emma came up with a nice phrase that we use to define what we do – a Social Purpose Company. As a business we have a really focused view of the social impact we aim to deliver; Improving People’s Lives. We have a strong set of commercial skills and principles that we continue to mature and develop. We have a strong set of values and a clear culture about the services we deliver, how we deliver them and how we want the business to evolve."

But if you google on the phrase, you find that it doesn't seem to be Emma's invention. For instance, on a website on Belgian law, we have "Belgian legislation has also created a hybrid entity, the social purpose company, which can be considered as an alternative to non-profit associations. Unlike these associations, a social purpose company may perform a commercial activity, but this activity should be carried out in a non-profit context." This is more or less what we would call a social enterprise; it doesn't describe A4e. Then there's an internet selling company called OneNest which sells artisan goods. It's founder says, "Exactly ten years ago, I created my first social purpose company, oneNest." And, "Global Partners & Associates is a social purpose company working to promote democratic politics, effective governance and human rights."

So the phrase can mean whatever you want it to mean. What A4e apparently wants it to mean is that they're not like all those other private companies, like Serco, Capita, G4S et al, which take whatever contracts they can get in order to make a profit. No, A4e sees itself as blending "commercial and social principles" and coming up with something new. They've got a long way to go to persuade many of the people they've had dealings with that this is the case.

And as a PS, I wonder why there are almost no comments under any of Lovell's blog posts.

It's who you know

2011-04-07T03:54:00.000-07:00

I have thought carefully about how to comment on this article in the Express by A4e's Emma Harrison - and decided that there's nothing I can say. Just enjoy the irony.

Toynbee article. And why it matters

2011-04-05T01:03:00.000-07:00

There's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, looking at the "benefits bonanza" of the Work Programme contracts. She points out that the big winner, Ingeus Deloitte, is run by a former director at the DWP, and that the company underbid the other providers to a worrying extent. She expresses surprise that previous performance is not taken into account, talking about the failure of A4e and Reed in the Pathways programme. We have pointed this out before, and it continues to startle people that a company can bodge one contract after another but still get the business. Toynbee asks why the providers would want these contracts now, and says that there are two reasons: "in previous contracts when they ran out of money they ganged together, demanded more – and got it. The government had no option. Not one company has ever been terminated for missing its targets. So price is flexible. The other reason is that these contracts are small beer, loss-leaders for large companies with their eye on massively lucrative future contracts in the great Cameron outsourcing bonanza."

But why does it matter if a private company provides a public service? Who cares. as long as it's provided efficiently and cheaply? Successive governments have taken this view, and David Cameron has been explicit about it. There is a market place, and the private sector can compete with the public sector to deliver the goods. Those of us who question this philosophy are regarded as socialists (a dirty word) or stupid. But I'll try to explain why it matters.

If my local council decides to contract out the maintenance of its housing stock, that would seem to be simply a matter of getting the best deal for council tax payers. But there are problems. Council tax payers won't be allowed to know how much it's costing, because the contract is "commercially sensitive". One firm may under-bid to secure the business, buying up its competitors, and then go bust, leaving my council to pick up the pieces. A contract may turn out not to serve the interests of residents, but can't be re-negotiated. One could regard these as matters of practicality rather than morality.

There are areas, however, where questions of morality are inescapable. There has always been a market in healthcare and education, the result of people being able to buy their way out of public provision. When it seems that the public provision may disappear altogether, in favour of the market, there are protests - too late. Three areas remain where many citizens expect, and assume, that the market should not operate, even as it takes over; areas where the commodity is people: offender management, advice services and welfare. Private prisons have been in existence for years; a few days ago it was announced that Birmingham jail was to be contracted out to G4S, the first time that a publicly-run prison has been sold off. Another jail is to be run on a payment-by-results contract; the private firm will get paid for the number of people it can keep from re-offending. Advice services used to be run by not-for-profit organisations like the CAB; deliberately so, because it was thought that such services should be clearly distinct from government. Now they are sold to the highest bidder. And, of course, there is a thriving market in welfare-to-work services. In these three areas, people in need of help are sold for private profit. They cease to be citizens, part of society with rights and responsibilities in a public space, and become objects in the market place.

I know this is a dialogue of the deaf. Growing numbers of people have been persuaded that the services used by other people (rarely by themselves) can be a matter of private profit, and there are no practical or moral objections to a few people getting rich from the public purse. To them, I would recommend the book Consumed by Benjamin R. Barber.

A4e and money

2011-04-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

A press release by the Press Association this morning hasn't been picked up by the media. A4e has another contract. That fact is rather tucked away in the story that, "A new independent service is being launched to offer free advice on financial issues over the phone, the internet and face-to-face through a nationwide network of centres." This "Money Advice Service" is free to use for everyone, and is a rehashing of a service that's been there for a while. Now it's adding a national face-to-face service, provided in England and Northern Ireland by A4e. (In Scotland and Wales, Citizens Advice have the contract.) A4e have been involved in this for a while so perhaps the papers don't think it's news. They're too busy pushing the start of the drive to get people off incapacity benefits. The Money Advice Service's own website makes no mention of A4e. And there's nowhere a statement of how much this contract is worth to A4e.

Emma Harrison has been in America looking at social and welfare reform, while Mark Lovell reports "some good new business in welfare skills and local govt."

£1.4 million a year for Emma Harrison

2011-04-02T23:38:00.000-07:00

This is a must-read article for anyone interested in A4e. In the Guardian, Toby Helm and Daniel Boffey have been going over A4e's accounts and report that Harrison and her husband have a joint income of £1.4m from government contracts.

The writers give the incomes of Serco bosses and point out that a recent report for the government called for a fair pay code for company executives. Then they turn to A4e. "A4e's latest accounts show that Harrison, who lives with her husband in Thornbridge Hall, a 12th-century stately home in the heart of the Peak District, has an 85.5% shareholding in the Sheffield-based company. She receives a salary of £365,000 a year. On top of this, last year she and her husband received an additional £462,000 from A4e for the company's use of her home for conferences and administrative work. .Her husband received an additional £626,856 for the lease of another property to A4e." The company's "turnover hit £190,990,000 and its profit increased 80% to £6.2m in the last financial year". The accounts take an upbeat view of the "opportunities" to be had from the "pressure on public spending".

Union leaders are quoted. Understandably, they're not happy. But, "A spokesman for A4e said the £462,000 paid to Harrison and her husband for the use of Thornbridge Hall last year was part of a leasing arrangement covering several years. The spokesman added: 'Over the past 20 years Emma Harrison has grown A4e from a small, Sheffield-based training business to one of the largest social purpose companies in the UK, helping unemployed people back into work. This has been a long journey, at times involving significant personal financial risk.'"

This is a timely article. It's just a pity that it won't change anything.