Reflections on those accounts

It's very telling that no one in the media has shown the slightest interest in A4e's latest accounts.  How different from the furore nearly three years ago which brought down Emma Harrison and very nearly destroyed the company.
How have they done it?  They've scraped their way back to profit, just, from a dire situation, and they've done it by not trying to compete with the big boys.  The chairman talked about "discipline".  They've put in realistic bids for contracts but withdrawn when they could see that they were going to be undercut by companies which could afford to lose money initially and then get the contract changed to allow them a profit.  It's not a game A4e wants to play any more.  And they've pulled out of foreign parts (except for Australia), presumably because it was costing too much to keep up that international presence.  From a company with limitless ambition they've become a medium-sized outfit looking to make a living.
I suppose we should be pleased.  But there's no comfort in the fact that a few huge companies now run the bulk of our public services and behave as if there are no risks or consequences of failure.

Meanwhile, there was an interesting story on the Disability News Service website last month.  A former A4e employee, Chris Loder, took the company to a tribunal claiming constructive dismissal.  He alleged that he had been forced to work with vulnerable ESA clients, some with mental health problems, when he had no experience in this area and was given no training.  A former colleague, supporting him, described the policy as "incredibly dangerous".  The article prints a long statement from A4e refuting the claims.  The tribunal's verdict is due this month.

And speaking of verdicts, there still isn't one in the Slough fraud case, being heard in Reading.  Before the holidays it was reported on the courts' website that the jury was out, but today there's no further news.

Do you remember A4e's Hayley Taylor and her 5 minutes of fame as the "Fairy Jobmother"?  It seemed the company might have another star in the offing.  ITV have a programme starting this Thursday called Bring Back Borstal, and A4e were publicising the fact that one of their managers, a woman connected with their prison education contracts, was going to be on it.  That link has now disappeared, so I've no idea what's happening.

Nine charged with fraud

It's all over the media by now.  The Slough fraud allegations have dragged on a long time, but now nine A4e former employees have been charged with a total of 60 counts of forgery and conspiracy to defraud.  According to the BBC they were working on a programme called "Inspire to Aspire", a local initiative very much like the Work Programme.  They will appear in court on 14 October.
Both the Guardian and the Independent front their pieces with a photo of Emma Harrison.  Curiously, the Independent says that "prosecutors have not been asked to consider charges" against her personally.  It also quotes the head of fraud at the Crown Prosecution Service, who describes A4e as "a social purpose company"; we thought that particular label had been buried.
The company did discover and report the fraudulent activity themselves - they had to.  And they will be glad to get the case out of the way and say it couldn't happen again.

What's happened to A4e?

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

Waiting

Some people think that outsourcing has taken a bit of a knock lately.  The G4S fiasco showed how risky it can be, and the bad publicity surrounding A4e has done the whole business no good.  But none of it has slowed the pace of outsourcing, and ideologues of the right want to see everything hived off to the private sector.  Some local councils have already done this, knowing that they have no fall-back position if it goes wrong because they have sacked all their council employees.  The same handful of companies are scooping up all the work and the profits.  All that the government's much-vaunted Payment By Results has brought about is the even deeper involvement of the huge financial companies such as Deloitte and the shoving aside of the smaller organisations.  Big money rules.  And why would politicians want to change that?  

Working Links is having a bad time (see Private Eye) and warning staff that because they are not delivering the expected results for the Work Programme they could be in serious financial trouble.  One curious aspect of this is that the boss, Brian Bell, said that, "In some locations we are struggling to fill the vacancies we are finding."  Does that mean that employers won't consider people who are on the WP, i.e. have been out of work for a long time?  A4e's Andrew Dutton warned of that some time ago.  And the leaked document showing A4e's outcomes confirmed how bad the situation was.  But the official figures contradict that.  If the companies do fail, as the Eye points out, there is no fall-back position because there is no public sector involvement in the WP, so we could be looking at a bail-out for those companies.  That could include A4e.  But I suspect that some face-saving formula will be found to obscure the truth.  Anyway, A4e doesn't depend entirely on the WP.  

We're waiting for something to happen on the Slough A4e arrests.  The last we heard was back in May, when an eighth person was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud.  I know the legal system can grind slowly, but it's time we knew whether the case is going to trial.  

Report on the Work Programme

The Public Accounts Committee has published its interim report on the Work Programme.  There's some approval, mainly for the speed with which it was implemented, the "greater flexibility" it allows and the way it transfers risk away from the taxpayer.  (See the BBC's report.)  But there are also major criticisms, as the Telegraph highlights.  "One of the major worries is that companies are getting paid at least £400 just to assess each candidate, when many would be in the same situation 'without the programme'.  Some of those unemployed people would already have found jobs of their own accord, while others will remain on benefits that continue to be funded by the taxpayer.  The report will say payments for people who did not need the programme amount to nearly £1bn and could 'potentially' be even higher - the equivalent of £40 for every household in Britain.  MPs will also say they were 'sceptical' that it was value for money to pay around £50 in "management fees" for every jobless person processed." 
The BBC version of the story also reports the Committee's concern about A4e.  "They expected the Department for Work and Pensions to 'urgently' publish the results of its investigation into allegations against the firm regarding the Mandatory Work Activity work experience scheme, adding that Parliament had 'significant interest' in the firm's financial affairs."  And that's a bit confusing, because of course the DWP's "investigation" is supposed to be into all A4e's contracts, not just MWA.  
But publishing any sort of results doesn't seem to be a matter of urgency for the government.  Figures for the WP are not set to be disclosed until August.  Meanwhile, "Unofficial figures seen by the BBC in February suggested about 20% of unemployed people who have been signed up for at least six months have been found a job."  (There's an extraneous word in there - "been".  People have found a job, often without any help.)  Now, the dead weight figure, according to Grayling - the numbers who would have found work anyway - is 28%.  What does that tell us?

Another A4e employee has been arrested in Slough - the eighth. 

Seventh arrest

It's reported today that there has been a seventh arrest in the case of suspected fraud at the Slough A4e office.  Quite why this case is dragging on isn't clear.  Does the evidence point to the fact that at least 7 people must have known what was going on? 

I came across an interesting thread on the Money Saving Expert forums, about clothes for interview.  In the past it was the Jobcentre which would provide the money for new clothes.  Now it appears to be the private contractor.  One would hardly expect any private company (let alone A4e) to cough up large amounts of money.  But in this case, £40 for a new outfit, even from Primark, seems insufficient.  Has anyone got recent experience of asking for money for interview clothes?

Another arrest

It's reported that a sixth person has been arrested from the Slough A4e office in connection with the fraud investigation.  All 6 are free on bail.  No details of the charges have ever been given, but it's hinted that the fraud involves false job outcome claims. 
And that reminds us of the investigation which is supposedly ongoing into whether there is "systemic fraud" at A4e.  No news of that, but I bet it's only a matter of time before it's announced that there were only isolated cases of fraud, it's not systemic, and all sorts of procedures are in place to minimise the risk .... blah, blah.  Because, as we've said before, the government can't contemplate finding A4e guilty and taking away their contracts.  We know that there are allegations against other providers, so why single out A4e?  It makes the Work Programme look like a row of dominoes; knock the first one down and they all fall over.  
One examination that A4e has to face, along with the other primes, is an assessment of their compliance with the Merlin Standard.  This guides the relationship between primes and their sub-contractors.  The process runs throughout May and June, but there's no statement of when we'll hear the results.