A4e in "mass email blunder"

Now here's a story about A4e.  It's appeared today on the Plymouth local newspaper site, but happened more than a month ago.  A4e has the contract in Plymouth for what used to be called direct payments for social care and is now known as Independent Living Services.  Most councils chose to keep this in-house, but A4e won a number of contracts to deliver the service.  This story concerns an administrative blunder when a mass email to 157 people included, by mistake, an attachment listing the personal details of service users, i.e. people with disabilities.  They've said sorry and done all the necessary things, but the council isn't best pleased, and neither are the service users and their relatives.
It's not the first time A4e has leaked data by mistake.

No choice

There's an interesting exchange on the BBC "Ouch!" message boards started by someone who got a phone call from A4e. The person had no idea what "A4e" was, and, when told that s/he was in receipt of direct payments for social care, was still flummoxed, since the only payment s/he had received was a one-off small cheque some time ago. The point of this account is not simply that an A4e employee made a mess of a phone call; it's that a great many people can have vital parts of their lives controlled by this company without even knowing it. Privatising public services removes choice and it removes accountability. The thousands of people whose direct payments have been farmed out to A4e had no say in the matter. Similarly, those whose children are referred to Vox centres, or who have to access a CLAC any of the numerous services "outsourced" by local councils, may well not know that it's A4e who are running things. In some cases, like direct payments, even the local councils have only the choice between A4e or keeping the service in-house, because there are no other players.

Welfare-to-work similarly gives the client no choice. Flexible New Deal was set up with choice in mind. Each area would have two prime contractors so that clients could choose between them; but the companies successfully argued that the clients would not have enough information to make an informed choice (previous reputation being, apparently, irrelevant) so for the first year they would be allocated to a provider by the Jobcentre. Now with the Work Programme each of the 11 large areas will have a single large contractor, which will engage a lot of smaller outfits and create competition between them. (A4e describes this set-up on their MyA4e site.) Note that the client has no say in the matter whatever.

Few people know or care about this - until it impacts on them, and they find that there is nothing they can do about it.

Direct Payments for Social Care

Many local councils now put the minutes of their meetings, and reports to those meetings, online. Middlesborough Council, in an executive report dated 17 December 2009, gives us an interesting insight into what has been happening with Direct Payments for Social Care. When this was introduced by the government, several councils found it financially more attractive to contract out the service than to set up an in-house department. A4e has a number of contracts around the country to handle Direct Payments, and Middlesborough was one of those councils which contracted with A4e. It has more than 550 people in receipt of such payments. The 5-year contract included employer support, payroll support and financial monitoring, and it was due to expire at the end of March 2010. But "several quality issues had arisen throughout the period of the contract with A4e" and the council decided to split off the financial monitoring and do it in-house, and to separate the other two functions into different contracts. But "there was only 1 tender submission in respect of the Employer Support Contract and this was from A4e (with whom there has [sic] been quality issues)." (As the report says, there is a "niche market" in such services, i.e. only A4e.) And the three submissions for the Payroll Support contract were unaffordable. So it's back to the drawing board, with a new contract combining Employer and Payroll Support, and that means a whole new tendering process. So A4e's current contract will be extended for 6 months.

We have reason to be grateful for transparency in local government.