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  They've put in realistic bids for contracts but withdrawn when they could see that they were going to be undercut by companies which could afford to lose money initially and then get the contract changed to allow them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.

£1.375m for Emma

It's a story in today's Observer, but it's an irritating one.
The figures come from her husband, who said she got a total dividend of £1.25m in the year from April 2011, plus £250,000 from January this year.  Okay, she didn't step down as Chair of A4e until March, so this is hardly a surprise.  Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, is outraged, justifiably.  But the paper seems to forget that a big slice of A4's income doesn't come from welfare-to-work.  There are plenty of other lucrative contracts.
And there's a worrying inaccuracy in the story.  "She became a high-profile figure through reality TV programmes such as The Fairy Jobmother."  Er ... no.  She wasn't in that.  It was Hayley Taylor, who got her big break as an A4e employee in Benefit Busters.
I've no objection, of course, to the Observer / Guardian keeping this in the public eye.  But let's get it right.

Why pick on A4e?

I was drawn into a very peculiar correspondence recently.  I'll spare you the details, but it was with someone who professed himself unable to understand why A4e was the target for special hostility.  It's no different from any of the other companies, he said, so why was there such a virulent internet campaign against it.  I tried, briefly, to explain, but he dismissed what I said and still wouldn't have it.
Perhaps you can help me out here.  I'll set out what I think, and you can agree or not.  Why A4e?

1. When the wave of privatisation in employment-related areas got under way in the mid-2000s there was one big winner - A4e.   It got a huge slice of New Deal, plus Train to Gain and Business Link and more.  It's rivals couldn't understand why.  Even when questions were asked in Parliament, nothing stuck.  There was talk of friends in high places.
2. A4e's reputation among its clients was poor.  Was it any worse than that of other companies?  My impression is that it was.  The 2006-2009 New Deal contracts were very badly designed, fuelling client resentment, but experiences with A4e sparked off more internet outrage than could be chance.
3. The media did try to examine what was going on.  A Radio 5 Live programme was excellent, but nobody took any notice.  Channel 4's Benefit Busters should have rung alarm bells; but the only lasting effect of the two episodes featuring A4e was that a woman who had been a tutor with the company was catapulted to fame and fortune as the Fairy Jobmother, suddenly an international careers expert on such slender experience.  The unemployed began to feel even more insulted.  Other producers, who wanted to make the whistle-blower type of programme, found themselves thwarted by the fact that nothing was provable and the threat of legal action could always scare people off.
4. The face (and voice and everything else) of A4e was its majority shareholder, Emma Harrison.  The cult of personality was unstoppable, and she became a media celebrity.  When it came to demonstrating her expertise in finding jobs for people, however, she was less than impressive.  When the BBC plumbed the depths of the genre with Famous, Rich and Jobless, Harrison walked away from the show leaving at least one unemployed man she had supposedly helped feeling used and abandoned.  Another programme (the title of which I forget because I couldn't bring myself to watch it) saw Harrison competing with someone else to get an apparently hopeless case into a job.  That she achieved this by ringing up one of her mates was another kick in the teeth for those desperate for work.
5. More quietly, A4e was empire-building, getting into all areas of people's lives in some places; CLACs, which took advice services away from the CAB and the voluntary sector in some places; direct payments for social care; prison education; a privatised version of Pupil Referral Units.  They were in schools.  They were in more and more countries, with the aid of the British government.  And they came very close to owning and running a bank, having come to an arrangement with a South African bank and secured a £1m grant from a quango here.  That, happily, came to nothing.  But the sense of boundless ambition was very disquieting.
6. When David Blunkett, who had been the Secretary of State on whose watch A4e had prospered, ceased to be a minister, he took a job with A4e.  Later, when Blunkett had ceased to be such an asset, a Conservative insider joined the payroll.  Of course, A4e is hardly unique in employing those who can oil the political wheels.  But it did seem especially blatant.
7. Targets were never met.  Okay, A4e performed averagely; other contractors were usually just as poor.  But failure to perform adequately was never a reason for not giving them the next contract.  One can blame the procurement process for that.  But it added to the sense that the reality never matched the hype.
8. And hype there certainly was, a constant stream of it.  And it intensified when Flexible New Deal forced providers into competing in each area.  A4e's unfortunately named Know Hope roadshow was a PR campaign to persuade unemployed people that the company was going to change their lives.  (Fortunately for all the providers, the competition element was postponed and the contracts were bought out by the coalition government.)  None of the other companies behaved in this way.  They didn't want publicity, apart from the odd good news piece in the local press.  For A4e, publicity was essential. 
9. While all this was going on, there were reports of fraudulent activity, acknowledged but never publicised by the DWP.  While this was fairly minor stuff, it brought out more criticism of the company.  And it should have highlighted a major cause of such activity; the intense pressure on staff to make the money, whatever it took.  Bonuses or commission for getting job outcomes; prizes for success; it all encouraged corner-cutting if not downright fraud.
10. Harrison boasted of her closeness to government.  While she probably made little impression on Blair, and none at all on Brown, she was able to persuade Cameron that she had the answer to all society's ills.  She was the solution to whatever had caused the 2011 riots.  She would rescue the horde of problem families and put them back to work.  It was hubris.  While other companies made millions for their shareholders and paid their executives very well, it was Emma Harrison's 85% share of an £11m dividend which brought A4e's huge profits into the spotlight.

Why pick on A4e?

Fairy Jobmother

I was speculating about the possible shelving of Emma Harrison's Channel 4 programme, "The Wager". Well blow me down, there's a programme on the channel on 13 July called "The Fairy Jobmother", starring Hayley Taylor. You remember Hayley. She was the A4e employee in the first episode of "Benefit Busters" whose techniques for motivating lone parents to get jobs caused some controversy. We then heard that she'd left A4e. In the new programme she takes on a young unemployed couple in Middlesborough. And then, apparently, she's off to the US to repeat the process, according to a reality show casting site. Does this mean that Hayley's programme has replaced Emma's?