Help to Work - at least for G4S

At last, we know four of the companies which have won the contracts to deliver the inappropriately named "Help to Work" programme.  The Financial Times reveals that they are G4S, Seetec, Interserve and Pertemps.  Why it hasn't named the other two, I have no idea, but A4e hasn't said anything, and Serco has launched a rescue rights issue, so perhaps they both lost out.  The FT says that G4S is the biggest winner.  It also says: "It comes less than three weeks after the British government lifted a ban on G4S bidding for public sector work and suggests that Whitehall is taking a favourable view towards one of its largest contractors, despite insisting that the company remains under close scrutiny."
But hang on a minute.  The bidding must have taken place during the time in which that ban was supposed to be in place.  And the company was "cleared" just in time for the announcement of its success.  Who is the government trying to kid?

The whole "Help to Work" story today has been utterly depressing.  This morning, on Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davies had the dubious pleasure of trying to interview the appalling Esther McVey.  I bet he didn't want to.  When he tried to pose questions to her boss, Iain Duncan Smith, recently he ended up being complained about by ignorant listeners.  McVey did the same trick this morning - spouting utter twaddle and not answering questions.  The reaction to the new scheme in the media has been predictable.  The Guardian and the Independent get it right, while the Express salivates at the prospect of bludgeoning the poor even harder.  The BBC interviewed Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA, who said what you would expect since she's paid by the outsourcing companies, and Richard Johnson who used to work for Serco and talked sense.
So let's spell it out.  This scheme is largely about IDS's temper at the failure of the Work Programme, which he interprets as the failure of the unemployed.  So they must be punished.  And it will have the advantage of taking loads of people out of the unemployment figures.  They will be sanctioned en masse, or driven into the black economy, or forced onto workfare and so counted as employed.  
Newsnight is doing something on the scheme.  I don't think I'll watch.

STOP PRESS - contradictory figures

There has just been a confusing item on the BBC news.  It said that a third of people who have been on the Work Programme (I think they said for a year or more) have started a job.  But only one in ten of those with medical problems have started a job.  And the providers say that the money just isn't there in the scheme to help them.  Cue a brief clip of Labour's Liam Byrne saying that three quarters of people on the WP haven't even started a job.  And then Andrew Sells (who was captioned as a WP adviser but appears to be a businessman - see here) saying that the WP was more successful every month.  An employee of a WP provider (I didn't catch which one) was asked why the companies took the contracts if they knew there wasn't enough money in them, but he was otherwise treated sympathetically.

Now the item has appeared appeared on the BBC news website.  It has Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA (the providers' trade association) saying that money needs to be diverted from other budgets.  But I'm no clearer about the figures.

The Work Programme - not working

The Work and Pensions Committee has reported on the Work Programme, and its verdict is that it's not working for the long term unemployed and the most disadvantaged.  The official account of it is here.  The main points which I've picked out of it are:

• The government spent about £248m less than it anticipated on the WP in 2012 / 13 because the results were poorer than they expected.  
• They support the "black box" approach (they shouldn't) but they want it balanced by minimum service standards.  They point out that the providers are allowed to set their own standards which are currently "so vague as to allow providers to virtually ignore some jobseekers if they so choose".
• There are no figures for the numbers being referred to specialist sub-contractors.
• They want "a review of Work Programme sanctioning activity as a matter of urgency".

The media have picked up on various aspects of the report.  The Mirror quotes the committee's chair, Dame Anne Begg, who said, "Too often, the reality seems to be Work Programme advisers swamped by caseloads of 120 to 180 jobseekers, and employers deluged with poorly matched CVs and under-prepared candidates."  This is significant.  We know that people are being made to apply for jobs they know they can't possibly get, and suspect that WP advisers are sending out CVs off their own bats.

The Telegraph picks out the fact that the WP is "failing single parents".  The Independent talks about the problem of people who are "parked" because they're too difficult to help.  The BBC news website picks up the "poorly matched CVs" point.

The BBC's Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning ran an item on the report - but bodged it as usual.  They had a homeless man, Billy, whose experience of the WP was horrible.  He'd been sanctioned for missing an appointment which had actually been cancelled.  The interviewer, Sarah Montague, didn't know enough to bring this out, and Kirsty McHugh for the ERSA (the industry's trade body) was able to get away with blaming Jobcentre Plus for the "mistake".  McHugh has copied the politicians' technique of talking fast and throwing out misleading "facts".  She talked about 300,000 people being "helped into jobs" so far.  When Montague questioned whether these were long-term jobs the answer was a fudge.  And McHugh even stated that if a number of short-term jobs added up to 6 months, this was an outcome.  Is it?  Does anyone know whether the providers get paid for this?

I really hope that journalists (and I know that there are some who read this blog) will get the facts straight when the figures are finally published.

There have been some critical reactions to the Centre for Social Justice's report on "welfare ghettos".  Chris Goulden of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation picks the CSJ's figures to bits in an excellent article on the Foundation's website, and insists that it's not people's attitudes which drive worklessness, but what he calls "decayed job markets".  There's an angry response to the report by the leader of Birmingham City Council,  in the Birmingham Mail.  He talks about "character assassination" and emphasises the lack of jobs.  The Guardian went to Hull, to the offices of the WP subcontractor Pertemps, and concluded that the jobs simply weren't there.  But, of course, that's not the message which the government wants put out.  Blame the victims, it's so much easier than doing something positive.

Thanks to the Eye

The latest Private Eye has some interesting sidelights on the Work Programme and attendant issues.

• The first concerns those sanctions targets which the government so strenuously denies. Labour's Liam Byrne and his colleague in the Lords, Lord McKenzie, have made much of this, wanting an investigation. But the Eye reveals that in 2006 Labour had an explicit target of 6% sanctions, and when this came out the excuses were “spookily similar” to those given recently. They also point out that Freud, who has masterminded much of the current “reform”, was also advisor on welfare to Labour. No wonder Labour's opposition is so lame.
  
  
• FoI requests made by the Eye have also revealed how the government tried to massage the Work Programme figures before their release last year. Mark Hoban, employment minister, met Kirsty McHugh who is head of the ERSA, the trade body for companies like A4e, involved in the WP. “She told Hoban, 'On performance overall, I think it is really important that both the industry and the department are robust in terms of defending the Work Programme as much as we can.'” Hoban's response was that he was keen to put the ERSA's own figure of “200,000 job entries” out there because it would be “much more understandable to the media / public than discussion around Job Outcomes”. This was, of course, deliberately misleading, since the 200,000 figure means nothing without knowing the percentage figure for actual job outcomes. But Hoban and his masters obviously didn't want that to come out. There was a lot of discussion with the ERSA, not, apparently, about why they were doing so badly and what measures were going to be taken to improve the situation, but about how to spin the failure. The emails suggest that the DWP even considered ignoring the contractors' minimum performance levels completely, but McHugh thought they needed to be prepared for questions on it. She was right. The DWP press release did ignore the minimum performance levels, but the media went with it anyway. This hardly inspires confidence that effective measures to tackle the dismal performance of the WP providers are being taken. Indeed, the apparent vow of silence on the whole subject might be a sign that they hope we'll all forget about it – except for those obliged to take part in it, of course.
  
  
• Finally, the much unloved Universal Jobmatch. The last edition of Private Eye showed that many of the vacancies for carers were being advertised on the site at well below minimum wage when travel time was taken into account, and that the DWP was not interested in doing anything about this. Now they've turned their attention to the non-jobs (which many of our readers know only too well). They found adverts which turned out to come from outfits which demanded personal data but then never responded; simple data mining, in other words. And they chased down adverts for what are not real jobs but “multi-level marketing”, particularly from Kleeneze reps. Again, people were using UJM simply to garner contact details and make money out of desperate people. This isn't new. Such “opportunities” have been a familiar feature of job sites for years. But now that people can be punished for not pursuing them, it's only a matter of time before someone loses their benefits for refusing to join one of these pyramid selling schemes.

Radio 5 Live Investigates - the self-employment scam

The Radio 5 Live Investigates programme has tackled the Work Programme and its predecessors several times.  Today they were looking at reports that people are being pressured into declaring themselves self-employed simply to get an outcome for the providers, and on the promise that their benefits would actually be higher.  No providers were named, but by the end of the programme it was said that 10 different providers had been accused.
Did we learn anything?  A number of WP clients, two of them on ESA, told of being pressured from very early in their WP experience that they should go self-employed, not because they had any viable business in mind but because they could get more in benefits by claiming Working Tax Credits.  They were given totally inaccurate figures, according to Sue Royston of the CAB, and were being led into a very dangerous situation where the fact that they're not working the requisite number of hours results in a clawback of thousands of pounds.  People spoke about advisers being totally clueless and only driven by the need to get people signed off.  One WP client, an unemployed project manager, faced an "adviser" who didn't know what a project manager was and admitted she couldn't help him, but the office rang a bell, literally, whenever someone signed off.
Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA (the industry's trade body) said she was surprised.  She corrected some of the misinformation - the providers only get an outcome payment after 6 months, not immediately as had been said.  But there was no excuse for bad advice, and people should complain to the provider if they felt they had been wrongly advised.  The researcher was able to point out that people are frightened to complain, and would not use their real names on this programme.  McHugh was then guilty of what I'm seriously tempted to call a lie - that WP providers are not able to sanction anybody.
Mark Hoban wasn't available, and the DWP said that there were always payment checks and a complaints process.  Stephen Timms, for Labour, had nothing useful to say.
What came out of this investigation was that the taxpayer is being ripped off in at least two ways.  WP companies are claiming outcome payments they are not entitled to; and WTC is being paid falsely.  There's also the problem that the government is putting out false figures on jobs.

One thing that wasn't mentioned but which I'm wondering about; is agency work (which has always been regarded as casual work and so doesn't attract an outcome payment) being reclassified as self-employment? I know that supply teaching agencies have forced their clients to become self-employed, so shifting the costs of National Insurance and administration of tax onto the client.  The same seems to be true of nursing agencies.  Is it happening in other areas as well?  If so, it's another serious distortion of the figures.

Slippery figures for the Work Programme

The ERSA (the trade body of the w2w providers) has put out a statement warning that the Work Programme is not likely to meet its targets.  Hardly a surprise.  But what's interesting is the way in which the various media reports of this spin the figures.

Take the version in the Financial Times.   They report the ERSA saying that on average 22% of starters "have been placed into jobs".  Round the country the rate ranges from 18% to 26%.  But the signs are that a lot of the jobs are temporary.  The Recruiter website reports the range but headlines it as "nearly a quarter".  The Telegraph's version is that "a fifth" "have found jobs".  But on Radio 4's PM programme Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA said it was "approaching one in four".  Okay, you can say that it's a minor point.  But none of the reports point out that more than that number would be expected to have found work without any intervention - the dead weight figure. 

Radio 4 asked McHugh if the prime contractors were going to need to go to government for financial help; she dismissed the idea.  But one small contractor, Groundwork Southwest, has gone into administration, and several charities have pulled out.  The Work Programme isn't working.  Even those who find work are likely to be in temporary or part-time jobs.  Better than nothing for the clients, but useless to the providers.

For a little light relief, take a look at the latest post on Hayley Taylor's website and ask yourself if you would like this "Fairy Jobmother" to write your CV.