Sanctioned? Then starve

The sanctions story naturally generated a lot of interest.  This might rile you even more.  It's one of those stories that make you wonder, at first, whether it could actually be a wind-up.  But no.
Left Foot Forward reports that Hounslow Community FoodBox is a partnership between the local council and tenants' and residents' groups.  It's chaired by a Labour councillor, Steve Curran.  All well and good, you might think.  But specifically excluded from eligibility are those who are "under sanctions from the Jobcentre".    They, presumably, are the undeserving poor, who've brought it on themselves and can therefore starve, along with their kids.  Oh, and those who are "in constant difficulties due to chaotic lifestyles" are also ineligible.  They are undeserving too.
LFF say they have contacted the Foodbox but have not had an answer.  It would be interesting to hear the justification.

More truth, more lies

Iain Duncan Smith has been taken to task by the official statistics watchdog over his claims that the £26,000 a year benefits cap spurred 8,000 unemployed people to find jobs.  Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, has written to the TUC (following a complaint from them) to say that he did not comply with the code of practice on the way ministers handled figures, and wanting assurance that he won't do it again.  It sounds mild enough, but the language is strong for that kind of official letter.  The Huffington Post has the full letter, and the Independent dissects it.  Channel 4 News' FactCheck has also described the situation.  They all point out that this isn't the first time that IDS has been officially rebuked for making false claims.  At last, this morning, the BBC has reported the story, talking briefly to MP Dame Anne Begg who was copied into the letter.  She talked about using figures to make a political point and referred to the false claims about 1 million people who were supposedly fit for work.
But "lies, damned lies and statistics" are the stuff of much modern journalism.  Ministers are fond of talking about "fraudanderror" (as if it was one word) costing vast amounts of money.  Left Foot Forward publishes the official figures from the DWP, which show that just 0.7% of total benefit expenditure (£1.2bn) is down to claimant fraud.  0.9% is due to claimant error, 0.4% to official error.  A poll carried out for the TUC shows that the public believes that the fraud figure is 27%.  Now, how could they get that false impression?  Could it be the result of disgusting "journalism" like that in the Express today?  Somebody called Martyn Brown writes an article headlined "Call for new blitz on benefits to cut £3.6bn fraud bill".  Hang on, where did that figure come from?  Oh yes, it's 3 years' worth.  And there's a great big photo of "benefit scrounger Mick Philpott" (who is referred to again at the end of the article as if he's typical).  The only reference to percentages in the piece is the fact that the figure for official error has fallen to 0.4%.  Brown dissects the fraud figures to show what huge amounts of money are involved, and drags in the odious Taxpayers' Alliance in support.  There's nothing in the piece which is actually false (I think) but it's pure propaganda, selective use of the figures to create a false impression.

The freedom of the press - to lie

The owner of the Daily Express is Richard Desmond.  The editor is Hugh Whittow.  The writer of a particularly shameless article today is Giles Sheldrick.  I mention these names because newspaper articles don't come about by accident.  They are the result of deliberate decisions by men who consider themselves free to debase the whole concept of truth.  This is propaganda of the most egregious kind, peddling an interpretation of figures which have been shown to be false.  These men don't have to explain why they do this.  They are not answerable to the people they insult and denigrate.  They just make money.
If you have read the article, you might also read this piece in the New Statesman; or, if that's a bit left-wing for your taste, this one in the Economist.  You might also read FullFact's analysis of the figures, written back on 24 April.  But the circulation of the Express is nearly 600,000, and presumably those people read it because it confirms their prejudices, not for truth.
Related to all this is an interesting piece on the Left Foot Forward website, which graphs the number of times the word "scrounger" has been used in British newspapers since 1994.  It takes off steeply from 2010. Some of the comments under the article rubbish the accuracy of the exercise, but it remains fascinating.

PS:  I later discovered this, even worse, article in the Daily Mail.  They've added a bogus "workshy map of Britain" to fuel the lie of those "found fit to work".  It's breathtaking in its sheer dishonesty.  The writer is someone called Amanda Williams.  I wonder how much she was paid for this scurrilous trash.  These two papers between them continue to make Britain a nastier place than even the politicians know how to do.

"Misleading and insulting"?

That's what Mark Hoban calls criticism of the "work experience" schemes.  He's written a piece for the Telegraph explaining away the need for emergency legislation and justifying what most call "workfare" with the usual buzz phrases.  I won't bore you with them.  As always, the comments under the article are much more informative than the article itself.

But the Left Foot Forward website has an interesting piece called "Five things the government won't tell you about workfare".  What the five points amount to is that the schemes don't help people get into work.  So all that Hoban and the government are left with is what the last administration actually called "work for your benefit", and they are happy to cite the findings of a survey, that 85% of respondents believe that unemployed people should do just that.  So who is being misleading?

Labour, by the way, has decided to abstain in the vote on the emergency legislation (which stops the government having to pay back the £130m they took from claimants while the schemes were illegal).  There are a lot of Labour people unhappy about that.  But there's talk of Labour pressing for an enquiry into the sanctions regime.

As a postscript, a piece on the BBC News website reports a housing association, Eastlands Homes, sending a disgusting newsletter to its tenants.  They asked people affected by the welfare cuts, "Can you really afford Sky, cigarettes, bingo, drinks and other non essentials?"  They've apologised.  But it's very telling that someone responsible for the newsletter could put it out in the first place.

Reaction to the figures

There hasn't been much reaction to to those figures released yesterday.  The Guardian has a long piece which airs the arguments about what the figures mean.  They put to Grayling the point that the companies had "creamed off" the easiest groups, but he says they didn't.  A couple of industry websites summarise the press release, which is what the government obviously wanted - a bald heading that 25% were off benefits after 36 weeks.


Channel 4 News' Factcheck blog does a reasonable job of analysis.  They point out that the non-intervention rate (the numbers who would get work anyway) was supposed to be 28%, so a current figure of 24% is hardly brilliant.  And, as they say, it's not even a figure for those who've found work, because people sign off for a variety of reasons.  They point to ONS figures that show that in the last 3 months only 46% of those who left JSA actually went into work.  


The political left naturally chooses to focus on the fact that the number of people out of work for two years has more than doubled under the current government.  Left Foot Forward uses this to show that the WP is failing.


No one, apparently, can remember as far back as privatised New Deal (2006 - 2009), where the providers promised 50% job outcomes and delivered around 24%.  Strange coincidence.  But the WP was supposed to give the providers the ultimate incentive - payment by results.  It's not working, is it?

That document

Last week a set of data was broadcast round the internet.  It seemed to show some performance stats for a whole lot of A4e's "partners" on the Work Programme.  I had a look, decided it was very difficult to interpret and not very relevant anyway.  But now Left Foot Forward have got hold of it and have asked A4e about it. The interpretation Left Foot Forward puts on it is that fewer than 10% of clients have found jobs, and fewer than 2% have held on to the job for 26 weeks.  A4e says that the data "was drawn from a test website which is confidential and protected" and "was obtained from a password-protected secure site", so it's not clear how it got out.  A4e threatens legal action "should you publish this data or make any of the inferences set out."  Left Foot Forward couldn't get any further clarification of what law A4e intended to use.  I remain dubious about the value of these figures.
It's timely that Richard Johnson, who used to be head of welfare-to-work for Serco, has written about the need for absolute openness in the WP performance figures.  He talks about the PAC's questions about money being creamed off by providers.  "One provider, in particular, appeared to be behaving like the fattest of cats, pouring many millions of dividend cream into her own bowl."  And he wants an independent regulator.  It's an interesting read, even though I don't agree with his conclusions.

Plugging away

There's an interesting piece by Fiona MacTaggart MP on the Left Foot Forward website.  MacTaggart is the Labour MP for Slough, and a member of the Public Accounts Committee which tore into A4e recently.  She begins: "In politics often you plug away at an issue with no-one noticing, and then it becomes big news."  Yes, Fiona, I know the feeling.  She then says that over the last two years she has reported A4e to the National Auditor three times after complaints by constituents.  And it was in Slough that four former employees were arrested.  She outlines her concerns about the company:

• It cut its costs and provided a poor service
• It implied that it could offer skills training courses but failed to provide them
• It used unemployed people in unpaid roles in the company, and didn't give a job to any of them

We have a right, she says, to expect high standards from A4e in return for their high profits.

All true.   But something else worries me.  MacTaggart certainly isn't the only MP who has had complaints about A4e (and, I'm sure, about other providers).  There are a number of things MPs can do with such complaints.  They can i) ignore them; ii) pass them on to the relevant minister; iii) pass them to a civil servant in the relevant department or iv) pass them to the National Auditor because money is involved.  Whatever the various MPs did, the DWP would have been well aware of an accumulation of complaints; but nothing was done.  Undoubtedly, bland responses were given, assurances offered.  It's pure luck that MacTaggart was tenacious and well-placed.  Could we now see some other MPs coming forward with their own dossiers of complaints - and the replies they received?

Abandoned

The name of Emma Harrison came up in Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons again today, when Labour's Nick Raynsford asked what independent checks were made before her appointment as families champion, and what checks should be made in the future.  The Telegraph tells us that Cameron yesterday "asked the head of the civil service, Jeremy Heywood, to conduct an inquiry into what happened."  But at the time, there was no formal investigation going on.  He was concerned, said Cameron, that information should have been passed up.  It was the "nobody told me" line.  But Labour are in a tricky position, which Cameron exploited, reminding Raynsford that Emma Harrison was given her CBE by Labour, and it was his government which gave A4e all its contracts.  Harrison must feel that she's been completely abandoned by politicians of all stripes.  There could be more trouble for all the big companies, as the Public Services Social Value Bill is about to reach the statute book, requiring councils and other public bodies to take into account wider social value, and not just cost, in awarding contracts.
If you were listening to the radio at lunchtime you may have heard Anne Marie Carrie of Barnardo's breaking the news that the DWP has dropped benefits sanctions from their work experience scheme.  It won't be enough to please everybody.  But there is proof now that the DWP was playing about with evidence against the "voluntary" nature of this scheme.  Channel 4's FactCheck site has tracked the disappearing documents.  And Left Foot Forward provides a timely guide to all those schemes, including the Work Programme, where work experience is still mandatory.

Free labour for Tesco

Many people will have seen the news today about Tesco's use of free labour.  It started with a "job" advert on the government's own website for a night shift worker in Tesco in East Anglia.  Pay - "JSA + expenses".  Outrage spread via Facebook and other sites.  Then Left Foot Forward showed how this was far from a one-off.  Guardian journalists had found several similar adverts.  Tesco's response fluctuated.  First they told people that they were helping young people by taking part in a government scheme; then they said at had been a mistake.  Now John Harris has written a considered piece in the Guardian about what he calls the "sinister reality" of such schemes.

I can add little to what has been written.  But it will be interesting to see whether the story is taken up by the rest of the media.  Newsnight, perhaps?  If you're one of those driven to boycott Tesco because of their use of free labour to save on employment costs, bear in mind that Sainsbury's and the Co-op have decided to steer clear of the scheme, and can be patronised with a clear conscience.

The magical Work Programme

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.

Lying with statistics, and reforming welfare

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.