And after the publicity?

I didn't watch Emma Harrison last night in "Who Knows Best". If you did, feel free to comment. The lack of any reviews in the press, apart from the Guardian's premature piece, shows that it raised little interest. Perhaps that means that the TV companies have exhausted this particular line of programming; the "it's easy to get a job if you really want one" line. But I bet there is more stuff in the pipeline that encourages this perception and bashes all "benefits scroungers".

What does all this exposure mean for A4e? Like the other big contractors, they have been encouraged to expect to inherit the new Work Programme contracts. Emma Harrison's expectations are summed up in a little piece in the Wellington Times: "Iain Duncan Smith's New Work Programme has been greeted as 'fantastic news' by Emma Harrison the chairman of A4e. A4e have £300 million of Government training contracts and controls 25% of the long-term unemployment budget for the Department of Work and Pensions." She praises the new direction: "The way it has been done in the past is with a myriad of programmes going on, it has been too much, too complicated and the cost of it has been too much. This Government has been brave enough to announce that there will be one programme and that programme will be individualised to every single person who comes on the programme." And: Mrs Harrison said that A4e was 'very happy' to work within the New Work Programme payment structure. "We are growing organically. We don't do acquisition. We are all owned by ourselves. We are very well placed to do this thing," she said." And finally: "We will export this worldwide."

The "framework" is expected to be announced in November; those big companies which will control the contracts under the Work Programme. We can assume that the procurement process will not be influenced by the amount of TV exposure a company has had. But when it comes to selling your services worldwide, it can only help.

Who Knows Best? Now you don't need to watch

I don't want to spoil it for you, but the Guardian already has, publishing a review of tonight's programme prematurely. A4e's Emma Harrison won the challenge, getting the lad chosen for her by Ray Lewis a £17.5k position in a city firm. See, it's easy! But the writer of the piece, Alison Benjamin, isn't impressed. "The viewer was .... left with the sneaking suspicion that the competitive duo had called in the favour of friends as gospel-spouting Lewis lines up a position for Dave as a caretaker at a church-run community centre, and well-connected Harrison gets John a job in the City." Benjamin continues: "My main gripe is not so much with the programme itself – other than it was yet another vehicle for Harrison and Lewis to satisfy their insatiable appetites for self-publicity – but more with how the programme fails to highlight the government's flawed approach to tackling unemployment. It stands to reason that anyone given the tailored, one-to-one, intensive support, guidance and care that John received has a much better chance of being offered a job than someone left to languish on the types of employment programmes that welfare-to-work providers receive large sums of taxpayers' money to deliver in the form of government contracts. Another TV show, The Fairy Jobmother, bears this out. It features former Harrison employee Hayley Taylor going into people's homes to transform their job chances."

And well done to Mark Shields for keeping up his campaign. He was one of the people who were "advised" by Harrison on "Famous, Rich and Jobless" and he's still out of work. Let's hope the publicity helps him.

So, can I watch something else at 9.00 tonight?

Who Knows Best?

Channel 4 bosses think that you can't have too many programmes about unemployed people, so Emma Harrison is on our screens again on Tuesday 10 August. It's the second in a series called "Who Knows Best" (the working title was "The Wager", but that was obviously dropped.) Ms Harrison is billed as "the country's top recruitment expert", and we're told that "Emma's approach is to work with people: 'I walk by their side, hold their hand and we go on a journey resulting in them getting a job that transforms their lives.'" This piece doesn't mention A4e, and it may well be that Channel 4 has taken the same approach as the BBC did with FR&J; they are not advertising the company as long as they don't mention it, but everybody else can.

Meanwhile, one of the specialist sub-contractors in the Flexible New Deal business, Dering Employment Services, has gone bust. Dering was run by and for deaf people, and according to the Carley Consult site, "The company has claimed that the reasons for its failure stem from alleged non-payment of invoices and breach of contract on the part of one of the largest prime contractors with whom it works, and it is understood that Dering are considering legal action." No one is saying at the moment which prime contractor they are talking about. This comes at a time when Chris Grayling, the Work & Pensions minister, is trying to reassure the voluntary sector that they will get a slice of the Work Programme cake. In an interview with John Plummer of the Third Sector he points to various measures to ensure that charities and the like take a full part in the contracts. "We don't want to create a situation where you end up with a hard taskmaster prime contractor in effect exploiting voluntary sector organisations," he said. But Plummer maintains that "unless third sector organisations are used to bidding for huge contracts, they had better make friends in the City soon - or their role in government welfare projects could continue to be limited primarily to subcontracting."

Figures for FND outcomes have not been published, but A4e, in a PR piece on Wales Online, announces that they have got 5,626 people into jobs in Wales in the last 12 months. This means nothing, of course, without the total number of people on the programme; and we're told that "A4e has worked with more than 20,000 Welsh customers". That's only 28%.