The mind of Iain Duncan Smith

The most remarkable item to pop up in the news feeds this week was in a regional paper, the Gloucestershire Echo.  It's the key to understanding the mind of Iain Duncan Smith and the battle which his opponents face.  I urge you to read it before going any further.
Okay?  You're surely bemused now.  Can this be what he really believes?  Let's take it a few sentences at a time.  He was asked if he accepted blame for the fact that the use of food banks has quadrupled in Cheltenham, according to the Trussell Trust.  IDS replied that he is "very much in support of people helping other people.  I don't even think there is a blame here."  So it's just a matter of mutual support, and not something anyone, least of all IDS, is at fault for.  Now we get the waffle:
"The reality is that first of all people who get involved with food banks, set them up, are doing what they feel is very community spirited and want to help out people who they think have got a particular issue or problem."  
This is pretty meaningless, but implies that the Trussell Trust is doing what it wants to do, and so what?  Nothing to do with me.
"The reality is [that silly phrase again, which asserts rather than argues] that usage of food banks has been rising anyway and it was rising even during the time of growth under the last Government, continuing to rise over this, most of the period you are talking about anyway is pre-the impact of welfare reforms, most of them didn't come in until the early or middle part of last year."
Food banks started in a small way under the Labour government, but their numbers have soared since 2010.  That hasn't stopped the Tories making thoroughly dishonest statements.  And what is IDS arguing here?  That the growth is not down to "welfare reforms"?  So what is the reason?  He leaves that one hanging.
"I think it is a positive thing for people to use food banks and I think if they need it, local authorities sometimes refer to food banks now because they run the social funds and instead of actually just paying money out some of them refer across."
The first part of that is just grotesque.  Then he gets on to blaming local authorities.  They "run the social funds" so they save money by sending people to the food banks rather than giving them cash.  No mention, you notice, of jobcentres doing the same thing, or of his refusal to publish, or even collect, any data on this.
"There are complex reasons why people use food banks but I think it's excellent."
Dismissive, contemptuous and stupid just about sums up that sentence.  But he hasn't finished:
"We should put this in context.  In the UK the Trussell Trust has put some figures out that say about 60,000 people use them a week but in Germany, which has a more comprehensive welfare system, one and a half million people a week use them and in Canada which has a smaller population about 800,000 a week use them."
Notice the phrase "has put some figures out".  It drips with contempt for the Trust's propaganda, and then implies that the figures are tiny anyway in comparison with other countries.  I have no idea whether his figures for Germany and Canada are correct or whether direct comparisons are possible, but it's irrelevant to the argument.
The interviewer must have felt that it was like punching blancmange.  There is no sense at all that Duncan Smith understands what's going on or why.  He literally doesn't want to know.  He has a completely fixed idea of his mission, and filters out any inconvenient fact which doesn't fit.
Mr Duncan Smith is appearing before the Work & Pensions Select Committee on Monday to answer questions about Universal Credit.  Not the PAC, as I thought, which means he won't get the sort of grilling he would have got from Margaret Hodge.  It's at 4.30, I believe.  Let's hope it's televised.

IDS in bother again

It's another bad patch for Iain Duncan Smith.  Those pesky judges in the Upper Tribunal have ruled that the Work Capability Assessment, which tests whether people are fit for employment, is inadequate when it comes to people with certain mental conditions, like autism, which mean they lack insight.  It puts them at a substantial disadvantage when trying to navigate the process.  Under the present system the claimants are expected to put together the medical evidence themselves, but the lawyers argued that it should be the government's responsibility.  Now, a reasonable response to this ruling, you would think, would be a statement that the DWP accepts it and will put things right.  But not the DWP.  The Huffington Post publishes the tweets from the DWP press office: "We disagree with today's ruling...".  So they'll appeal and stall.
IDS can avoid personal responsibility for that one, but not for the "misuse" of statistics recently.  Now we learn that he is to be "grilled" (not literally, sadly) by the Work & Pensions Select Committee as they "examine the way DWP releases benefit statistics to the media".  For a summary, see the New Statesman article here.  Should be interesting.

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.

Financially viable?

Nobody seems to be asking at the moment whether the Work Programme is financially viable for the providers.  The Work and Pensions Committee has taken evidence from "users" and there is a focus on the voluntary sector and small organisations which have found that the programme is not working for them or for anyone else.  Charities which help the homeless are particularly concerned about the specific problems of their clients being ignored; WP providers not even asking whether someone is homeless.  Yet the charity Crisis says that it got two people into work separately from the WP but was contacted by a provider asking for details so that it could claim the outcomes.  Meanwhile the media are focussing on other groups such as the disabled.  I missed the Panorama programme, but I gather that A4e was just one of the providers that didn't come out of it very well.  The response of A4e, as usual, is to point to a success story.  Next Sunday morning at 11.00 Radio 5 Live is looking at self-employment and the WP.
But, as I said, nobody is asking whether the whole thing could founder on the fact that the providers can't afford to run it.  The government insisted from the outset that only the largest and most financially secure companies could be prime providers, and that drove some companies, such as Ingeus, to partner with companies which could guarantee their financial security.  A4e didn't do that.  Nonetheless, the DWP was surprised that some potential primes put in bids that even the government didn't think were viable.  It now appears that the attachment fee income was sufficient to keep the companies ticking over.  Maximus, for instance, said that it had broken even on the first year.  But A4e's accounts to March 2012 showed them in deep trouble, and apparently without the expectation that things would improve much.
So what would happen if a prime decided that it just couldn't afford to go on?  Would the business be transferred to another company - assuming anybody wanted it?  Would they have to pay a penalty for breach of contract?  Is the government busy renegotiating terms in order to save the skins of these companies?  If that happens, I suspect it will be slipped through without publicity.

Someone put a petition on the government's e-petition website asking for the abolition of "work for your benefit/workfare schemes in the UK".  The rest of it was eminently sensible, but unfortunately the DWP was able to seize on the description and deny that there was any such thing as workfare in this country (it's American) and equally no such thing as "work for your benefit" - it's all about support.  How lucky that they changed the title of Labour's pilot scheme from "Work for your Benefit" to "Mandatory Work Activity".  

The Work Programme: experience of different user groups

This is the title of a lengthy document produced by the Work and Pensions Committee.  It's an interesting read, although I admit to skimming after a while, because a lot of the submissions are very similar.  A variety of sub-contractors contribute, along with individuals and prime providers.  Since there's so much of it, I've chosen to pick out the bits about, or by, A4e.

Gill Marshall, A G & I (UK) Ltd: "Companies such as A4e/Ingeus are too large to effectively run the programme and have far too much control."  She recommends a model not very different from that which worked before outsourcing in 2006.  "It would be better if there were one centre (Centre of Training & Educational Excellence) in each county holding the funding, regulating and managing the training providers to ensure standards and performances are met."  She gets in a specific dig: "Anyone can claim that they are successful, A4e being a prime example!"
Anna Burke, Consultant Partner, Drop the tag: She was the boss of Eco-Actif, the sub-contractor to A4e which folded.  "We only received £210 of the average £400 attachment fee in Year One.  This double impact meant that we found it very difficult to provide the quality of service and adviser time that we were contracted for.  Indeed we felt it would be unethical to provide less.  The double layer of contractors also meant that it was taking an average of 10 weeks for invoices to be paid, which was disastrous for our cash flow. We were, however, under a great deal of pressure to ‘cream and park’.  At one point we were told (after a monitoring visit) that our advisers were ‘very good and experts in their field’.  We were then advised to redeploy them to other projects and employ more sales oriented staff who ‘would not care so much’."  She concludes that "There was very little in A4e’s approach that could be considered in any way innovative."
Milton Keynes Women and Work: They are very critical of A4e's behaviour.  "Milton Keynes Women & Work (charity No 1010038) established an agreement with the local A4e office to deliver various training packages. A4e did not adhere to the terms of the agreement e.g.  
a) They did not confirm numbers of attendees in time, did not give agreed notice times to cancel a course, did not give agreed notice period to cancel the crèche provision we had outsourced.  All of this had a negative financial effect on the
charity.  
b) They did not pay their invoices for several months which also impacted on the charities cash-flow.  
c) They cancelled a course we had an agreement to provide for them and started delivering a course in-house based on the format and content we had devised.

There is a long submission from A4e itself.  Not surprisingly, it stresses how wonderful the company is and how well it is doing with the Work Programme.  They do, however, echo something which comes up in a number of submissions:

"One way the Work Programme could be enhanced further is by strengthening the use of differential payments.  The nine current payment groups for the Work Programme are still loosely based on the previous type of benefit recipient. A4e is a provider to Job Service Australia, which means that we also operate with the Australian model. The Australian system has over eighty different payment groups. Our experience is that this creates better incentives, and better reflects the true costs and difficulty of dealing with a very diverse group of customers."

Specialist charity sub-contractors often say the same thing.

A4e says: "We would support greater use of 'Day 1 entry' for some types of customer."  Ignoring the misuse of the word "customer", this is about wanting to get some people, like offenders, onto the programme as soon as they sign on.

They get in a plea for their "super-contract" idea.  They want "the DWP to lead a pan-government effort to create a common social outcomes procurement framework.  This should build on the work of the recent Social Justice Framework for measurement and the Cabinet Office’s Social Outcome Fund, to allow a single provider to pool budgets around an individual."  I think they're going to push this at every opportunity.  

It will interest their clients to know that A4e believes "It is vital customers have a voice in the service they receive. It is crucial both to ensuring quality service and to suggesting further improvements to the service model. Therefore having good mechanism of feedback and complaint is a very important part of the Work Programme’s black box."

There is a great deal in this whole document which should result in changes to the Work Programme.  The criticisms and recommendations are so similar that they surely can't be ignored.

More advice for government

We know that A4e has never been shy of giving advice to government.  Submissions regularly pop up in response to the enquiries conducted by committees.  The latest is in relation to the Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into "Youth Unemployment and the Government’s Youth Contract".

They have every right to make such a submission, of course.  They stress their vast experience in this area and say that they are "currently helping over 20,000 individuals under the age of 25 enter employment."  And it's not just in employment.  "We partner with the public, private and voluntary sectors to develop innovative and efficient solutions to the most complex social problems; from entrenched, inter-generational worklessness to poor health in deprived communities. This work brings us into contact with people across the UK who we help to navigate public services, and ensure that they get the support and help they need to help themselves.  We therefore have a unique perspective on the ways in which services are delivered."

Yes, okay, we'll skip the obvious objections.  Have they got anything worthwhile to say on the subject of the "Youth Contract"?  Well, they point out that it's not clear how the delivery of the programme is supposed to work and who is responsible for it. And that, by the way, is a question that was raised when this scheme was announced.  If young people are guaranteed placements or subsidised jobs, why should WP providers get outcome payments?  But A4e is clear that it should be WP providers who do it and profit from it under payment by results.  And the ERSS framework, that list of approved prime contractors, should be flexible and allow new entrants.  They point to the need for better skills training for young people and cite A4e's Vox centres as the way to do it.
One interesting point in their submission is the risk of "deadweight costs"; that the wage subsidy will go to employers who would have employed these young people anyway.
What we see in this submission, as in others they have made to government, is a mixture of sensible observations and concern to expand their own business.  If other contractors have made similar submissions, they will have done the same.  What should concern us is not this very obvious lobbying, but the less obvious kind going on behind the scenes.