Notes on comments

While things are quiet I'd like to make some points about comments to this blog. Comments are moderated.  I reject as many as I publish, for various reasons.

• they contain offensive language (and it's my decision as to what is offensive) 
• they are abusive towards individuals or groups
• they make allegations which may or may not be true, but I am in no position to verify them
• they are illiterate.  I don't require perfect English, but some people obviously don't read what they type.
• they add nothing to the discussion

I sometimes make the decision to terminate a discussion if it is deteriorating into a slanging match, or someone wants to have a personal argument with me.  It's my blog, after all!
There is a continuing problem with people who don't acquire a pseudonym and simply call themselves "Anonymous".  It can get very confusing.  I don't want to insist that you get a pseudonym, but there's no reason why you shouldn't.  There is no way of identifying you.
If you don't want a comment published, but just want to tell me something, say so at the beginning of the post.  Bear in mind that I can't edit a comment; I can only reject or publish it.  So I can't take out anything and publish the rest.
If you want to reply to another comment, use the "reply" button under that comment.
I use Google alerts (not the same thing as Google search), so I'm usually aware of the latest press and internet pieces.  If you draw my attention to something in the news, I may well be aware of it already, or I may choose not to publish it because I want to do a post about it.  Don't take offence if I don't publish your comment.
I will never publish email addresses.  If you want to contact me directly you can send a comment including your email address.  But I will only reply if I think you have a bona fide reason for wanting to make contact.
Finally, I am grateful to everyone who takes the trouble to comment on posts.  

"The Report" revisits the Work Programme

Six months after it first looked at the Work Programme, The Report on BBC Radio 4 revisited it.  Helpfully, the BBC published a piece on its website which could have avoided the need to listen to it at all.  But it was interesting.  The main focus was on those charities and voluntary organisations which are struggling, finding the WP not financially viable.  Despite gagging clauses in the contracts which forbid sub-contractors from doing anything to "damage the reputation" of the primes or "attract adverse publicity, one charity, the Single Homeless Project, has pulled out of its contract with Seetec and has been the first organisation willing to talk to the media.  What it boils down to is that the primes, the big companies, are not passing down the money to the charities to enable them to deliver the support necessary to the clients; they are only passing down the risk.

The Boston Consulting Group has produced a report pointing out that the DWP itself says that the "dead weight figure" - the proportion expected to get work if there was no WP - is 28%, and the assumption in the WP is that between a half and three quarters of the money paid out will be on those dead weight numbers, i.e. unnecessarily.  Chris Grayling and the DWP say that this is a misunderstanding of the figures.  Richard Johnson, who used to be with Serco and was involved in the contract negotiations, says that the model is wrong and is encoraging "creaming and parking", as so many said it would.

So what of the clients, asked the reporter.  Of the several clients who were interviewed six months ago, none have found work.  One, an A4e client, has had two interviews but there were 170 applicants for one of the jobs.  He said he had had no support from A4e, but the local office disputes this.
Back to the voluntary organisations, which the primes were obliged to include in their tender for the contracts.  They were called "bid candy" by some, and there are those which were not even aware that they had been put into a bid document.  Others have not signed a contract and have had no involvement with the WP.  Grayling had said that he would crack down on this, but now says that he hasn't received a single complaint about it. 

The Financial Times revealed the other day that the DWP has contingency plans in case A4e is stripped of its contracts.

Attack and defence

Our attention was drawn (thanks, Solomon) to a post on the businesszone site which has the quote of the week from Peter Holbrook, chief executive of Social Enterprise UK:  "Speaking at the opening of Social Enterprise Exchange in Glasgow, he went on to say that at a recent event, his chair, Claire Dove, 'almost decked' Emma Harrison, the 'infamous' founder of A4e."  He also said that A4e was about "pure profiteering and greed".  Holbrook's organisation is not alone in distancing itself from A4e.  It defines a social enterprise in the usual way, and specifically excludes any company which exists to make profits for shareholders or to "make its owners very wealthy".  Not so an organisation called ClearlySo, which says that it "connect(s) social enterprises with investors & the corporate world".  Their definition of a social enterprise is so elastic that they talk loosely of a "social business" which aims "to do good by doing well" (which is an inversion of one of Emma Harrison's little sayings) and A4e qualified to be in their directory.   The recent scandal got them seriously debating whether the company ought to stay in it, and now they've decided that it shouldn't.  The logic of their reasoning is beyond me.

Among those who really don't like A4e and all it represents are a lot of "voluntary sector" organisations.  This is another area where definitions are a bit blurred.  But on the Third Sector website someone called Debra Allcock Tyler tells us that "Charities should be running services because they care for people, not profit."  On the subject of the A4e scandal, she says: "I've been particularly amused by the moral outrage expressed by some of our politicians about the size of the salaries and bonuses paid to its directors."  Why should they be surprised when that's what businesses are for?  But her conclusion is that all the contracts should be given to charities.  "Our sector isn't in it for the money. We will do whatever it takes to continue to serve our beneficiaries, none of the money given to us will be distributed in profits and we do not walk away when the money dries up. So for me it's a no-brainer. Use charities to deliver services to vulnerable people."  I disagree.  The answer is a public sector which is properly valued, and actually pays people to do the front line work rather than just the management.

A4e, of course, are fighting back, with yet more PR.  They have now engaged "support from the Conservative Party's former campaign director", according to PRWeek.  "A small number of senior employees at Quiller Consultants, led by George Bridges, are working on what sources have described as a ‘crisis comms brief’......... A senior public affairs figure commented: ‘Bridges has very senior connections, and his crisis management role will be to help A4e get through its present mess.’"  Those "very senior connections" again; Bridges apparently ran George Osborne's 2010 election campaign.  But will they pull A4e out of the mess?  The company already employs at least 4 PR companies and has recently worked with another three.  Is the current need really for friends in high places?


 

The future of A4e depends .....

All the newspapers have reported the revelations from the BBC yesterday.  The coverage ranges from the Daily Mail's usual strident reporting, complete with graphics, to the more sober account in the Telegraph, which quotes an A4e spkesperson: "While this investigation uncovered a number of areas where procedures may have been lacking, the final audit and further investigation determined that five claims were irregular and related to one former employee.  This was reported to the DWP Risk Assurance Division, which confirmed that the action taken by A4e fully met their own audit requirements and that they considered the matter satisfactorily resolved.  A4e repaid the value of these three claims in full, which totalled less than £5,000.”  

The Yorkshire Post has the full quote from the DWP: "A 2009 A4e internal audit and risk document, relating to programmes contracted by the previous government, has today been passed to the department.  The Work and Pensions Select Committee was made aware of this audit at the time and the department later received assurances from A4e that it had not uncovered any major issues."  [my italics]

Paul Mason picked up this point on Newsnight tonight.  He said the DWP is now certain that it never received the report.  Yet weeks ago it asked for all the relevant information.  The report was made public in October 2009.  (I'm not sure what he meant by this.  Presumably it wasn't this leaked draft which was made public.)  So what did the DWP get, Mason asked.  
A4e says that they reported to the DWP the results of a final audit and further investigations.  The DWP says they only got the document yesterday. So was the version of the original audit report which was given to the DWP devoid of all the damning findings and warnings?  Did it amount to a cover-up? 
Mason ended by saying that the future of A4e depends on what was actually submitted in 2009.

Is this the end? Newsnight revelations

When Newsnight devotes nearly 20 minutes to the story you know it's serious.

We got a trailer in the news; and the Guardian published the details earlier tonight.  But the piece on Newsnight was pretty devastating.  A report has been leaked, an internal A4e audit, which found evidence of widespread fraud and irregularity.  Numerous job outcome claims could not be backed up by evidence.  If this was systemic management failure, asked Paul Mason, why have A4e still got contracts?  We were shown David Cameron at an A4e office and told that A4e are paid £170m a year.  Then we were told that 224 client  records were examined from 20 of the company's top performers.  4% of the claims were described as potentially fraudulent and 12% as risky.  These cases come from all over the country.  Employers complained of being given blank forms to sign.

A4e were said to be playing it down and wouldn't be interviewed.  Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA (the industry trade body) said that appropriate action had been taken.  But the DWP never saw the document.  Why not?  And what did A4e do about it?  Mason said that there were questions for the politicians.  The government has a duty of care to the unemployed who are being sent to A4e.  No one from the DWP would be interviewed.

That gave free rein to Margaret Hodge, who talked of a "shocking catalogue of incidents" and fraud being "erndemic in the company".  Any manager of moral integrity would have shared this evidence with the DWP.  Hodge is sure that it's a systemic issue throughout the company.  She has had over a hundred emails on the matter.  The company has been greedy, she said, and she wants their contracts suspended.  people will lose trust in the system as a whole.  She rejects the idea that this was all in the past and couldn't happen now.  She believes that the culture in A4e hasn't changed, and they are not an appropriate company to be getting all that money.

Liam Byrne was also interviewed.  He wants to know if ministers knew about this when A4e got the Work Programme contracts, and what checks are now in place.

The government is now in a difficult position.  Trying to bluff this out, when even the BBC have got their teeth into it, makes them look complicit in fraud.  But pulling the plug would be very messy.

If I had to bet on it?  I think it's the end for A4e.

Stop press - Newsnight tonight

We've just heard that Newsnight (BBC2, 10.30) has a special report tonight, 22 March, on A4e.  They have a leaked report, A4e's own audit, from 2009, which suggests widespread potential fraud.  Paul Mason says that it reveals that A4e knew that its controls were "minimal".  It surveyed only the top 20 recruiters in the company, and found that 8% of the outcome claims were potentially fraudulent and only 70% could be verified.  Employers say that they were asked to sign blank forms.  Two of those staff named are still working for A4e.

This could be dynamite!

Half a page in Private Eye

Yes, the latest edition of Private Eye devotes half a page to the continuing saga of A4e.  While there's nothing new, there are some interesting elaborations on what we already know.

There has been speculation that the system of giving bonuses to staff who get somebody into a job fuelled the temptation to cut corners and even commit fraud.  A4e actually admitted to MPs that the practice "may have been a driver for individual malpractice".  But Rob Murdoch said that he thought the problem had been solved by moving to group bonuses.  I doubt it.  It doesn't cure the culture of relentless pressure to reach targets and make money.  As we have said, A4e isn't the only company to use bonuses for job outcomes, but it seems to be the only one in which the practice has resulted in scandal.

The article cites what happened in Edinburgh over local claimants' battle to be represented by a support group known as ECAP.  This is something we reported on in the past.  Two people were "sanctioned" simply because they insisted on having an ECAP member with them at interviews with A4e.  Both won their cases at tribunal.

Finally the writer turns to the two new contracts for prison education, provisionally awarded to A4e.  He reports that the two most recent Ofsted inspections of A4e's prison contracts were pretty damning and wonders how they could be given new ones.

I'm sad to see that the owner of a blog which has been tireless in its criticism of the treatment of the unemployed has decided to wage war on Watching A4e.  His conclusions are bizarre, and I won't waste time trying to answer them.  I don't suppose it will help to say that we are both on the same side, although our approaches are different.

There seems to have been a hiccup in the comments notification recently, so apologies to anyone who left a reasonable comment which was published late or not at all.