Whistles blowing an uncertain sound

The Mail has waded in again today with its own whistle-blower revelations.  But the piece shows the danger of not having done your research.

They focus on A4e's Edinburgh office.  This is interesting because we have received a number of complaints about events there.  But the "former team manager", Amy Rae, tells us that all the blame lies with A4e.  Faced with an inspection they had to fake courses, because there was no money for real ones.  Then the specific allegations begin.  "‘People would be found a job on a construction site that only lasted a day,’ she says, ‘and that was enough to claim the money. It was easy because there was just a tick-box on the form to say the job was “expected to last at least 13 weeks”, but often labourers were being put out of work again after 24 hours.’"  As we've pointed out before, this was perfectly okay in the terms of the contracts.  And it was more often the case that a client would start a job and disappear after a day or a shift, thinking that now the JC would be off his back.  

We are then told that "In the A4e office in Bradford, one whistleblower alleged staff went to Staples, the stationery store, to buy ‘make-your-own’ stamp kits to use on paperwork staff filled out if they found someone a job."  The Mail makes much of these rubber stamps, but again there is not necessarily fraud here.  The forms produced by the DWP required either a company stamp or a piece of headed notepaper.  Many small employers had neither.  It was not uncommon for providers to make a rubber stamp, with the full agreement of the employer.  Towards the end of the article A4e is quoted explaining this.  But it's a very different matter from the next allegation: "Some employers’ signatures were allegedly faked electronically, using a scanner to copy a signature off one sheet and print it on to another. On other occasions, signatures of employers were allegedly copied by hand from the signing-in book at reception."  That's fraud, straightforwardly.  

In Newcastle, we're told, employees had to take basic literacy and numeracy papers to fill the targets A4e had to meet for these tests.  The whistle-blower there talks about the appalling conditions the clients there had to endure.  There are frequent allegations of forged timesheets, according to the Mail.  As we've said before, this is often an indication of incompetent admin rather than deliberate fraud, but it's surprising that it was so widespread.

The Edinburgh woman also talks about the rewards and prizes on offer for meeting targets, including an invitation to tea at Emma Harrison's mansion.
The Mail has, naturally, been more strident than the Guardian in its whistle-blowing.  And there are probably more journalists out there busily compiling similar allegations.  We have to welcome that.  But there is a need to separate what went on under the old privatised contracts from what is happening under the Work Programme.  The old contracts were deeply flawed, and the DWP is to blame for that.  Some providers obviously stepped over the line separating expediency from fraud.  A4e's focus on the bottom line drove people to dishonesty.  Is it still going on?

The sound of whistles blowing

The Guardian has a number of stories about A4e today.  But first, a story in the Financial Times.  David Cameron has admitted that there have been a total of 125 investigations into welfare-to-work companies in the last 6 years (that is, since privatisation of the contracts).  Eleven of these concerned A4e.  So there has been a lot of dodgy practice going on throughout the industry.

The first of the 3 Guardian stories comes from "several former managers" and concerns what the headine calls the "champagne culture" at A4e.  It's about junketing by Emma Harrison and A4e managers, with expensive foreign travel.  But the article goes on to revelations by an unemployed man who, ironically, had been a Jobcentre employee.  As a client of A4e he was given a 4-week work placement in A4e's own finance department.  There he processed expenses claims, some of them lavish and not backed up by receipts, something he was told not to bother about.  A4e's reaction is what you would expect from any company in this situation.

The second piece is a description by a client, Stuart Webb, of his experience of the Work Programme in Lincoln.  This will chime with many clients, and not just of A4e.  He was simply told to sit in front of a computer, find vacancies and apply for them.  For this, A4e got the £400 attachment fee.  There was, he said, no personalised assistance, and twice appointments were cancelled when he got there, wasting his time and money.  The good news is that he found himself a job, but it galls him that A4e get money for this.  Webb runs into the same difficulty as other discontented clients; it's his word against the company's.  "A4e said that some of his comments about Job Search sessions were 'entirely subjective', and that advisers are always available to 'support individuals' as well as helping them 'structure their job search'.  They said their 'staff are always 'bothered',  and that Webb's view of his adviser was 'disingenuous'. They also refuted the claim that A4e gave him no help. One of its staff had informed Webb of the vacancy that led to his new job, the firm claimed."  Let's be clear, this isn't a new situation.  Many, many clients through the years have felt that it was unjust that the contractor should get paid for a job outcome that was none of their doing.

The third piece concerns fraud by a single employee.  A4e was working with vulnerable youngsters on Teesside on a local council project funded by European money in 2009.  But one A4e employee crudely forged signatures to make the figures look better.  A4e had to withdraw from that part of the project.

No doubt this drip of revelations will go on.  Not all of them will be valid.  And unemployed clients will face the problem that their perceptions are easily deniable. 

PS.  Some readers helpfully send me lots of links to stories.  Thanks, but there's no need.  Google alerts are very useful.  

Unanswered questions

Two Labour MPs have tried asking questions about A4e but have not received answers.

The first is Liam Byrne.  Yesterday he put in a written question to Francis Maude, Cabinet Office Minister, asking "when allegations of fraud at A4e were drawn to the attention of his Department's Propriety and Ethics team.  The answer was: "As has long been the practice, information relating to internal discussion and advice is not normally disclosed."  No joy there, then, but I don't suppose Byrne expected anything else.
Last Tuesday Fiona Mactaggart asked "the Secretary of State for Justice what contracts his Department has with A4e; and what the (a) purpose and (b) value is of each such contract."  Now, you would have thought that was straightforward.  But Kenneth Clarke replied: "The Ministry of Justice has no current contracts with A4e. However other departments do have contracts with A4e that deliver services to offenders."  What Mactaggart probably had in mind were the contracts for prison education, known as OLASS (Offender Learning and Skills Service).  Helpfully, back in 2008 A4e submitted a memorandum to the Public Accounts Committee trumpeting its involvement in these contracts.  On their own website A4e talk about working in 20 prisons with 400 staff on OLASS and providing careers guidance in 7 prisons.  It's big business.  And apparently these contracts don't come from the Ministry of Justice.  So, do they come from the Department for Education?  It would seem so. 
If even MPs have trouble getting information, no wonder the rest of us struggle.

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.

Keep Calm and Carry On

The Independent on Sunday is the only paper today keeping the story going.  "Further No. 10 link to A4e" says the headline, linking the departure of Cameron's advisor Steve Hilton with the appointment of Harrison as "families champion".  Hilton recommended her, they say.  And they describe the £250k contract given to A4e last September.  "A4e is advising No 10 on the next wave of privatisation. It will offer advice on "value for money" in contracting out, including writing guidelines on future privatisations. The firm will hold a seminar in Whitehall explaining how to design welfare contracts with private firms. .......... The Cabinet Office hired A4e to advise on four experimental schemes to help families with unemployed parents. All are in Conservative-led authorities: Hammersmith & Fulham, Westminster, Birmingham and Leicestershire.  A4e is not running the schemes, but is helping the Government write the rules on how they should work. They are based on social impact bonds, the Government's 'big idea' for privatising welfare. Investors and banks will pay private companies to help poor families. The taxpayer will then pay them back over years for the supposed 'savings'.  A4e is being asked to advise how to stop welfare firms taking money for poor performance. Yet A4e has often been found to be a poor performer itself."  

 

When A4e's main website went down recently there were some of us who felt that it was the result of a decision to revamp the site as part of an image makeover.  But no.  It's back, with no changes.  Even the link to "Emma's blog" is there on the home page, even though it hasn't been updated since last November.  Andrew Dutton has posted a response to the various accusations, and he ends with a note on "A4e and Emma Harrison".  "As a result of Emma Harrison’s resignation, announced on 24 February, she is no longer a Director or Chairman of A4e which means she cannot participate at Board meetings. The governance of A4e has therefore changed with immediate effect and decisions relating to future dividend policy will be determined by the Board under a new, independent non-executive Chairman. In addition, Emma’s salary as Chairman and Director and payments made by A4e in respect of Thornbridge Hall have ceased."  So who made the decisions about dividends before?  And that last bit about Thornbridge Hall is interesting.  The Board are really seeking to distance themselves from the woman who still owns most of the company.

But back to the websites.  The MyA4e site looks like something designed by professionals who have no clear idea of who their target audience is.  One could say the same about the multitude of other sites set up by A4e.  There's A4e Voicewhich is a blog for good news items.  The latest, posted on 2 March, is aimed at refuting the criticisms of A4e for using clients in work experience roles in its own company.  Then there's A4e Transitions which is an arm of the company which provides services to companies which are making lots of people redundant.  Very different is A4e Careers which apparently seeks to recruit people to work for the company.  It's a mess, with cartoons, handwriting-style fonts and all the familiar slogans.  Much more sober is the Direct payments for social care site.   Eleven local authorities contract with A4e to deliver this service.  Then there's A4e Skills which is "the direct delivery arm for vocational learning, delivering Apprenticeship programmes, work based learning (QCF & NVQ's), in-house training and vocationally related courses, accredited courses including e learning courses.  Most training takes place within the workplace, working flexibly to meet the needs of both organisations and individuals."  Finally there's A4e Insight,  their "research and consultancy arm".  This is where the line between private company and public sector becomes dangerously blurred.

 

I've almost certainly missed some of A4e's numerous websites.  But what they show is a confusion about image, despite the vast amounts of money A4e has spent on PR over the years.  Will the aim now be to shun the limelight, stop provoking the natural response to hype, and just buckle down to making money?  

 

By the way, Emma Harrison is a trustee of the Eden Project, which is currently having to lay off staff because of financial difficulties.

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?

A flash in the pan?

The graph shows how the hits on this blog rose from the end of January, took off, soared and then gently settled down as the fall-out from the Public Accounts Committee meeting hit the headlines.  But the fuss dies down.  A4e and Emma Harrison are out of the news, and attention wanders away to other matters.  I'm sure that MPs Margaret Hodge and Fiona Mactaggart are still collecting stories, but they can't force an enquiry.  The government would just like to drop it now, and Labour, having garnered a bit of publicity for Liam Byrne, don't want to press too hard, because A4e's success is their responsibility.  Journalists are, no doubt, still collecting material, but they will drop the subject if it seems to be going stale.  You'll hear no more from the BBC.  Something worrying happened with the BBC, and we must be aware of it.  Emma Harrison had moved from being the owner of a business to being a celebrity.  There was a marked reluctance even to report the story, as if someone was ordering hands off.  It's unlikely that Harrison is the only person to have struck up a relationship with the Corporation which inhibits proper scrutiny.  But it means that people who had no particular interest in this subject are still almost completely unaware of what has happened. 

The Financial Times has kept on the case, reporting that DWP officials "told Number 10 that giving Ms Harrison a role advising the government on finding jobs for troubled families might cause ethical problems, given her company’s role as one of the main providers of the government’s £5bn back-to-work scheme."  But they didn't tell no. 10, because they couldn't see any reason to, that fraud investigations had been carried out into A4e.  They didn't see them as evidence of "systemic" fraud.  There is some minor fall-out around A4e's other contracts.  A4e has the contract to deliver "face-to-face" money advice, and the Money Advice Service has had to state that the current row has no bearing on this contract.  Glyndwr University, which had arranged to validate courses for A4e, has now said that it will keep the situation "under continual review". 

A4e has published (not necessarily deliberately?) its performance data for the Work Programme so far.  It's broken down by "partner" and difficult to analyse, but seems to show that on outcomes - sustained jobs so far - one organisation leads the pack.  It's too early to make much of this.  In the Autumn the DWP will have to publish figures across all the contracts.  Remember that the plan was to penalise the worst-performing provider in each area, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was dropped.

Emma Harrison has disappeared from Twitter, but Mark Lovell is still there (although he hasn't posted since 18 February).  

Has it been a flash in the pan?  Probably.