The view from Planet Tory

I'm not a Conservative voter.  (In fact, I'm politically homeless at the moment.)  I don't routinely read stuff on the Conservative Home site - too depressing.  But one blog piece on there popped up in the alerts which is worth reading for the insight it gives into the Tory mindset when it comes to welfare.  It's badly written and nobody has bothered to proofread it.  But when you get past that, you see an attitude which is blind to reality.  It takes as its starting point the ERSA figures published in a pre-emptive strike this week, and the writer, someone called Harry Phibbs, swallows them whole.  The WP "has certainly made progress", he says.  Well, we'll see.  He insists that the programme is "good value for the taxpayer".  "There is an incentive to innovate, to cater to the needs of the individual," he says, oblivious of the fact that this simply hasn't happened.  But "even more important is reality [sic] that for those able to work sitting at home on benefits is ceasing to be an option".  He misses the irony here; that the WP was supposed to solve this problem.  No, "Those who don’t find jobs via the Work Programme will go through a Community Work Programme where they work 30 hours a week for 26 weeks to contribute to their community. For claimants refusing to participate, benefits will be withdrawn for three months for the first offence, six months for the second, and three years for the third."  He is conflating a number of things here, but relishes the punishment to be dished out to these idle people.  His proudest boast, however, and the one displaying the greatest ignorance, is that 150,000 people, and rising, disappeared from the unemployed figures rather than go on the WP.  If this piece is a sign of Tory ideology triumphing over reality, the comments underneath it show that there are plenty of people know the truth.
But that doesn't include Fraser Nelson.  He's the editor of the Spectator magazine and one of the BBC's favourite journalists.  On Thursday he had an article in the Telegraph in which he tried, ridiculously, to show that the Tories are fighting for the "working classes" while Labour would abandon them.  While Nelson is a better writer than Mr Phibbs, his conclusions on welfare are very similar.  The WP seems to be working now.  There's a curious statement that IDS has decided to "hire more private companies to help the long-term unemployed".  That is news to me.  Then the usual laxity with figures starts.  "There are more in employment than ever before."  Of course there are, the population is bigger than ever before.  And of the 1.2 million referred to the WP, 321,000 have found work.  That's the headline ERSA figure, as we know, which is likely to be thoroughly misleading.  Nelson has examples of WP success stories - examples provided by A4e.  An ex-railwayman from Glasgow who got nowhere with the Jobcentre but, "with proper help on job-hunting", is now fixing computers.  And another man who, after 16 years out of work, is now a street-cleaner.  Good for both of them.  Any success is to be applauded.  But what does that prove?  Nelson says that these two stories "are the work of A4e, which was vilified when it said it had caught some of its employees fiddling the figures to hit targets".  Well, there was rather more to it than that, Mr Nelson.  
This, of course, is why the government allowed, or encouraged, the ERSA to put out the headline figures a week before the true statistics.  The myths can take hold, and the media can get bored before the details are published.  And it's these myths which permeate the consciousness of the government and its supporters.

STOP PRESS - contradictory figures

There has just been a confusing item on the BBC news.  It said that a third of people who have been on the Work Programme (I think they said for a year or more) have started a job.  But only one in ten of those with medical problems have started a job.  And the providers say that the money just isn't there in the scheme to help them.  Cue a brief clip of Labour's Liam Byrne saying that three quarters of people on the WP haven't even started a job.  And then Andrew Sells (who was captioned as a WP adviser but appears to be a businessman - see here) saying that the WP was more successful every month.  An employee of a WP provider (I didn't catch which one) was asked why the companies took the contracts if they knew there wasn't enough money in them, but he was otherwise treated sympathetically.

Now the item has appeared appeared on the BBC news website.  It has Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA (the providers' trade association) saying that money needs to be diverted from other budgets.  But I'm no clearer about the figures.

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.

The Work Programme - what we now know

Two quotes from that grisly Emma Harrison interview on Channel 4 News:
1.  (about the leaked A4e figures) "They're wrong."
They were right.
2.  "The Work Programme is the most successful programme we've ever run."
It isn't. 
The one thing that's missing from the data released so far is the comparative figures for the providers, at least in a form that means something.  So we don't yet know how A4e compares with the others.
Everything else is out there.  The dead weight figure for the first year was 5%, the number expected to get jobs without the WP or any other intervention.  So the target of 5.5% was very low.  The actual figure achieved is 3.5%.  There were 200,000 breaks in claiming, which the ERSA (the providers' trade body) wants to spin as 200k jobs.  Mark Hoban on the Daily Politics claimed that one in four have found work.  Iain Duncan Smith says that more than 50% have come off benefits.  Yeah, right.
The best summary, surprisingly, comes from the Daily Mail.  What a pity they spoil it by referring to people "returning to claim handouts".  Hoban intends to write to the worst-performing providers telling them to produce an action plan.  A far cry from the original promise to "sack" them.
There's a fair bit more talk to come today, much of it trying to prove that black is white.

"Providers of New Deal to voice concerns"

There's to be a meeting tomorrow, 2 June, between the "minister for work", Chris Grayling, and the body which represents the New Deal providers. That body, the Employment Related Services Association (ERSA) is chaired by Rob Murdoch, who is an executive director of A4e. The Financial Times reports on this today, and says that the providers "have spent millions bidding for the second wave of Labour's Flexible New Deal contracts". It goes on: "Those contracts were put on hold just as they were about to be awarded when the general election was called. But the existing providers also hold contracts under the first wave of Flexible New Deal that run to 2014." Current stop-gap contracts are due to stop taking on new clients next month, and the government wants the Work Programme up and running by April next year. Given that the government wants to roll up all the various existing contracts into one provision and put people on it much earlier, it "implies larger scale contracts", says Murdoch. He points out that if providers are only going to get paid for outcomes, it "has big implications for cashflows". If an organisation has to wait longer for payment, only the biggest companies can afford to bid for the contracts and stump up the money. Murdoch also has a threat for the government. "If they breach contracts, that would be very negative for how the provider market looks at the changes."

This is something which, presumably, the government has thought about. They have suggested in the past that they want to get smaller organisations and the "third sector" involved, but that will only happen if they act as sub-contractors to the big companies.