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.

Going up

The news today is that unemployment is slightly down but the number claiming benefits is up.  There's a good analysis in the Independent.  Not even Chris Grayling can see much encouragement in the figures.  And, unusually, he doesn't try to cite the Work Programme as the solution.   One of the union leaders, Dave Prentis, points out that, "The number of people unemployed for more than two years continues to rise. We know that the longer someone is out of work, the more difficult it is to get back into it."
 The BBC this morning (Today on R4) followed 8 people who were put out of work when a shop closed.  5 of them are still unemployed months later, and aware that time is running out for them.  What a pity that the crisis around A4e scuppered the BBC's plans to follow a number of clients at A4e's Liverpool office.  (See my 8 Feb post.)  It was a project which began in November 2011, but presumably had to be killed.  The fact is that the Work Programme isn't working.

"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.

"The Report" on the Work Programme

Radio 4's "The Report" tonight on the Work Programme had a straightforward thesis: it is unlikely to succeed when it is being delivered by the same private companies which have failed on all previous welfare-to-work schemes.

They homed in on the Pathways to Work programme which failed so dismally for those companies. A4e and Reed, you remember, were interrogated by the Public Accounts Committee on why they had performed so much worse than Jobcentre Plus. Now, A4e's Nigel Lemmon ( Executive Director A4e Welfare) says that they did better in some areas than in others; but the programme pointed out that this was only on their own measures of performance. (Lemmon later on said that all the criticism of A4e was unfair.) Dan Finn, who is a professor of social inclusion, said that JCP did better because they had been doing the work for years - er, yes - and because they were in competition with the private sector. (No evidence was given for this, because there is no evidence.)

Then we got Hayley Taylor. But what she said was actually true; people are not realistic and the government has no comprehension of people's lives. A report from the DWP says that half the people on benefits are not looking for work. I haven't seen the report, so I don't know what that figure includes. There was an interview with Colin in Leeds, a graphics designer unemployed for 3 years, who described the poor facilities and lowest-common-denominator approach he has experienced on New Deal and FND. Then Hayley Taylor openly criticised her old employer, A4e, for the first time. She knew it was hopeless when she was faced with an 18-year-old who didn't want to work and a redundant 55-year-old who was desperate for a job and was expected to deliver the same lesson to them in the same class. The impression was given that this was the reason she left A4e, whereas she seems to have left to star in her own show. Anyway, the programme pointed out that much of the criticism they had heard was about A4e, which seemed to have an unenviable reputation. Yet it got the second-largest share of the WP contracts. We heard from Martin who is with A4e for the second time; he was shattered to hear them telling him that his CV was no good, when it had been done by the same A4e people the first time around. He said he felt he was serving a prison sentence.

The presenter said that they had spoken to numerous people on the WP who feel that they are being ignored because there are too many people on the programme. They also complained about assumptions that every client was illiterate, innumerate and stupid. One commentator said that the big companies had all bid for the WP because that was all there was, and they all assumed that the government will have to step in and renegotiate when it goes wrong. Chris Grayling said that won't happen. The CE of the WISE Group complained that they had lost out on the contracts and had to lay off 40% of their staff. The presenter then said that they had a confidential document which shows that Ingeus offered a 60% discount for part of the contract, and they were not the only providers which had done this. Grayling denied that the government was putting price before quality. It was pointed out that only half the promised 40% of the work went to small companies and voluntary sector, and there were fears that the primes would cherry-pick the easiest customers and pass the hardest on to their sub-contractors. Finally, and significantly, the presenter said that everyone they had spbout oken to in their research wanted a job. All in all, this was a worthy attempt to present a serious programme about the Work Programme.

Here's the document about A4e's "Families Unlimited" project to get sub-contracts for the new workless families contracts. There's an American organisation with the same name. Perhaps they didn't know.

I'm thinking of setting up a website with practical advice for the unemployed; jobsearch, application forms, CVs, interviews etc. What do you think?

The Work Programme proceeds

The publicity surrounding Emma Harrison and her project is over, and attention turns back to the Work Programme. A4e continues to generate PR for itself, helped by the government. The Oxford Mail published a touching story about Chris Grayling's visit to A4e in Oxford and how he heard how "Furniture maker Shane Clarke got a new job four hours after visiting a 'giant employment dating service' in Oxford." The article details several other people who found work quickly; but the manager at Oxford wouldn't give figures for just how many people had found jobs since June, because that was "commercially sensitive". And the government doesn't have to give those figures until next year. It's not all plain sailing. In Runcorn and Widnes, where the WP is run by Ingeus and A4e, there have been delays caused by "data security issues" with A4e and a higher number of starts than expected. The article concludes with the statement that "So far 31 jobseekers have been seen (by A4e) but only 22% are considered ready for the workplace." This notion of "job-ready" appears to be common to all the providers, and up to a point it's sensible. But it does brand a huge number of people as not job-ready without detailing why.

Much has been made of the position of the voluntary sector (or Third Sector as some organisations prefer to be known) in the WP. Their involvement was guaranteed. Many were not enthusiastic, but needed the funding that sub-contracts could give them, and didn't want to see their work taken over by someone else. Now, various groups are feeling let down, with the work not materialising. One charity, Crisis, is particularly unhappy. Its Welfare Network Manager writes that "The reality of the Work Programme is proving to be quite different from what the government promised." He (or she) doesn't specify which prime they've been dealing with, but as well as getting much less than they believe is necessary to support a homeless person into employment but, "In addition, one contracter would only pay us for engaging with a client and job entry (the hard and expensive bit) whilst they would then themselves support the client for the year in work (the easy bit with the highest payment from DWP). There were also requests that we work with their clients using our own funding streams - with no financial reward for doing so."

The BBC is running a programme on Radio 4 next Thursday at 8.00 pm on the Work Programme. There's no indication of what line they're going to take. It can only be anecdotal. Let's hope it's fair.

Work Programme starts

Loads of publicity today for the start of the Work Programme, most of it ill-informed. The BBC's Today programme on Radio 4 made a complete mess of it, with a dreadful interview of Chris Grayling by John Humphrys and then a brief discussion between a chap from the Work Foundation and one from CDG.

The print media are scarcely any better. As you'd expect, the Express leads with "A crackdown on benefits scroungers will be launched by ministers today" and continues in the same ignorant, not to say demented, vein. The Mail is actually rather better, but it loves the idea of "recruiting former Army officers to help instill discipline into young jobseekers".

The Telegraph takes a different line. Its writer, Louisa Peacock, asks how the scheme can succeed when it "is being delivered by the same old providers". She points out that PriceWaterhouseCoopers pulled out because it didn't think the scheme was financially viable. "If the same old providers haven't found a solution to this by now, what on earth can be different in this 'step change' of delivery?"

The BBC news website quotes A4e's Andrew Dutton, who "said it would look at removing the barriers that had been keeping people out of work. 'They [sic] may be debt issues or housing issues or problems within the family, legal issues around housing, but often very much around supporting them to really gain confidence,' he told the BBC."

The Guardian is thorough and balanced. Its writer, Patrick Wintour, cites the concerns of the Work Foundation "that in areas of Britain with the highest unemployment and fewest job vacancies, contractors will struggle".

Chris Grayling had an easy time on The Daily Politics. But when asked about the concerns that providers would focus their efforts on those areas of the country with the best job prospects, he said that there had been intense bidding and competition for all areas from the providers, so he was confident that wouldn't happen. The interview ended with a question about why the private sector was going to be better at this than the public sector. The answer was purely ideological.

Tell BBC Radio 4 about New Deal and FND experience

The following comes from the Indus Delta site :

The producers of BBC Radio 4's "File on Four" are preparing a programme about welfare reform and New Deal. They would like to hear views (good and bad) from New Deal and FND clients.

Here's what they say:

"We are researching a programme for BBC Radio 4 and we want to hear from clients who have been on New Deal or Flexible New Deal back to work courses within the last year. What has been your personal experience? Has the course lived up to your expectation? Please email : Kate.O'Hara@bbc.co.uk or text, or phone on 07834 846 059 with your details of how we can contact you quickly. We’ll call you back."

BBC Radio, News and Current Affairs
BBC, Oxford Road, Manchester, M60 1SJ.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/fileon4