Waiting

Some people think that outsourcing has taken a bit of a knock lately.  The G4S fiasco showed how risky it can be, and the bad publicity surrounding A4e has done the whole business no good.  But none of it has slowed the pace of outsourcing, and ideologues of the right want to see everything hived off to the private sector.  Some local councils have already done this, knowing that they have no fall-back position if it goes wrong because they have sacked all their council employees.  The same handful of companies are scooping up all the work and the profits.  All that the government's much-vaunted Payment By Results has brought about is the even deeper involvement of the huge financial companies such as Deloitte and the shoving aside of the smaller organisations.  Big money rules.  And why would politicians want to change that?  

Working Links is having a bad time (see Private Eye) and warning staff that because they are not delivering the expected results for the Work Programme they could be in serious financial trouble.  One curious aspect of this is that the boss, Brian Bell, said that, "In some locations we are struggling to fill the vacancies we are finding."  Does that mean that employers won't consider people who are on the WP, i.e. have been out of work for a long time?  A4e's Andrew Dutton warned of that some time ago.  And the leaked document showing A4e's outcomes confirmed how bad the situation was.  But the official figures contradict that.  If the companies do fail, as the Eye points out, there is no fall-back position because there is no public sector involvement in the WP, so we could be looking at a bail-out for those companies.  That could include A4e.  But I suspect that some face-saving formula will be found to obscure the truth.  Anyway, A4e doesn't depend entirely on the WP.  

We're waiting for something to happen on the Slough A4e arrests.  The last we heard was back in May, when an eighth person was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud.  I know the legal system can grind slowly, but it's time we knew whether the case is going to trial.