There's a bit of news today which provides no comfort for A4e. Big reforms to pensions come in next year, and the government has recognised that people will need advice and guidance. It was expected that the Money Advice Service (MAS) would be the outfit to deliver that; but no. The Pensions Advisory Service will deliver the non-face to face guidance, while Citizens Advice will handle the face to face service. What has that got to do with A4e? Well, it's A4e which has the contract from MAS to do the face to face money advice, a fact which is still nowhere mentioned on the MAS website. So what might have been a new source of work for A4e won't be.
The "no news" refers to the silence over the Slough fraud case. If you need a reminder, there's this from the Daily Mail. Five A4e employees were convicted of fraud early this year, having pleaded guilty to using forged paperwork to make false claims. Sentencing was delayed, presumably until the trial of the remaining 8 accused, who were, we were told, due to go on trial in October. I assumed that these ex-employees had pleaded not guilty, hence the delay. Okay, there are two weeks of October still to go, but will we hear any more of this case? I know it's small beer compared to the massive frauds by G4S and Serco, apparently forgiven by the government. But we need to hear the full story.
Showing posts with label Citizens Advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Citizens Advice. Show all posts
Saturday, 18 October 2014
Friday, 18 April 2014
Religion and the war on the poor
In Easter week it's appropriate that the focus should be on Christianity. David Cameron's Easter message, his declaration that he is a Christian in a Christian country and his mini-sermon, has drawn scornful comments. But most of the journalists who have been cynical about it are atheists, and so while they are right in many respects they miss the point.
Cameron, along with Duncan Smith, is under fire from the leaders of all the mainstream Christian churches. They first wrote to try to draw his attention to the misery which his policies were causing to individual people, real people. IDS's response to his own church's leader was, "He's wrong; I wish he'd talked to me first." There's no way through that insane arrogance. Cameron waffled about having a moral mission. The church leaders have written again. And that's what has brought on the sermon about the big society. Neither he nor IDS ever address what the churches are saying about the real cases of hardship. Is Cameron trying to set himself up as an alternative focus of Christian authority? Is he trying to appease the Tory shires church-goers who loathe gay marriage etc.? Does he really believe what he is saying?
Many have pointed out that there might be another agenda here. The Tories are happily dismantling the welfare state and leaving casualties to be picked up by the charities, many of them church-run. Perhaps they envisage a US-style system where huge, wealthy church charities do the job which the state has hitherto done here. But we don't have huge, wealthy church charities in Britain, and bleating about the "big society" isn't going to create them.
While Cameron hasn't openly declared war on his opponents, Duncan Smith has. He can rely on the likes of Stephen Glover in the Mail to write preposterous nonsense on his behalf, and on councils like that in North Lincolnshire, where they have decided that "residents who smoke and have satellite television" are not eligible for hardship payments if they are hit by the bedroom tax. But IDS's arch enemy is the Trussell Trust, which he accuses of "running a business" and therefore having a vested interest in the proliferation of food banks. That'll go down well with the thousands of volunteers, in Trussell Trust and other food banks, who are giving their time and energy freely to help those in desperate need. An excellent article on the subject appeared this week in an unexpected place - the Economist magazine. I recommend it. It draws attention to the soaring number of sanctions. A similar point is made by the Citizens Advice blog, and it expresses concern that with the new regime of 4-week minimum sanctions duration this is going to get much worse.
Of course, readers of the Daily Mail don't know anything about that. In a baffling article yesterday someone called Matt Chorley, their political editor, ranted about the "welfare state we're in" and, since Mail readers need pictures, included lots of helpful graphics. What's peculiar is that he happily acknowledged that a huge proportion of the bill is the state pension. And pensioners react badly to being told that they're on "welfare" when they've paid in all their working lives on the basis that they would get a pension at the end of it. So this may well come under the heading of "shooting yourself in the foot".
There's some minor news about A4e. Two of its non-executive directors, Sir Hugh Sykes and Steve Boyfield, have stepped down, replace by Neil MacDonald and Sarah Anderson. It's not significant. Non-execs are only supposed to serve for 9 years, and for Sykes and Boyfield that period was up.
So, if you can, have a happy Easter.
Cameron, along with Duncan Smith, is under fire from the leaders of all the mainstream Christian churches. They first wrote to try to draw his attention to the misery which his policies were causing to individual people, real people. IDS's response to his own church's leader was, "He's wrong; I wish he'd talked to me first." There's no way through that insane arrogance. Cameron waffled about having a moral mission. The church leaders have written again. And that's what has brought on the sermon about the big society. Neither he nor IDS ever address what the churches are saying about the real cases of hardship. Is Cameron trying to set himself up as an alternative focus of Christian authority? Is he trying to appease the Tory shires church-goers who loathe gay marriage etc.? Does he really believe what he is saying?
Many have pointed out that there might be another agenda here. The Tories are happily dismantling the welfare state and leaving casualties to be picked up by the charities, many of them church-run. Perhaps they envisage a US-style system where huge, wealthy church charities do the job which the state has hitherto done here. But we don't have huge, wealthy church charities in Britain, and bleating about the "big society" isn't going to create them.
While Cameron hasn't openly declared war on his opponents, Duncan Smith has. He can rely on the likes of Stephen Glover in the Mail to write preposterous nonsense on his behalf, and on councils like that in North Lincolnshire, where they have decided that "residents who smoke and have satellite television" are not eligible for hardship payments if they are hit by the bedroom tax. But IDS's arch enemy is the Trussell Trust, which he accuses of "running a business" and therefore having a vested interest in the proliferation of food banks. That'll go down well with the thousands of volunteers, in Trussell Trust and other food banks, who are giving their time and energy freely to help those in desperate need. An excellent article on the subject appeared this week in an unexpected place - the Economist magazine. I recommend it. It draws attention to the soaring number of sanctions. A similar point is made by the Citizens Advice blog, and it expresses concern that with the new regime of 4-week minimum sanctions duration this is going to get much worse.
Of course, readers of the Daily Mail don't know anything about that. In a baffling article yesterday someone called Matt Chorley, their political editor, ranted about the "welfare state we're in" and, since Mail readers need pictures, included lots of helpful graphics. What's peculiar is that he happily acknowledged that a huge proportion of the bill is the state pension. And pensioners react badly to being told that they're on "welfare" when they've paid in all their working lives on the basis that they would get a pension at the end of it. So this may well come under the heading of "shooting yourself in the foot".
There's some minor news about A4e. Two of its non-executive directors, Sir Hugh Sykes and Steve Boyfield, have stepped down, replace by Neil MacDonald and Sarah Anderson. It's not significant. Non-execs are only supposed to serve for 9 years, and for Sykes and Boyfield that period was up.
So, if you can, have a happy Easter.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
More lies v. truth
You couldn't have a better example today of this government's contempt for the truth, and how the media collude with them.
On the one hand there are two articles, in the Express and the Mail. The very names tell you what's coming - a platform for Iain Duncan Smith to lie about some made-up figures. They are the same article, really. The Mail says: "Half of those caught out by benefits cap are 'spurred to seek work': New figures show the system is working". This is based on an Ipsos Mori poll of "more than 1,600 capped households" showed that 28% did more to find work. Pretty thin, you might say. Even thinner is the finding that 11% of capped households have found work, although you'll have to get your calculator out to work that one out. This gives IDS the excuse to claim that the cap is changing people's behaviour, etc, etc. This is the sort of nonsense which he was rebuked for, but he takes no notice.
The Express's version oozes hatred, as usual, referring to "handouts", "welfare bonanza", "workshy", "creaming off" and on and on, but it's the same lie based on the same dubious figures. Bringing in Jonathan Isaby of the Taxpayers Alliance to parrot the right things hardly enhances the credibility of this rotten propaganda.
So for an antidote we turn to the Guardian, and first to an article by Patrick Wintour. The same Ipsos Mori poll which delights IDS also shows that a third of people affected by the cap have had to cut back on essential items. Just as important are the findings of Citizens Advice. The increased ruthlessness of the sanctions regime is driving people to loan sharks and hindering them from looking for work. They point out that on the Work Programme twice as many people are sanctioned as find work.
And then there's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee. The latest employment figures will show that more people are in work; but in the last 3 months all the increase is down to self-employment. And most of it is down to desperation. Toynbee goes on to look at Help to Work. Since nobody actually calls it that, let's refer to it as workfare. She says: "For once, instead of rushing in, the DWP has done a good control trial on this with 15,000 unemployed. The pilot's results, however, were sneaked out just before Christmas with no press release. That's no surprise when you uncover the findings. First the unemployed were given a 13-week warning period to act as a deterrent, and then 26 weeks of either 'intensive Jobcentre Plus support', or the workfare 'community action programme'. Or they went into the control group with nothing special. Here's what happened: exactly the same number in the control group – 18% – found themselves jobs as those doing the forced community work. Just 1% more found jobs from the group with jobcentre support. In other words, workfare didn't work. Although 68% of the control group were still on unemployment benefits at the end, so were 66% of those who did the community work and 64% of those given jobcentre support."
Help to Work is only two weeks from launch, but there hasn't even been an announcement of the contractors, and Toynbee couldn't get an answer out of the DWP. She concludes that the only reason for going ahead with this is that it takes people out of the unemployment figures for 6 months. " Incidently," she says, "these sad long-term cases will do more than twice the maximum any court can sentence a thief to on Community Payback. To be out of work is now officially morally worse than committing a crime."
On the one hand there are two articles, in the Express and the Mail. The very names tell you what's coming - a platform for Iain Duncan Smith to lie about some made-up figures. They are the same article, really. The Mail says: "Half of those caught out by benefits cap are 'spurred to seek work': New figures show the system is working". This is based on an Ipsos Mori poll of "more than 1,600 capped households" showed that 28% did more to find work. Pretty thin, you might say. Even thinner is the finding that 11% of capped households have found work, although you'll have to get your calculator out to work that one out. This gives IDS the excuse to claim that the cap is changing people's behaviour, etc, etc. This is the sort of nonsense which he was rebuked for, but he takes no notice.
The Express's version oozes hatred, as usual, referring to "handouts", "welfare bonanza", "workshy", "creaming off" and on and on, but it's the same lie based on the same dubious figures. Bringing in Jonathan Isaby of the Taxpayers Alliance to parrot the right things hardly enhances the credibility of this rotten propaganda.
So for an antidote we turn to the Guardian, and first to an article by Patrick Wintour. The same Ipsos Mori poll which delights IDS also shows that a third of people affected by the cap have had to cut back on essential items. Just as important are the findings of Citizens Advice. The increased ruthlessness of the sanctions regime is driving people to loan sharks and hindering them from looking for work. They point out that on the Work Programme twice as many people are sanctioned as find work.
And then there's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee. The latest employment figures will show that more people are in work; but in the last 3 months all the increase is down to self-employment. And most of it is down to desperation. Toynbee goes on to look at Help to Work. Since nobody actually calls it that, let's refer to it as workfare. She says: "For once, instead of rushing in, the DWP has done a good control trial on this with 15,000 unemployed. The pilot's results, however, were sneaked out just before Christmas with no press release. That's no surprise when you uncover the findings. First the unemployed were given a 13-week warning period to act as a deterrent, and then 26 weeks of either 'intensive Jobcentre Plus support', or the workfare 'community action programme'. Or they went into the control group with nothing special. Here's what happened: exactly the same number in the control group – 18% – found themselves jobs as those doing the forced community work. Just 1% more found jobs from the group with jobcentre support. In other words, workfare didn't work. Although 68% of the control group were still on unemployment benefits at the end, so were 66% of those who did the community work and 64% of those given jobcentre support."
Help to Work is only two weeks from launch, but there hasn't even been an announcement of the contractors, and Toynbee couldn't get an answer out of the DWP. She concludes that the only reason for going ahead with this is that it takes people out of the unemployment figures for 6 months. " Incidently," she says, "these sad long-term cases will do more than twice the maximum any court can sentence a thief to on Community Payback. To be out of work is now officially morally worse than committing a crime."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)