A4e's accounts

The accounts are now available for the year ending March 2014 - and the company is in profit.

If you want to examine all the figures you can download the report from the Companies House website for only £1.  But the salient points are:

• There's an operating profit of £3.2m for the full year (against a loss of £10.3m in 2012 / 2013).  EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) showed a profit of £7.6m (2012 / 2013 loss of £5.8m).  The Chairman, Robin Young, says that, "we have improved our performance on all our contracts".  
• The Work Programme continued to be profitable, and they expected it to remain so for the duration of the contract.
• The A4e office in Spain was closed and they gave up on prospects of business there because the country wasn't moving to outsourcing fast enough.
• As they stated in the previous year's accounts, no dividend was paid in 2013 / 2014.
• Young talks about their "open door policy" with MPs, and says that most of the 140 visitors "have come away impressed".
• The new IT system, Connect4Work, is working well.
• Although the company originally bid for 3 contracts (Community Work Placement, Transforming Rehabilitation i.e. the Probation Service and Job Path in the Rep. of Ireland) they decided not to submit final bids - a matter, say the directors, of "discipline".
• They are optimistic about opportunities in the "market" of people with special needs.

So it seems that the strategy of reining in their ambition has worked for A4e.

Carrying on

On the day of the reshuffle the DWP put out its independent report into the way the bedroom tax is working.  It's a process known as burying bad news.  But it was noticed, particularly by the Liberal Democrats, who decided that it was just too bad to defend any longer.  And it's that, unfortunately, which has been the news story, rather than the contents of the report itself.  Let's skip the politics and look at the facts.
You can read it all here - "Evaluation of Removal of Spare Room Subsidy".  There's a lot of it, so you might like to copy most of the media and just look at the Key Findings from page 15.  Crucial is the fact that only 4.5% of affected claimants have moved "within the social sector" in the first 6 months of the reduction, with another 1.4% moving to the private rented sector.  There's nowhere to move to.  Most people said that they had done more to find work or better-paid work (well, they would, wouldn't they?) but hardly anybody had taken in a lodger.  41% of tenants have paid the full shortfall, 39% have paid some, and 20% have paid none.  Where have people got the money to pay the extra?  57% say they have had to cut back on essentials (like food) and 26% had had to borrow money.
And on it goes.  The RSRS (as the report calls it) is a massive failure, as everyone except IDS and Freud predicted, and all it has achieved is to plunge poor people into greater penury.  The BBC got a quote from Iain Duncan Smith: "This department is delivering some of the biggest welfare reforms in over 60 years, designed to return fairness to the system and we are on track to make the £6bn savings we had previously set out.  At the same time we are helping to make sure our housing benefit reforms have a transformative effect on the lives of those who in the past were faced with a system which trapped people into cycles of workless and welfare dependency.  The scaremongering by those opposed to our welfare reforms - in particular our housing benefit reforms - has been proven to be without substance, and we are already seeing the effects of people moving into work."  The risible DWP Press Office chaps tweeted desperately in similar vein.  But the Lib Dems decided that they couldn't defend it.

There was some barely-noticed news on the outsourcing front.   The contract for electronic tagging of offenders, previously held by G4S and Serco (both of which were found to have defrauded the taxpayer of millions) has gone to - wait for it - Capita!  Some asked why Capita; why does it always have to be these three?  But it's an inevitable part of the outsourcing business.  If you create huge contracts only the big firms can bid, and it was these three which were prepared to bid for everything.  
One lot of contracts of interest to many is Community Work Placements.  But CWP doesn't seem to be going well.  The Boycott Workfare team is doing a great job of publicising companies and organisations which agree to take part by taking free labour.  One was recently claimed by the government as a success, providing a photo-op for Osborne.  It quickly decided to withdraw when it discovered the trouble it was attracting.  It looks like the CWP contractors are targeting councils and housing associations for placements, if Seetec is anything to go by.  They say, "Examples of such projects include estate maintenance and local renovation, groundswork, horticulture, recycling as well as administration, customer service and sales, warehousing, distribution and cleaning services. The list of potential projects is almost endless."  Sadly, it will be tempting for cash-strapped councils to go for this.  Presumably they can adapt the hi-viz jackets they use for Community Payback offenders on similar projects.

Why Iain Duncan Smith should go

Someone yesterday started a story of a conversation supposedly overheard on a train to the effect that in the forthcoming reshuffle "Ian" was to be replaced by "Esther".  Despite there being no substance to this story at all it's made it as far as the BBC website.  One thing that this demonstrates is that Iain Duncan Smith's future is the biggest talking point in the reshuffle.  Will Cameron move him?  Will he have the guts to fire him if he refuses to be moved?  Who would replace him?

I have blogged before about IDS's failures, as have a great many people.  There's an excellent piece on the Labour Left website which lists "Iain Duncan Smith's 100 biggest failures".  It's a heroic effort, well worth study.  But let's distil it into the most obvious areas where his ambition has far exceeded his competence.

• The Work Programme.  This was the first of IDS's grand schemes to be put in place.  It was going to solve unemployment; and the most revolutionary aspect of it was "payment by results".  But it was never that.  The providers were guaranteed an "attachment fee" which would keep them going if they did nothing; and they were able to look forward to an "incentive" payment even if they failed badly.  And fail badly they did.  After 4 years it's clear that job outcomes (below even the minimum performance demanded and way below the providers' promises) depend on the economy and not on anything the companies do.  Helping to drag down the WP is:-
• ESA.  The companies were never going to be able to help those on ESA into work.  Indeed, most have been parked.  And overall, the companies have spent less than half the amount per client which they promised.  Remember, they get contracts because of the promises made in the bid documents.  And now they've got contracts to scoop up the people they've failed into:-
• Community Work Placements.  Okay, these appear not to have actually started yet.  But that's because a huge chunk of the voluntary sector want nothing to do with them, and a growing number of councils have also refused to take part.

There were a number of other, almost incidental, schemes along the way which have also been disasters, notably

• The bedroom tax.  (Let's face it, no one was ever going to call it "the removal of the spare room subsidy".)  It has cost councils a fortune, saved no one any money and inflicted huge distress and misery on thousands.
• Universal Jobmatch.  This was, it seems, entirely IDS's baby.  A grand one-stop-shop for employers and jobseekers alike which would have the added advantage of monitoring the activities of claimants.  The contract was given to a company with a poor record but which claims that much of what went wrong with UJM could have been prevented - but they were told not to put the necessary refinements into the software.  The system has been used to control and punish claimants without ever being the wondrous solution IDS envisaged.  But its costs are enormous.
• The sanctions regime.  A ludicrously impractical "claimant commitment" has been coupled with a vicious imposition of punishments which breach people's human rights.  Yet time and again IDS and his ministers have simply lied about sanctions; McVey repeated again this week in Parliament that they are "a last resort".  The human cost is appalling.  

The biggest failure of all, however, is:-

• Universal Credit.  This was to be the lasting legacy of Iain Duncan Smith, transforming "welfare".  At the outset opposition parties said yes, great idea, but it's never been done because it's too difficult.  Not for IDS, though.  Millions have been spent on IT that didn't work, more millions on trying a different IT system, and on patching up the problems thrown up by the very limited trials of UC.  We needn't rehearse all the problems.  But through them all IDS has insisted that it will all be fine.

We're told that it's Osborne who is keen to get IDS out because the Chancellor wants to slash the welfare budget and IDS resists that.  We're also told (in the Mail today) that Smith will again refuse to go.  This man's failures have cost us dear.  Surely he must go.

CWP contractors - the full list

Thanks to a site called TWPSolutions, we have the full list of Community Work Placements providers, after the Financial Times gave us 4 of them.
There are 18 regions.  Of these, G4S have 6; Seetec 5; Pertemps and Interserve 2 each; and Learn Direct, Working Links and Rehab one each.
Did A4e put in a bid?  It would be very unusual if they didn't, and this must be a major blow for them.  All that's left in the pipeline are the Transforming Rehabilitation contracts, and the government wants to get on with them before the election, despite Labour's pleas to postpone the decision.

CWP - is it a secret?

Community Work Placements are supposed to start next week.  That's the "help" for the long-term unemployed who have been failed by the Work Programme; months of unpaid work "in the community".  But there has been no announcement about which companies have won the contracts to organise this.  It seems certain that the contracts have been awarded.  G4S is advertising dozens of posts to do with CWP on the Indus Delta site.  So why are the public not being told?
Could it be that the DWP wants to avoid the inevitable media outburst which would follow an announcement that those lucrative contracts had been given to G4S?  After all, this is the company which defrauded the government (which means you and me) of millions over the tagging contracts.  It is obvious that the tendering process for CWP was going on while G4S was still supposedly under investigation and suspended from bidding.  Yet it was "cleared" just in time to be given another opportunity for oodles of dosh.  Perhaps Serco, with a similar record, is also on the gravy train.
Community Work Placements could come to grief not just on the incompetence of its providers, but also on the lack of actual placements.  We know that lots of voluntary organisations want nothing to do with it.  CWP is a popular concept with the right, but even the commercial sector could find it attracting too much bad publicity for comfort.
We will just have to wait and see.  Those of our readers who are referred to the programme will no doubt keep us informed.

G4S "cleared"

The news slipped through.  The Telegraph reported it briefly, the BBC website more fully.  But, apart from Paul Lewis on Twitter, no one else has noticed, or thinks it's important.  G4S can again bid for government contracts.  Yes, after bodging contracts and then, along with Serco, defrauding the government over the tagging contract to the tune of £109m, the company was temporarily barred from bidding for its slice of public money.  But now, "The Cabinet Office said G4S had taken steps to address weakness in its operations and its 'corporate renewal plan represented the right direction of travel to meet our expectations as a customer'."  And this comes while the Serious Fraud Office is still investigating.  So keen is the government to get G4S back into the fold that they are not even waiting for the outcome of that.  
What's the urgency?  Well, there were those prisons which Grayling wanted to privatise but couldn't because Serco and G4S, the only bidders, had been banished.  And there are more contracts coming up.  We still haven't heard who the providers are to be for Community Work Placements.  And another nice little earner is up for grabs, barely noticed.  This is the Health and Work Service (HWS), contracts to "intervene" in the lives of people who are off work sick and get them back to work.  Read about it here.  It won't be payment by results, and it needs the consent of employees.  One can expect the usual suspects, including A4e and, of course, G4S, to be bidding.
It makes no sense at all to people outside the weird world of government procurement and outsourcing that providers which have failed to deliver and have ripped you off should be welcome to bid again.  The Public Accounts Committee was astonished that previous performance couldn't be taken into account.  

Workfare

A4e's accounts for 2012 / 13 have been filed, but won't be available for a day or two.
The company will no doubt be hoping that it will get a big slice of the latest outsourcing pie, Community Work Placements (workfare to the rest of us).  The new issue of Private Eye details the provisions and payment structure of this pernicious scheme.   We knew that it would be the same companies which are involved in the Work Programme - that is government policy.  But the Eye points out that there is a potential clash of interests here.  Payment is in stages, for starting a placement, being on it for 12 weeks, 22 weeks on CWP or in work, and for staying in work for 6 months.  It's a clear disincentive to encouraging someone into short-term jobs before the 22 weeks is up.  The magazine also says that the charity sector has no use for the people who will be on workfare, and lists a few charities which have said they will have nothing to do with it.  Still, the providers are allowed to put people into placements in their own businesses, so there will be a lot of that, no doubt.   Many poor souls will find that they have spent two pointless years on the WP with, say, A4e, and then are given back to the same company for a workfare stint.  And since the DWP itself doesn't expect more than a fifth of those on workfare to find permanent jobs, it will be relatively cheap, and therefore not particularly profitable for the providers.  What is it for, then?
The fall in unemployment reported today has to be good news for those who have benefited.  Even long-term unemployment is down a bit; but everybody who is on a workfare scheme is recorded as employed, so it's not as clear as it should be.