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.

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.

Secrets and lies

G4S is in the news again.  The outsourcing company has agreed to pay back almost £109m to the government as a settlement for its overcharging hugely on its contract to tag offenders.  It had offered £24m.  Serco, which shared the contract, has given back £70.5m.  Both companies, we're told, still face investigation by the Serious Fraud Office, and neither can bid for the flogged-off probation contracts currently out for tender.  G4S is in deep financial trouble.  But, you may say, is that it?  Is no one going to be charged with criminal offences?  After all, benefits cheats are in court very quickly.  I doubt it.  
There are several reasons why the government would not want a court case.  The relationship between people in government and those running these outsourcing companies is not the standard one of purchaser and provider; there is a much greater degree of mutual self-interest.  You don't want to put your mates in court.  These two companies in particular have been crucial to the government's exercise in creating private wealth out of public services.  And suppose there were charges.  They could plead guilty, and that would save embarrassment.  We've seen what happened, on a very, very much smaller scale with A4e.  The employees who pleaded guilty have not yet been sentenced.  That may not happen until the second batch have been tried in October.  If they plead guilty as well, we will never know the details of what they did, and what pressures or incentives they were under.  The G4S and Serco cases could follow that route, sparing the public the details of their contracts.  It wouldn't do for us to know how those contracts, and the monitoring of them, allowed the firms to overcharge on this massive scale.  If they pleaded not guilty, all that would have to come out.  The government wants this out of the way as soon as possible, and the companies back in the ring bidding for more juicy contracts.  Grayling had to cancel altogether the privatisation of a batch of prisons because the only bidders were G4S and Serco.
More secrets.  We are used to this government suppressing information if it goes against its narrative of great success in "welfare reform".  So it's no surprise to learn from Channel 4 News that it sat on a report which showed, according to independent experts appointed by the DWP, that the Work Programme isn't working.  That's hardly news, you might say.  But this report came out last September and a decision was taken to suppress it "at a ministerial level", and we know what that means.  All the things which critics said would happen, particularly "creaming and parking", are still going on.  Sanctions are not helping anything, says the report.  And the providers themselves, or 58% of them, think the WP is not helping or worse.  The DWP apparently said, "The reality is that the Work Programme is working."  That's the point at which the secrets turn into lies.
For a straightforward untruth we turn to the narrative on food banks.  The DWP has always insisted that it doesn't refer people to food banks.  There's a good reason for that.  It needs to deny that food banks have become part of the welfare state, or, indeed, that they are needed at all.  But now we have the evidence, thanks to the Guardian, that there is official guidance to jobcentres on how to give out vouchers, and one of the documents is entitled "Foodbank Referral Service".  That has now been modified; "referral" has become "signposting".  And they mustn't refer to the vouchers as vouchers.  (Orwellian newspeak is thriving at the DWP.)  There's a significant paragraph in the article: "The documents show each jobcentre is told to write down how many people have been sent to food banks on a 'slip record sheet', even though the DWP has said: 'Food banks are not part of government policy and, as such, the Department for Work and Pensions does not hold or collect information on their usage.'"
What was it David Cameron once said about being the "most transparent government ever"?

Morality?

I've just heard Esther McVey lying about sanctions on Radio 4.  No surprise there.  The unemployment figures are out, and it's tempting for ignorant commentators to link the slight fall to the sanctions regime, in a simple-minded way.  Iain Duncan Smith announces even more restrictions on the ability of immigrants to claim benefits, standing on what he fondly imagines is the moral high ground; but he hasn't publicly replied to Archbishop Nichols, who is sticking to his guns.  No, he's left that to his mate Dave, who has claimed, in an extraordinary piece in the Telegraph, that the government is on a "moral mission".  He accuses the Cardinal of saying things which are not true.  "Mr Cameron insisted that no one would be left destitute by the welfare reforms and said the claim the basic safety net no longer exists is untrue."
Cameron misunderstands the concept of morality.  I'm tempted to refer to the Christian gospels, but I know that cuts no ice with a lot of people (it ought to with IDS, but apparently doesn't).  Morality starts with the way you treat individuals.  You do not sacrifice them to some self-appointed mission.  All the most monstrous dictators of the 20th century believed that individual suffering had no significance in pursuit of the grand plan.  I really don't know whether Cameron knows that he is not telling the truth when he makes his claims; but a moral person would take steps to check.  Instead, like all of his government, he has simply turned his back.  He might like to read an article in the Independent which reports a survey of GPs in their trade magazine, Pulse.  16% of the doctors have been asked to refer a patient to a food bank in the last year.  One Everton GP describes his experience of this in detail.  Hospital diagnoses of malnutrition have nearly doubled in the last 5 years, and academics have called it an emerging "public health emergency".  Now that, Mr Cameron, really is a moral matter.

Today, many people are staging demonstrations at the various offices of ATOS.  On Monday we read in the Guardian that a leaked document shows that the government is preparing to shove ATOS out of its WCA contracts.  They want, first, to bring in more contractors; and then to push ATOS out altogether.  But a competition lawyer is quoted as saying that it wouldn't be lawful, because they would have decided in advance that they were going to exclude one bidder from the tendering process.  While many would rejoice at the ousting of this company, the competition could only come from those on the government's "framework" of favoured companies.  And that means Serco, G4S, Capita and - yes - A4e.

What would I do?

Since reading this excoriating article by Polly Toynbee in yesterday's Guardian I've been asking myself how I would react if I was still working in the welfare-to-work system.  It's many, many years since I worked for a year as a teenager in what was then the Labour Exchange; but only a few years since I worked on the New Deal contracts.  There has always been a "sanctions" system.  If you weren't available for work or actively seeking work, you lost your benefits.  But it took Iain Duncan Smith to introduce a reign of terror and direct staff to throw as many people as possible into destitution.
Toynbee says that jobcentre staff are "mostly decent people", and I would agree.  So what do you do, as a decent person, if you find yourself caught up in this?  One strategy is to make sure the facts get out there, like the "regular 'deep throat' correspondent" who has described to her how, "You park your conscience at the door".
Part of me thinks I couldn't stay in the job.  But walking out isn't that easy, unless you can walk straight into another job (which is unlikely these days).  You wouldn't get any benefits for a very long time; and when you were finally eligible to sign on you would have to go to the jobcentre.  Not much of an option if you've been loudly blowing the whistle meanwhile.  So do you stick it out and try not to become part of the culture?  That, according to the informant, leads quickly to losing your job.
It is horribly easy to become part of the culture when something as wicked as this is going on.  You start by dehumanising those you deal with.  These are not unfortunate people who deserve support and consideration.  They are idle scroungers.  All of them.  That's what you're being told, and what the propaganda has been telling you for years.  They are not part of society, as you are, not "hard-working families".  So if you treat them like rubbish and they react badly, they just confirm your opinion.  History is littered with such treatment of minority groups who have been made scapegoats for other people's sins.
So I don't know what I would do.  But I do know where the responsibility for this misery lies.  And it's not just on Iain Duncan Smith, guilty as he is.  It's on David Cameron, who appointed him and keeps him in his job, presumably because he approves of what he's doing.

"Contractorisation"

"Contractorisation" - a hideous word coined by David Cameron when he was questioned recently by a parliamentary committee.  He was asked about Chris Grayling's statement that companies which are guilty of malpractice or gross failure could be ruled out of future contracts.  (Think Serco and G4S.)  Would this happen?  Cameron was vague, but said he was in favour of more "contractorisation".  Of course he was vague.  Because it won't happen.  For one thing it would be a legal minefield, and for another, who else is there?  He was also asked about the timetable for bringing in Universal Credit, and was equally vague, leading people to conclude that he and the government know it's not remotely on schedule, and only Iain Duncan Smith thinks it is.
With the start of the party conference season, we can see very clearly that there is consensus among the main parties about welfare and outsourcing.  Clegg waffled this morning about "making work pay" and dodged a question about the deepening poverty of those on benefits.  This is the Tory attitude as well; they believe that they have won the argument.  Tales of hardship can be brushed aside, because a majority of the electorate have accepted the propaganda.  Michael Gove caused a bit of a fuss by saying that he thought people who used food banks were just bad at managing their money.  Various Labour MPs are willing to put a different point of view, but their party would not alter anything the Tories have done.  Nor would they call a halt to the outsourcing.
Cameron, Gove, Clegg et al are not necessarily bad people.  They have good intentions towards people whose lives they cannot begin to understand.  When they are confronted with the truth they can't accept it.  And now that the economic figures aren't quite as bad as they were, they can proclaim that they were right.  It's grim.

Keeping up the attack

For the government, the holiday period is clearly a time to carry on the assault on benefits claimants.  David Cameron started it in his New Year message, covered in the Telegraph, which headlines it "We'll help the strivers, not welfare claimants".  Well, that's everyone who is elderly or disabled branded, as well as those trying to find work.  There's an extraordinary passage which shows just how clueless he is about the reality of unemployment:  “When people say we've got to stop our welfare reforms because somehow it is cruel to expect people to work, we are saying no. Getting people into good jobs is absolutely vital, not just for them, but for all of us."  Sorry?  Did someone say it was cruel to expect people to work?  What are you talking about?  The article points out that the message echoes that put out recently by Tories in marginal constituencies "demanding whether the Government should offer more help to 'hard working families' or 'people who don’t work'. The advertisements have been criticised by Labour as taking the Conservatives back to being the 'nasty party'."  Yes, and I would think they've alienated all the pensioners and disabled, too.
Iain Duncan Smith has been busy too.  Since it was pointed out that around 60% of those claiming benefits are actually working, he has turned his wrath on the tax credits system.  Several papers cover his attack, but the best version, perhaps, is in the Independent.  Now, I have to say that I was never entirely happy with the tax credits system.  It seemed to be subsidising bad employers.  And it goes too far up the income scale.  I knew a man with a young family who was on a good salary (I knew exactly what it was since it was partly my responsibility to pay it) who was eligible for the credits, while a single person under 50 wasn't.  I also knew someone who was offered a job with variable hours who panicked at the thought that he would face the money being clawed back.  But I wasn't aware that "after 2008 HMRC did not attempt to reclaim overpayments of less than £25,000. That is set to be reduced to £5,000 under the coalition, alongside moves to require proof of payments from those claiming for childcare or that children aged between 16 and 19 are in full-time education."  Reform is obviously necessary.
But, as usual, IDS goes over the top.  The Factcheck blog has shown that his figures are either wrong or just made up.  It seems that he will claim anything to justify his hostility to people on benefits.
Happy New Year, folks.

More figures - but not the right ones

The latest unemployment figures are out, showing the number of unemployed down, the number in work up.  Good.  Except that they mask realities which are not quite so rosy.
Far too many of those extra jobs are part-time, and taken by people who want full-time work.  Then there's the fact that the population of the country is higher than ever, which has an effect on the percentages, and lots of people who would have retired haven't been able to.  And the figures are an average; in many parts of the country unemployment has risen again.  The Express reports on a study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which shows that 66 people "chase every retail job".
But perhaps the most worrying fact is that long-term unemployment isn't going down.  While David Cameron threw in a plug for the wonderful Work Programme at PMQs today, it's this group which the WP was supposed to help.  And that, perhaps, explains why we still have no results for the first year of the WP.  It's those long-term unemployed who were going to provide the big bucks for the providers.

Those employment figures

With no more responses from Jonty Olliff-Cooper, we can turn our attention to the latest employment figures, perhaps with a sense of deja vu.  The number of people unemployed fell a bit again.  This time there's been no careful analysis on Newsnight or the news; no critical report by Stephanie Flanders.  Presumably they didn't want another hysterical rant from Iain Duncan Smith.  The item on the BBC news website does report the ONS's verdict that "it's all down to women".  The number of men out of work has actually gone up.  And it does show the wide variations in unemployment around the country, and that it's actually going up in many areas.  Significantly for the Work Programme, it also reports that a record 1.42 million people are working part-time because they can't get full-time jobs.

Channel 4's Factcheck blog takes apart David Cameron's claim that the number of women in employment is up.  And Fullfact demolishes his boast that half a million private sector jobs have been created since the election.  It's also been shown that a lot of the "jobs" are accounted for by people going self-employed, often unwillingly.  And, of course, we don't know who they are, these people who are getting work.  They are probably not the long-term unemployed who would provide bumper payments to the WP providers.  If they are taking part-time jobs, they won't provide any outcome payments to the providers.  And since in many parts of the country, unemployment continues to rise, the outlook for the providers there is even bleaker.

I wonder whether there are negotiations going on to change the contracts.  Will all that part-time, casual or zero hours working be redefined as success?  I wouldn't be at all surprised.

The big profits society

You wouldn't want G4S running it.  You certainly wouldn't want A4e running it.  How about Serco?  One of David Cameron's "big society" ideas is for a National Citizen Service for youngsters over 16.  Naturally someone has to make money by running it, and, according to the Observer, is in line to win 8 of the 19 contracts currently up for tender.  As with the Work Programme, charities are involved to deliver it, but many charities are complaining that they are being forced out of existence in favour of the big private companies.  The government doesn't care about that.  Indeed, it isn't capable of comprehending that there could be a problem.
The Guardian gave a platform to Martyn Hart of the National Outsourcing Association to explain why outsourcing is "here to stay".  He insists that, "Outsourcing is far from privatisation – done properly, the client remains in control at all times. The client's purchasing a service, over a long period of time: as paying customer, they are perfectly entitled to specify exactly what they want. But a key facet of outsourcing is the shared bearing of risk: the partners are in it together. Not just financially, but also in terms of reputation. If things go wrong, both brands are weakened and, in the case of the supplier, future custom is jeopardised."
Now, I understand the difference between outsourcing and the kind of privatisation he's talking about.  But it's a distinction which becomes less and less relevant when the private companies are large enough to call the shots on these contracts.  We saw it with the Work Programme; the contracts were not what the government had originally intended because the only companies large enough to bid wouldn't play unless they got their way, over attachment fees, lack of inspection and so on.  Cameron's National Citizen Service will have been designed in conjunction with Serco and others.  And the blurring of boundaries between government and these companies - ex ministers on the boards, friends in the boardrooms - works against the idea of partners sharing risk.  The only risk is to the taxpayer.  We effectively have privatisation of government.
Something else leaps out from Hart's article.  The "partners" in outsourcing do not include the people for whom the services are supposedly designed.  This is business.

War on the poor

If you're under 25 and unemployed you probably feel even more depressed and persecuted than usual today.  David Cameron feels the need to assert right-wing ideas, and that means a "welfare crackdown", with the young taking the brunt of it.  The report in the Telegraph says: "Ministers expect this 'next wave' of benefit cuts to include the axing of all housing benefit currently paid to around 380,000 people aged under 25. Such a move would force many to move back in with their parents rather than living independently."  
The Express says: "It could also mean stopping the £70-a-week dole payment for individuals who do not try hard enough to get work and forcing a hard core of unemployed to do community work after two years - or lose all their benefits."  Of course, that's just making the ritual noises to appease Tories, but it's another kick in the teeth for the unemployed.  Interestingly, the Express has another article entitled "Starving in Britain" which shows clearly the effect of cutting housing benefit, and the struggle of people, even those in work, to feed their children.
If you're not angry enough yet, read the piece in the Mail on Sunday based on an interview with the Dear Leader, from which all the other reports get their information.  The headline sets the tone: "Cameron to axe housing benefits for feckless under 25s as he declares war on welfare culture."
Figures in one city I know show that there are 44 unemployed people for every job vacancy.  Mandatory Work Activity (MWA) is already forcing people to do unpaid "community" work.  Under 25s already can only get housing benefit for shared housing.  Etc., etc.  There's no need to repeat it.  

"It's who you know" - networking and A4e

The unemployed are increasingly being lectured about the benefits of networking.  For most people this is irrelevant.  Our networks don't include anyone who could give us a job.  But for outsourcing companies like A4e networks are vital to the business.

This is a simplified version of the A4e network.  Top left, David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions when the w2w contracts were privatised; after ceasing to be a minister he became a paid "advisor" to A4e (and still is).  But with Labour out of power it was useful to get a Tory on board; Jonty Oliff Cooper used to be an aide to David Cameron's strategy director Steve Hilton and was taken on by A4e as their director of policy and strategy.  He is not now listed as part of A4e's senior team.  Moving clockwise, we get to David Cameron.  He was sufficiently persuaded of Emma Harrison's capacities that he made her his "family champion".  And then there's Chancellor George Osborne who brings us to George Bridges of Quiller Consultants.  Bridges is a personal friend of Osborne and helped him run the Tories' election campaign in 2010.  So the network helped in the appointment of Bridges and his firm to help A4e revamp its image after the meltdown.  Private Eye points out that the firm, Quiller Consultants, is owned by Lord Chadlington, the Tory peer who is also Cameron's constituency chairman.
The new chairman of A4e is Sir Robin Young, a retired career civil servant whose last government job was as a Permanent Secretary.  The link between him and Robert Devereux,  Permanent Secretary at the DWP, was referred to by Margaret Hodge last week when she described them both as, "A whole lot of good chaps - I understand that the Chairman is an ex-Permanent Secretary, whom, no doubt, you have conversations with."
It's a network that has made millions for Emma Harrison.  What a pity that we can't all do it.

What kind of investigation?

There's plenty of coverage of the removal of one of A4e's contracts today, but most of it just repeats the press release.  We saw at Prime Minister's Questions how the government wants to spin the NAO report; Cameron focussed on how quickly the Work Programme had been got up and running.  It's left to the Guardian and the Yorkshire Post to highlight a significant omission.  
You remember that leaked internal A4e report which showed how much probable and potential fraud was going on?  It was important enough for the BBC to break its vow of silence on the A4e issue.  But it wasn't, apparently, important enough for the DWP to want to look at it.  They didn't ask for it.  Margaret Hodge isn't happy about that, naturally, and wants a more complete investigation.  It raises the question of what kind of investigation the DWP thought it was conducting.  The phrases "whitewash" and "damage limitation" spring to mind.  


Another major point in the National Audit Office report is reported in the Guardian.  "...  allegations against A4e represented just under 10% of cases where fraud was substantiated.  Over 40 cases occurred in other back-to-work companies, representing total losses since 2006 of a quarter of a million pounds.  Out of a total of 126 reported cases of potential fraud the DWP concluded that there was no case to answer in 75 cases. Of the remaining cases, the NAO report said, '24 were of false representation [fraud], 22 of non-compliance' and five were still under investigation. The total losses to fraud since 2006 averaged £129,000 a year, which it described as a 'small' loss in comparison to a total expenditure of £829m on employment schemes in 2011-2012 alone."

An unexpected advert on Twitter from Paul Lewis, who is one of the BBC's financial experts.

Those 120,000 families

Emma Harrison reached the height of her influence with her "family champions" idea.  The government reckoned that there were 120,000 "troubled families" responsible for most of what was wrong in the country, and Harrison persuaded ministers that she had the solution.  There were many people at the time who criticised both the analysis and the proposed remedy.  One established charity, Family Action was particularly concerned about the damage which Harrison's approach could do.  Now a report has been published which shows the flaws in the original thinking.  It has been written by Professor Ruth Levitas for the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK Project, and can be accessed through the Indus Delta site.  

Levitas shows how the original figure of 120,000 families was based on a misuse of statistics, and how "troubled families" were redefined as "troublesome families" by government rhetoric.  She quotes a Cameron speech: "That’s why today, I want to talk about troubled families. Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase. Officialdom might call them ‘families with multiple disadvantages’. Some in the press might call them ‘neighbours from hell’. Whatever you call them, we’ve known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society. Drug addiction. Alcohol abuse. Crime. A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations. We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money…but now we’ve come up the actual figures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families…that is around £75,000 per family."   The government has conflated families which have disadvantages which are not self-inflicted with those who cause expensive trouble.  Levitas goes on to show how this rhetoric has fed a vindictive attitude towards the poor.  It's an excellent report and well worth reading.

Emma Harrison was not, of course, responsible for this.  It would be truer to say that she jumped on the bandwagon.  She proposed a simplistic solution; volunteers could work with these families to get them into work.  "Working Families Everywhere", a pilot scheme, was born, and we had the toe-curling suggestion that these volunteers be known as "Emmas".  But Harrison had, possibly unwittingly, ruled A4e out of bidding for the contracts for European Social Fund money to pay private companies to do the work with local authorities in a professional way.  A new "tsar" was appointed, Louise Casey, a woman with very different experience from Harrison's.  And when the torrent of bad publicity for A4e was unleashed, Harrison stepped down from the ongoing WFE scheme.

I am tempted to draw lessons from this story, but readers can do that themselves.  Perhaps the lesson for Harrison is that hubris results in nemesis. 

Inadequate

David Cameron was made to look foolish in his dazzled admiration of A4e's Emma Harrison.  But, as the Morning Star points out, Labour had been just as convinced of A4e's ability to solve the nation's problems.  We know about David Blunkett, of course.  And the CBE.  And we have noted that A4e's Mark Lovell has been a guest of the Young Fabians.  But the article points out another connection with Labour.  A4e contributed an article to a Labour pamphlet last year meant to show how business-friendly the party is.  The article was about A4e's work at Blundeston prison.  But as Morning Star points out, Ofsted rated the company's work at Blundeston, and at another prison, "inadequate".  Yet A4e was recently awarded two new prison education contracts.

Some good news.  We've told the story of the fight by an Edinburgh group, ECAP, to get A4e to recognise claimants' right to have a representative with them at interviews.  You can read the story here.  They've won, and A4e have backed down, but not before people like Peter and Ram were put through huge pressure.  Congratulations to them and all the group.

Please remember that if you send me a comment which is critical of a named A4e office or identifiable staff member, I can't publish it.  It may be true, but unless I can back it up, it's libellous.  And to the anonymous poster who has twice pointed out to me the links between A4e, Carley Consult and the DWP.  Thanks, it's interesting, but not unusual, sadly.  I'm hanging on to your post.

Keep Calm and Carry On

The Independent on Sunday is the only paper today keeping the story going.  "Further No. 10 link to A4e" says the headline, linking the departure of Cameron's advisor Steve Hilton with the appointment of Harrison as "families champion".  Hilton recommended her, they say.  And they describe the £250k contract given to A4e last September.  "A4e is advising No 10 on the next wave of privatisation. It will offer advice on "value for money" in contracting out, including writing guidelines on future privatisations. The firm will hold a seminar in Whitehall explaining how to design welfare contracts with private firms. .......... The Cabinet Office hired A4e to advise on four experimental schemes to help families with unemployed parents. All are in Conservative-led authorities: Hammersmith & Fulham, Westminster, Birmingham and Leicestershire.  A4e is not running the schemes, but is helping the Government write the rules on how they should work. They are based on social impact bonds, the Government's 'big idea' for privatising welfare. Investors and banks will pay private companies to help poor families. The taxpayer will then pay them back over years for the supposed 'savings'.  A4e is being asked to advise how to stop welfare firms taking money for poor performance. Yet A4e has often been found to be a poor performer itself."  

 

When A4e's main website went down recently there were some of us who felt that it was the result of a decision to revamp the site as part of an image makeover.  But no.  It's back, with no changes.  Even the link to "Emma's blog" is there on the home page, even though it hasn't been updated since last November.  Andrew Dutton has posted a response to the various accusations, and he ends with a note on "A4e and Emma Harrison".  "As a result of Emma Harrison’s resignation, announced on 24 February, she is no longer a Director or Chairman of A4e which means she cannot participate at Board meetings. The governance of A4e has therefore changed with immediate effect and decisions relating to future dividend policy will be determined by the Board under a new, independent non-executive Chairman. In addition, Emma’s salary as Chairman and Director and payments made by A4e in respect of Thornbridge Hall have ceased."  So who made the decisions about dividends before?  And that last bit about Thornbridge Hall is interesting.  The Board are really seeking to distance themselves from the woman who still owns most of the company.

But back to the websites.  The MyA4e site looks like something designed by professionals who have no clear idea of who their target audience is.  One could say the same about the multitude of other sites set up by A4e.  There's A4e Voicewhich is a blog for good news items.  The latest, posted on 2 March, is aimed at refuting the criticisms of A4e for using clients in work experience roles in its own company.  Then there's A4e Transitions which is an arm of the company which provides services to companies which are making lots of people redundant.  Very different is A4e Careers which apparently seeks to recruit people to work for the company.  It's a mess, with cartoons, handwriting-style fonts and all the familiar slogans.  Much more sober is the Direct payments for social care site.   Eleven local authorities contract with A4e to deliver this service.  Then there's A4e Skills which is "the direct delivery arm for vocational learning, delivering Apprenticeship programmes, work based learning (QCF & NVQ's), in-house training and vocationally related courses, accredited courses including e learning courses.  Most training takes place within the workplace, working flexibly to meet the needs of both organisations and individuals."  Finally there's A4e Insight,  their "research and consultancy arm".  This is where the line between private company and public sector becomes dangerously blurred.

 

I've almost certainly missed some of A4e's numerous websites.  But what they show is a confusion about image, despite the vast amounts of money A4e has spent on PR over the years.  Will the aim now be to shun the limelight, stop provoking the natural response to hype, and just buckle down to making money?  

 

By the way, Emma Harrison is a trustee of the Eden Project, which is currently having to lay off staff because of financial difficulties.

Abandoned

The name of Emma Harrison came up in Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons again today, when Labour's Nick Raynsford asked what independent checks were made before her appointment as families champion, and what checks should be made in the future.  The Telegraph tells us that Cameron yesterday "asked the head of the civil service, Jeremy Heywood, to conduct an inquiry into what happened."  But at the time, there was no formal investigation going on.  He was concerned, said Cameron, that information should have been passed up.  It was the "nobody told me" line.  But Labour are in a tricky position, which Cameron exploited, reminding Raynsford that Emma Harrison was given her CBE by Labour, and it was his government which gave A4e all its contracts.  Harrison must feel that she's been completely abandoned by politicians of all stripes.  There could be more trouble for all the big companies, as the Public Services Social Value Bill is about to reach the statute book, requiring councils and other public bodies to take into account wider social value, and not just cost, in awarding contracts.
If you were listening to the radio at lunchtime you may have heard Anne Marie Carrie of Barnardo's breaking the news that the DWP has dropped benefits sanctions from their work experience scheme.  It won't be enough to please everybody.  But there is proof now that the DWP was playing about with evidence against the "voluntary" nature of this scheme.  Channel 4's FactCheck site has tracked the disappearing documents.  And Left Foot Forward provides a timely guide to all those schemes, including the Work Programme, where work experience is still mandatory.

Catching up

Through the day it seems that Liam Byrne's intervention has paid off, in that it has forced an admission from the DWP, according to the Telegraph, that "No. 10 was not told about A4e fraud allegations".  A spokesman for the PM is quoted as saying, “I don’t think we were aware. But it’s a police investigation. If the police are investigating private sector companies, I don’t think necessarily they report regularly to the government on how their investigations are going.”

Richard Kay in the Mail asks, "Is David Cameron’s former ‘back-to-work tsar’ Emma Harrison already plotting her return?"  He tells us that Emma Harrison "has been approached by maintenance firm Aspect.co.uk to advise on a boot camp for jobless youths. Boss Nick Bizley says he is fed up with a deluge of job applications from foreigners but very few from young British candidates, and wants to change attitudes towards work."  Sadly, I can find nothing more on this.  
The most interesting article of the day is by John Harris in the Guardian.  It's always gratifying when the press catches up with what we've been going on about for ages.  He says that Emma Harrison's biggest mistake was "not keeping her head down".  He points out that she is not facing any reduction in her income and "may well be in line for a rather nice future: less heat and less work, but potentially even greater takings".  Then Harris contrasts Harrison's high profile with that of Chris Hyman, CEO of Serco, a company which has much more outsourcing business than A4e.  And he makes the leap which nobody on the supposed left of politics (certainly not Liam Byrne) has yet been willing to make.  "For decades now, the introduction of the profit motive into public services has been held to be synonymous with dynamism, innovation and increased responsiveness to the 'customer'. There is, of course, plenty of evidence to the contrary, but the more zealous minds one associates with the rule of New Labour still believe it, and most Conservatives hold it as an article of faith."  Quite.  And he concludes: "Do not rely on senior figures in the Labour party to make the running on this issue: after all, it built a huge share of the shadow state in which these people make their money. There again, if the progress of the Emma Harrison story – as with the recent controversy about workfare – is anything to go by, these things no longer need the involvement of front-rank politicians to build unstoppable momentum. One thing is certain: though long buried, the tension between public services and profit is back – and this story is only just starting."
I'm currently reading a book called The Verdict by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, summing up the Labour years from 1997 to 2010 from a Labour-supporting but critical point of view.  They manage to cover New Deal and the various measures to help the unemployed while totally ignoring the privatisation in 2006.  John Harris is right.  But I fear it may be too late.

Emma pops up again

Emma Harrison made another appearance on the BBC today, this time on Pienaar's Politics on 5 Live.  I haven't listened to it yet.  Fortunately the Scottish Sunday Express has provided a summary of Harrison's views under the headline "PM warned over vulnerable families".  She is described as "the woman appointed by David Cameron to get families back into work".   And she's worried that the £26,000 benefits cap could harm some families with a number of seriously disabled children, families in which the parents are the full-time carers and which would cost the state millions without that parental care.  Can't argue with that.  And she's right that it's a "populist movement" (though I wouldn't use that phrase) that wants to cap benefits.  However, it grates when she says, "I know families ...".  We are always told that it's Harrison's personal knowledge of the unemployed which informs her opinions.  And she seems to row back a bit at the end of the article:"Of course we should reform welfare. We should make it work for today. Somehow it has become possible for 120,000 families to live on benefits. Now within that group of families there might be a small percentage who will always have to live on benefits because of some very, very extreme circumstances." 
If Harrison is going to use her position to challenge the government's more extreme moves, we can only applaud.  But she will need to be armed with some genuine figures.  And she will need to face some informed questioning about A4e's activities.
Perhaps I'll grit my teeth and listen to the programme tomorrow.


Monday:  Harrison's remarks have made other newspapers, including the Financial Times, (which thinks her remarks will be a blow to David Cameron), the Mirror (which says that the "Jobs Tsar" has turned on the Tories) and a brief piece in the Scotsman.  

Round-up, 3 November 2011

First, on Families Unlimited. The Guardian has published an amendment to its revelations about this, "Emma Harrison set up firm to pitch for government cash on project she devised". They now want to add, "Families Unlimited (the unincorporated Joint Venture set up by A4e and Gill Strachan Limited) has asked us to make clear that it was not set up solely for the purpose of bidding for European Social Fund (ESF) monies but rather to jointly develop and market their expertise in connection with the whole family/total person approach to worklessness including preparing for and submitting tenders for work with local Authorities and central government and if successful to undertake the provision of contracts. Further, we are happy to clarify that while Families Unlimited explored the possibility of acting as a sub contractor with a number of primes in bidding for ESF Funding they took a commercial decision not to do so." I'm not sure what this boils down to, other than that they are not now going for ESF sub-contracts.

There are a couple of conflicting takes on the Work Programme. One is an article in the Telegraph reporting Chris Grayling telling a business audience to use the WP providers as a kind of free recruitment agency. "They’ll get to know you and your business" he says. "They’ll get to know all the potential recruits. And they’ll bring you a small selection to choose from. Doesn’t that sound a better way to do business?” It sounds very reasonable, but is anyone else a little uneasy about the providers deciding who to put forward for a vacancy? A Labour MP, David Lammy, had a go at David Cameron about expecting the WP to be a cure-all when a tiny number of jobs are being chased by so many people. “You have described the work programme as ‘the biggest back to work programme since the 1930s’, but you know that the programme doesn’t create jobs, it merely links people up with vacancies. There are over 6,500 people unemployed in Tottenham and only 150 full time vacancies. What will your work programme do about that?” Cameron's response was to suggest that jobseekers look further afield, which didn't impress Lammy.

Google's revamp of its news feed means it's no longer possible to post links to stories. So here are a few which might interest readers. On 31 October the Telegraph reported "GPs to tell long-term jobless to find work". On 1 November the Express said, "Welfare plan 'may increase poverty'". On the same day the Guardian had a thoughtful piece called "What it's like to be young and looking for work in Britain" which looked at 10 real young people and their stories. Most important, perhaps, is a story from the BBC today. "Ministers 'consider alternatives' to 5.2 per cent benefits rise". Benefits should rise by that figure because it's the inflation figure on which all rises to benefits and pensions are based. But they think they can change the rules.