Sense and nonsense

We reported back in April this year that Richmond upon Thames council had put its contract for supporting and training local voluntary organisations out to tender, and the winning bid had come from the Foundation for Social Improvement.  Yes, the FSI, the creation of Emma Harrison, a registered charity with two other A4e directors on its board and based at A4e's Westminster offices.  The leader of the opposition on Richmond council was kicking up a fuss about handing contracts to a "scandal-hit organisation" rather than to the local CVS which had been doing the job satisfactorily.  20 days later we learned from the Guardian that the contract was worth £85,000 and that the council had decided to pull out because of the potential risks.  The author of the article, Patrick Butler, pointed out that the FSI had assets of only £90,000 in its latest accounts, and so it was odd that it had got the contract in the first place.  Now we have an update from something called Your Local Guardian.  The contract has been awarded to the Richmond CVS (Council for Voluntary Services) and the Richmond Adult Community College.  The piece shows how a bad reputation can follow you around.  "A4e was embroiled in scandal last month," it says, "when figures suggested it received £46m from the taxpayer last year, for its work on the Government's flagship Work Programme - despite finding long term jobs for less than 4% of its unemployed clients."
The FSI's accounts for the year ending March 2012 have not yet been received by the Charity Commission, but since 2008 it has received a total of £1,686,933, much of it from A4e, and spent a total of £1,691,561.

The government has come up with a "new" way of dealing with NEETs - those youngsters not in employment, education or training.  The Telegraph calls it an "earn or learn" plan, while the Express, in typical style, headlines it "Go to work or lose benefits".  It could involve "the creation of new-style 'traineeships' set up to prepare school leavers for jobs in relatively low-skilled industries."  Does anyone smell a new contract here?  Perhaps we should recall Labour's original New Deal scheme, back in the late 1990s, set up to training or work placements for NEETs.  That expanded into the full New Deal which was outsourced by David Blunkett in 2006.

"Whipping girl of the welfare apologists"

That's the curious description of A4e's owner Emma Harrison in the headline to an interview in the Sunday Times last Sunday.  It's a neat way of insulting all of us.  And another curiosity is that this is described as Harrison's "first interview since the scandal", completely ignoring the interview she gave to the Daily Mail on 11 August.  There's nothing new in this one, except that the self-justification is stronger than ever.  "I was busy helping families get back to work," she says.  The history of Emma and her company follows, complete with tuck-shop incident, and then the account of how she thought of the "family champions".  Her initiative was the inspiration for the whole government programme.  But then, "Suddenly I'm put forward as the face of all evil".  The article goes on: "Harrison does not deny that there was wrongdoing at A4e, but she believes it was blown out of proportion by political point-scoring.  Those who wanted to attack the government's controversial welfare policies had a handy whipping girl."  On the money, that £8.6m, she's still "unrepentant", giving the same explanation of her entrepreneurship as she gave to the Mail.  She now spends her time working with her Foundation for Social Improvement, helping small charities.
Perhaps this is another attempt at rehabilitating Harrison's reputation.

From bad to worse

Another story from the Guardian's Patrick Butler details more fallout from A4e's situation.  A contract awarded to the Foundation for Social Improvement, a charity set up and largely funded by A4e, has been withdrawn.  Richmond council gave the £85,000 contract to the FSI for charity business skills training, but has now decided to pull out,citing the potential risks of giving a contract to an organisation so dependent financially on a company now under investigation.  Butler hints that it was odd that the FSI got the contract in the first place, given that it had assets of less than £9,000 in its latest accounts.  Well done to Richmond's Lib Dem leader on the council, Stephen Knight, for raising concerns.

And yet more contracts

Thanks to the Richmond upon Thames Liberal Democrats for this story.  Richmond upon Thames council, like a lot of other local authorities, funded the Council for Voluntary Service (CVS) to support and train people in small, local voluntary organisations and charities.  The CVS branches usually consist of paid professionals helped by volunteers.  They are probably not experienced in drawing up bids for contracts to do the work.  So when Richmond Council, led by Conservative peer Lord True, decided to put the work out to contract for £85,000 the CVS lost - to the Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI).  Not A4e - or not quite.  The FSI is the creation of Emma Harrison and has received £1m from A4e.  Harrison is Chair of the Trustees (although the piece on the website about her doesn't mention A4e) and two other A4e directors, Jo Blundell and Andrew Dutton, are also trustees.  It's a registered charity, and it was originally about helping small charities to raise funds.  Now it is obviously using the bid-writing skills of A4e; it is based at A4e's Westminster offices, so it would be silly not to.  As Lib Dem leader on the council, Stephen Knight, says: "It beggars belief that Richmond council is intent on handing a contract to the A4e group of organisations, while the government and police are investigating evidence of widespread fraud and mismanagement. Local residents will be shocked that the Tories are intent of pulling funding from the local Council for Voluntary Service and instead handing a contract to a scandal-hit organisation based in Westminster."

There's an interesting piece on the Morning Star website (scroll down) headed "A4E isn't always terrible. Sometimes it is just mediocre."  A4e was hired to train 30,000 childminders in 2004, and the writer has got hold of an evaluation of the contract carried out by consultants PriceWaterhouseCoopers.  It's not good.  In fact, it's pretty grim.

Most of the newspapers have reported the story we took from Exaro yesterday about A4e being the preferred bidder for another contract, to run the Equalities and Human Rights Commission's helpline.  The Daily Mail takes the opportunity to re-run its previous graphics on A4e, but also quotes Margaret Hodge as saying: "This belies common sense.  There are so many question marks about this company’s competence and integrity that I can’t believe any government department is thinking of signing another contract with them.  The Home Office should hold off from making any decision until the investigations have been completed."


PS.  I read the latest Private Eye after posting the first paragraph above.  They have the story; but they also show that A4e used the FSI to help win the Work Programme contracts - the "bid candy" which the charities claim they became for the prime providers.  The Eye has also set its sights on another prime, Working Links, recalling a leaked "compliance visit" report last year which showed that Working Links in Liverpool had made 85 claims for outcomes which it was not entitled to. 

Emma Harrison on The Moral Maze

You probably missed Emma Harrison on Radio 4's The Moral Maze, (Wednesday, repeated Saturday) but you can find it on iplayer. The topic was the role of charities, and Emma was there in her role as Chair of the FSI. Michael Buerk described A4e as a charity, a mistake which Harrison herself corrected. She said that when charities get too big they get crushed and lose their mission. She works with small charities which are not looking to the state to support them. The most healthy charities do both state-supported and donor-supported work. She says she has always been led by her mission, but charities can get diverted by going after a pot of money. Michael Portillo asked whether charities should displace the state. Harrison said that whoever was best at it should do the work. Charities are not the only organisations with a moral heart. Can charities be unaccountable, asked Portillo. No, everyone is accountable, she replied.

I found the confusion about whether A4e is a charity quite disturbing. Harrison had a valid point about big charities losing their mission; but it was another "me and my mission" opportunity, and she took it. Once again, there were no hard questions, and Harrison has now become the spokesperson for small charities. Ironic.

Connecting Communities Plus and A4e

You may never have heard of "Connecting Communities Plus". An official document tells us that " Connecting Communities Plus, Community Grants (CCPlus) were announced and launched by the Home Office in October 2005. They formed part of the Government’s agenda for community cohesion outlined in Improving Opportunity, Strengthening Society (IOSS) (Home Office, 2005). The funding was designed for local community groups and aimed to foster both racial equality and community cohesion." The community grants scheme came to an end in 2006 and was followed by another £18m of funding over 3 years for strategic grants, project grants and community grants. The scheme is described here. If you read to the end of that document you will see that the grants administrator for the strategic and project grants is A4e.

There's some slight confusion, in that A4e states that it was its Foundation for Social Improvement that was responsible, but also has a separate website for the scheme.

I'm certain that A4e did the job properly. My question is why a private company needed to be involved at all. I don't know whether they were paid for the work, but if so it would have been no more (and possibly less) than a quango would have cost. But it does seem that this is another area where A4e is establishing itself as the expert.

On a lighter note, one of the places in Britain that I really want to visit is the Eden Project. The Plymouth Herald reported in October that Eden has appointed a new chairman and three new members of the Eden Trust - one of whom is A4e's Emma Harrison.