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. 

Family Champions - more confusion

The Children and Young People Now website has an article on Emma Harrison's Family Champions scheme which makes the whole picture even more confusing. It's supposed to consist mainly of volunteers. But the pilot areas are not keen. Westminster doesn't want any volunteers, costing time and money to train. Hull won't make a decision for at least 6 months. Shepway is similarly holding back. And these are the areas which already have paid "family champions" in place. The article doesn't mention the private contractors with the ESF money who will be doing a similar job. So much for David Cameron's "plan to transform the lives of England’s 120,000 most troubled families by 2015." It seems unlikely that there'll be that army of volunteers, of "Emmas" as it was originally put. Big society stuff.

And where did that figure of 120,000 families come from? Any round number is suspicious, and that one was just plucked out of the air. Certainly there are a lot of very troubled families, but they are best dealt with by the existing charities working with local authorities.

"Lead Family Champion"

Something called the Family and Parenting Institute (a think tank) gives space for Emma Harrison to plug her Working Families Everywhere campaign. The familiar message has been refined somewhat. "The difference in the Working Families Everywhere approach is on setting a single goal, in this case employment for at least one family member, and dealing with the other needs on the path to, or subsequent to, that goal." There's a great deal about Emma's qualifications for the role, and then the final paragraph is a triumph of Emma-speak. But we learn that these "family champions" will all be volunteers. That was inevitable. But there's nothing in this piece about the ESF contracts for private companies to do this work for profit. How will the volunteers fit into this strange mix of local council employees and private companies?

Meanwhile, Mark Lovell has been using the Huffington Post to publicise his vision of young people getting themselves out of unemployment by starting their own enterprises. One would think that the Prince's Trust didn't exist.

Puzzles

I am genuinely puzzled. Emma Harrison's stunt over Working Families Everywhere and family champions completely obscured the fact that contracts are coming out to provide such people with ESF money. And now Kent County Council are advertising for them in what they're calling a pilot until March 2013. The advert uses Harrison's slogans. But it also says that "there may be scope for an extension (after March 2013) depending on new funding becoming available". So when and where do these new DWP contracts apply? Since these people are currently employed by the councils, and would be TUPE'd over to the private contractors, there would seem to be nothing in it for Harrison except publicity; unless the volunteers she's trying to recruit are under her control, and that seems unlikely.

The website Children and Young People Now has tried to get some clarity from Harrison, but without much success. However, the piece does solve the puzzle of why Kent is joining in. Baroness Debbie Stedman-Scott is chief executive of charity Tomorrow's People and member of the Working Families Everywhere advisory board, and her group works in Maidstone, Kent. Helen Dent, chief executive of charity Family Action, repeats her scepticism about the whole scheme.

It would be useful if the journalists who are paid to research these things would sort it out. And pigs might fly.

There are times, just briefly, when I wonder whether I'm being unfair. Perhaps the bosses of A4e are genuinely more interested in helping people than in making money. Mark Lovell tweets: "Don't like profit motive - set up a social business and grow it globally. Compete, impact and force corporates and governments to change". And he's about to start an "Improving People's Lives" Fund. All very worthy. And unrecognisable to many of A4e's staff and clients. Another of his tweets is really interesting: "3,800 staff in our business - 63% female:male staffing ratio, higher outside UK. My 'boss' Emma and I have worked together for 20 yrs". Note the quotes around "boss". It has long been difficult to work out Harrison's real role in the company. There is a board of directors and a chief executive, so how much power does she have? Perhaps it's just useful to have her out there getting the publicity and cosying up to politicians while others get on with running the company.

Today Programme interview

You're having your breakfast calmly when up pops Emma Harrison. There was a disgraceful interview on the Today programme this morning, Justin Webb completely without research or knowledge and pretty much fawning on the woman. The clichés were all there. "Poking" came up again. When Webb seemed about to murmur a challenge she talked over him. Webb said it was a "fantastic idea" but what happens when some members of families don't co-operate? She didn't tackle that, unsurprisingly, just talked about the benefits of working with whole families rather than individuals. She said that she had a cross-party parliamentary group advising her, and that all of them were going to be told that they had to volunteer to do help. Webb said she was a persuasive person - she said she was heading up a campaign.

It was as bad as it gets. Lovely free publicity. When are we going to get real journalism backed by real research?

Business Opportunities

Blogger was read-only for a while and my last post was deleted, so here it is again:

A4's Mark Lovell has been talking to Citibank in pursuit of his banking ambitions, and is now looking at opportunities for business in higher education. Roy Newey is pursuing business in India and Pakistan, helped by the British taxpayer via UKTI. Emma Harrison was, a week ago, holding a meeting of family champions in London. The three pilot areas, you remember, were Hull, Blackpool and Westminster; but while Blackpool has advertised for 5 such champions, neither Hull nor Westminster have anything at all on their websites about it. Yet Harrison says that the meeting was of "the newly appointed and yet to be appointed Family Champions from Hull, Blackpool and Westminster", and claims that the local authorities are committed. Strange that they haven't told their residents.

Just a note about comments. From time to time I get comments from current or former A4e staff which are very critical of the company. I don't publish them, for various reasons, including the fact that Blogger doesn't allow me to edit them. But I do save them, so keep them coming. I'll do a digest at some point.

More family champions

Emma Harrison has announced that two other councils have joined Blackpool in piloting her Working Families Everywhere scheme. They are Hull and Westminster. Neither council seems to have told their electorates, since there's nothing on their websites. Perhaps they are reluctant to announce, at the same time as making hundreds of council workers redundant, that they are employing "family champions".

Family champions - and confidence and doubts about the Work Programme

Do you fancy being one of Emma Harrison's "family champions"? If you live in the Blackpool area, now's your chance. The council is advertising for 5 of them. The pay is £19 - 21k. Although the employer is the council, the advert was clearly drawn up by Harrison. Amidst the gush we find: "You will be working in partnership with multiple agencies to help families affected by inter generational worklessness that need your support within your community and become a positive presence in their lives and homes; challenging the family when objectives have not been met, supporting the family through new experiences and goals." (You might ask at this point, which families? Who is going to decide on the clients? Will they be able to refuse?) The job spec is more sober. And it's here you begin to see it as a kind of prototype for the super-contract. Among other similar requirements we get: "To engage in interagency, partnership and joint working to ensure a more coherent and personalized response to the needs of children, young people and families."

Nowhere can one find a definition of a family. However, while conceding that these "family champions" may achieve some good for some people, it must be seen as a dangerously flawed approach.

The Financial Times continues to take a close interest in the finances of the Work Programme. On 23 March it published a letter from A4e's Mark Lovell, disagreeing with the doubts which have been expressed. He says that A4e pioneered the payment-by-results model, and have been very successful with it in Israel. "Working in close partnership with the investment community, we are confident of success in the UK and in the ability of the market to respond to the policies that the government has put in place," he says. But the Mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales, has expressed grave doubts about the programme working at all in his area. In an FT report he says that 3 providers working in competition will just lead to confusion in a contract area which is far too big. The Olympics site is in his borough, and he is worried that the many temporary jobs created by the games will not come the way of local unemployed people. "The prime providers might actively discourage people from taking them because they would not get a significant payment – and those who did take the jobs and became unemployed again could have to go to the back of the queue and start on the work programme again a year later." Excellent point.

Contact - and quiet

I had a comment yesterday from someone claiming to be a journalist and wanting to make contact with me. That person can send me a comment (obviously not for publication) with his or her email address and I will get in touch.

There's nothing much to report at the moment. Emma Harrison hasn't given an interview for over a week. Perhaps her PR people have advised a period of quiet, or perhaps she's on holiday. There was, however, a piece in the Guardian last week by Rhian Beynon, who is head of policy and campaigns at Family Action. This is the charity, you remember, which is not best pleased at Emma's latest project, the Family Champions, or Working Families Everywhere, because they've been doing this work without fanfare for years. Beynon is particularly concerned in the article with the mental health strategy, or lack of it, to support children. And she is very sceptical about Harrison's capacity in this area.

Yet another interview

I know it's tedious to keep reporting Emma Harrison's press interviews. They are simply PR exercises, with compliant journalists failing to do the research or ask the right questions. But there's another such interview in today's Yorkshire Post; and it helps us to see how the spin works.

The interviewer is Sarah Freeman. I have no idea what her area of expertise is, but all she has done is copy down some figures from the ONS (269,00 households where no one has ever worked - pause there for a moment. 25% of households in this country consist of one person. So this isn't quite the same as 269,000 "families" of mum, dad and half a dozen kids all sitting around doing nothing.) And right at the end of the article someone has stuck the latest unemployment figures. In between is the usual spiel from Mrs Harrison; her background, her zeal to get people back to work, the Family Champions scheme; and added to that, the Vox centres. To show that she's human she cites her 16-year-old dyslexic son. Now, a real journalist would, at some point, have brought some facts to the table. The FND results, for instance. Of course, I might be doing Ms Freeman a disservice, and it wasn't her idea to omit the hard questions. And it would be sexist to wonder why Harrison is so often interviewed by women. "Harrison is clearly on a mission," we're told. Oh yes, a PR mission.

Family Champions and that summit

That presentation by Emma Harrison at the UK Nordic Baltic Summit has been put online; at least, the slides have. Judging by the introduction - "Every family gets a Family Champion who sorts stuff out and gets jobs – holistically – directing all existing efforts and resources towards Families with a sense of purpose, working, independent and Helping Others" - it was big on ambition and capital letters. And we have some new jargon. "Holistically" is nice, but "poking" as a description of what agencies have been doing with troubled families is not. Still, Emma can fix it. The Family Champion is going to be "one holistic point of support" to turn 500 such families into "working families".

Perhaps there were questions after this presentation; we're not told. Someone might have asked about the qualifications needed by these Family Champions, the training they will receive, and their relationship with other agencies. Someone might have asked whether "working" is the same as "volunteering". Someone, indeed, might have raised the Flexible New Deal results.