A4e sold?

I've had a tip-off that A4e has been sold and the staff will be informed on Monday.  Since I can't confirm that, I won't go into any more detail.  If it's true it raises some interesting questions.

Last night on Newsnight there was supposed to be a debate about "welfare" with representatives from Labour and the Conservatives.  Labour's Rachel Reeves and Stephen Timms were already on their way when they were told it had been cancelled - the Conservatives had pulled out.  It seems that Mark Harper, minister for the disabled, had withdrawn with two hours notice.  So, since we're now under election rules, the producers couldn't empty-chair him.  Instead there was a "panel" on which Fraser Nelson spouted egregious Conservative tripe and Will Hutton talked sense.  Also there was Deirdre Kelly ("White Dee"), because the media now treat her as some sort of representative of the unemployed.  It was terrible.  The Daily Politics has been holding a series of debates among party spokespeople on various areas of government, and on May 5th there's to be one on "welfare", including Iain Duncan Smith.  The editor assures me, via Twitter, that IDS won't withdraw and, no, it isn't already recorded, it goes out live.  We'll see.

Two verdicts on Universal Credit

Two programmes looked at UC last night (I had to catch up on both online this morning).

The first was a Channel 4 Dispatches programme.  Now, Channel 4 brought you Benefits Street, and the producers of that pernicious propaganda recently insisted that they wouldn't be "censored" and will go ahead with the next rotten slice; so could we trust the channel to do something truthful on UC?  Amazingly, yes.  Liz MacKean, a real journalist, went to Warrington earlier this year to look at how it was working.  They found four claimants, who could never be describes as scroungers, who had suffered problems and hardship because of mistakes, delays, confusion and poor staff training.  There were tales of the system not being able to cope with a change in circumstances; of the huge hike in rent arrears and debt.  A whistle-blower from a DWP service centre spoke of staff being overwhelmed by the workload.  Significantly, perhaps, it was Mark Harper, the newish minister for the disabled, who was put up to answer for all this.  He seems to be the new face of the DWP; Iain Duncan Smith and McVey are both, perhaps, seen as liabilities.  Harper talked blandly, of course; but there seemed no recognition that real people are suffering real harm as they "learn from their mistakes" at the DWP.

The second programme was a Radio 4 Analysis episode.  Most of it is summarised in the presenter's own piece in yesterday's Guardian.  Jonathan Portes used to work at the DWP so has an insider's view of what has gone on.  The radio programme was striving for "balance".  We got Kwasi Kwarteng, a Tory MP, making excuses for Duncan Smith.  Worse, we got a sizeable contribution from Fraser Nelson.  He's the editor of the Spectator, a small circulation right-wing magazine, and he also writes for the Telegraph, for which he has produced the most deluded tosh about "welfare reform".  He repeated it on the radio.  (For balance, Margaret Hodge told the truth.)  We got a damning description of the failures of IDS, in UC and in the Atos fiasco.  There was no mention of the dreadful damage that's been done to real people because of IDS's delusions, just a description of the financial costs.

Everyone except IDS seems now to agree that UC is a write-off, and will be ditched whoever is in power after May.

Harking back to yesterday's post, A4e have tweeted an apology.

The view from Planet Tory

I'm not a Conservative voter.  (In fact, I'm politically homeless at the moment.)  I don't routinely read stuff on the Conservative Home site - too depressing.  But one blog piece on there popped up in the alerts which is worth reading for the insight it gives into the Tory mindset when it comes to welfare.  It's badly written and nobody has bothered to proofread it.  But when you get past that, you see an attitude which is blind to reality.  It takes as its starting point the ERSA figures published in a pre-emptive strike this week, and the writer, someone called Harry Phibbs, swallows them whole.  The WP "has certainly made progress", he says.  Well, we'll see.  He insists that the programme is "good value for the taxpayer".  "There is an incentive to innovate, to cater to the needs of the individual," he says, oblivious of the fact that this simply hasn't happened.  But "even more important is reality [sic] that for those able to work sitting at home on benefits is ceasing to be an option".  He misses the irony here; that the WP was supposed to solve this problem.  No, "Those who don’t find jobs via the Work Programme will go through a Community Work Programme where they work 30 hours a week for 26 weeks to contribute to their community. For claimants refusing to participate, benefits will be withdrawn for three months for the first offence, six months for the second, and three years for the third."  He is conflating a number of things here, but relishes the punishment to be dished out to these idle people.  His proudest boast, however, and the one displaying the greatest ignorance, is that 150,000 people, and rising, disappeared from the unemployed figures rather than go on the WP.  If this piece is a sign of Tory ideology triumphing over reality, the comments underneath it show that there are plenty of people know the truth.
But that doesn't include Fraser Nelson.  He's the editor of the Spectator magazine and one of the BBC's favourite journalists.  On Thursday he had an article in the Telegraph in which he tried, ridiculously, to show that the Tories are fighting for the "working classes" while Labour would abandon them.  While Nelson is a better writer than Mr Phibbs, his conclusions on welfare are very similar.  The WP seems to be working now.  There's a curious statement that IDS has decided to "hire more private companies to help the long-term unemployed".  That is news to me.  Then the usual laxity with figures starts.  "There are more in employment than ever before."  Of course there are, the population is bigger than ever before.  And of the 1.2 million referred to the WP, 321,000 have found work.  That's the headline ERSA figure, as we know, which is likely to be thoroughly misleading.  Nelson has examples of WP success stories - examples provided by A4e.  An ex-railwayman from Glasgow who got nowhere with the Jobcentre but, "with proper help on job-hunting", is now fixing computers.  And another man who, after 16 years out of work, is now a street-cleaner.  Good for both of them.  Any success is to be applauded.  But what does that prove?  Nelson says that these two stories "are the work of A4e, which was vilified when it said it had caught some of its employees fiddling the figures to hit targets".  Well, there was rather more to it than that, Mr Nelson.  
This, of course, is why the government allowed, or encouraged, the ERSA to put out the headline figures a week before the true statistics.  The myths can take hold, and the media can get bored before the details are published.  And it's these myths which permeate the consciousness of the government and its supporters.

Right-wing backlash

The media coverage today has been interesting.

• The Mail began it with another attack on the Harrisons' finances.  After bashing away at the relatively minor point that the DWP knew about the fraud investigation when Cameron appointed Harrison as his "families champion", they tell us that, "Mrs Harrison, 48, and her husband Jim, 52, are joint sole directors of two businesses, Andromeda Park Ltd and Thornbridge Ltd. ........ These are used to manage their investments......... The companies owe the couple a total of £9.3m."  Once again, this is old news.  On 13 April 2011 we published this, unashamedly pinching it from Private Eye.  The Harrisons deny that they have received £9.3m through these companies.
• The Guardian has run several pieces which seek to widen the argument.  One by Pollyanna Perkins is headed "Private sector isn't always best".  She writes: "At a time when we are counting every pound and limiting access to services it is particularly galling to see public money – £478m – being misspent by one obviously untroubled family.  But we in the public sector have to wake up and stand up to this kind of development and be assertive in our condemnation of such approaches. The new troubled families initiative led by the then families tsar is a classic example.  Horrified as I was by the outline proposals, I was surprised by people welcoming this approach, muddling it up with the very valuable 'Think Family' work being done in mental health and other adults and children's teams."   Another, more general article by Patrick Butler targets the Work Programme specifically.  He speaks to an "industry insider" who would have preferred to see A4e's millions going to a social enterprise which reinvests its profits.  Butler says, "A4e is notorious for its now threadbare pretentions to being a 'social purpose' company. It proclaims to have one sole aim: 'To improve people's lives.'  Well, show me a business that claims otherwise."  He has a quote from another work programme executive about the way it works: " It's not about supporting 100 customers. It's about getting 50 of them into a job. The other 50 are collateral damage. At the end of the day, they [ministers] don't care about that other 50. It's an outcome contract, not a service contract."  Butler also points us to a bill being presented tomorrow by Conservative MP Chris White.  "In theory, he says, this "will mean contracts cannot be let on price alone, but must take account of wider social benefit. White believes it will put a brake on what he has called the 'supermarketisation' of public services and create a level playing field for charities and social enterprises." 
• But it was inevitable that there would be a right-wing backlash, and it comes in the shape of Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.  A4e, he says, "is a company that matches unemployed British workers with jobs, and has grown by being able to do so far better than government agencies. Coaching and training the unemployed are costly, but nowhere near as expensive as keeping them on the dole. Labour found that every pound spent with welfare-to-work companies saved the taxpayer three times as much. Soon, A4e was being given multi-million-pound contracts, and growing at what was probably too fast a rate. It was only a matter of time before something, somewhere, went wrong."  Note the highlighted statements.  Rubbish, untrue, unverified, as always with such statements.  And he goes on to castigate Margaret Hodge because a) she's rich and b) it was her government which got us into this.  He says, "What matters now is ideology, and beating up a government that seems comically unable to fight back (as the pantomime over the NHS Bill shows). The battle that Mrs Hodge is fighting is one the Left considered lost only 10 years ago: to make 'profit' a dirty word again and see the companies expelled."  Well, Nelson is one of those all-purpose right-wing journalists who needn't bother actually to know anything about his subject.  But at least we're having a debate.