Remember the Work Programme? Of course you do. But, like so much of what this government has done, the WP has been forgotten by most of the media; and its successor, "Help to Work", is just being ignored.
But the businesses contracted to deliver the WP have to plough on until 2016. And A4e has resumed its practice of inviting MPs into their local offices to admire what they're doing. Rob Wilson, Tory MP for Reading East, said, “I was very pleased to hear that A4e has seen a reduction in client numbers because of the success of the Work Programme getting people back into work and off benefits. Clients are supported by A4e staff after starting work to help ensure they are able to manage in their job. This extra support is essential to keep people in the new job.” John Bercow, Tory MP for Buckingham (and Speaker of the Commons) was equally impressed by A4e's work in Milton Keynes. Another cheer-leader is Dan Finn, Professor of Social Inclusion at Portsmouth University. He's written a piece on Serco's own website asking, "Is it working?" and concluding that it is, with a few caveats. And yet .... Huge amounts of money have been spent on this, with very low targets which are not being met. It was meant to solve unemployment and certainly hasn't.
So IDS came up with "Help to Work". It was supposed, after a delay, to start yesterday, but there's another delay. Could that be because of the difficulties in finding placements for all those sentenced to workfare? There's a good piece on the Ekklesia website, and another on ThirdSector's site. A growing number of voluntary organisations and local councils have signed up to a boycott of the scheme. If they can't find placements with charities and councils the firms with the contracts will have to offer this free labour to private companies. But, ostrich-like, "A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: 'Referrals to the placements have begun and the placements will begin shortly. There has been no delay. Charities are under no obligation to be in the scheme, but those who are recognise the benefits of it.'"
Despite the fact that everything he has touched has turned to dross, Iain Duncan Smith believes it's all wonderful. If you can stomach it, read his speech on welfare reform in Berlin. And if we needed confirmation that IDS has a headlock on the BBC, it comes in the Express. Talking about the Tories' promise of an EU referendum, "Iain Duncan Smith lashed out at the BBC for failing to give enough prominence to Mr Cameron’s promise of an in-out vote in 2017. The Work and Pensions Secretary said 'most people' do not even know about the pledge. A BBC spokeswoman said: 'We are satisfied that we have covered the EU referendum promise.'"
Showing posts with label Help to Work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Help to Work. Show all posts
Tuesday, 3 June 2014
Monday, 19 May 2014
The mess that is Universal Credit
If you depended on the BBC for your news - and apparently many still do - or if you thought that the Sun, the Mail and the Express were newspapers, you would know nothing about Universal Credit beyond the vague assurances that it's coming and will "make work pay". But there are still some real journalists who take an interest in such matters. One of them is Emily Dugan, who wrote a disturbing piece for the Independent on Saturday. She went to Warrington, one of the pilot areas, and spoke to the people who are having to suffer the consequences of UC; the claimants whose benefit wasn't paid or who found themselves in rent arrears because the money which was supposed to go straight to the landlord didn't; the Housing Associations trying to cope with a haphazard system which puts tenants at risk of eviction through no fault of their own; the CAB worker who says that the problems are increasing.
Sheila Gilmore MP is on the Work & Pensions select committee. She has written a piece on the Progress website about what they are being told and why they don't believe it. The meaningless waffle they get from civil servants is familiar to many of us, but it's trying to hide the fact that UC is a grotesque failure.
There are still only about 6,000 people on UC, and they are all the "easy" cases - single, no complications. Yet the IT obviously doesn't work even for them. I reckon that the plan for the Tories is simply to coast towards the 2015 election, delaying the roll-out. After that, whoever gets in can make the decision on whether to cancel the whole grisly project or to plough on since the only people who will suffer don't count.
The same may well apply to Help to Work. It was supposed to have started, but the workfare component was delayed to give at least the semblance of legitimacy to G4S's chunk of the contracts (no one was fooled but the DWP doesn't care). The rest of it - signing on every day, spending all day every day doing "jobsearch" in the Jobcentre - was never feasible and hasn't started either. But as far as Iain Duncan Smith is concerned, who cares? The propaganda has been successful beyond his wildest dreams. And there are very few journalists out there willing to report the truth.
Sheila Gilmore MP is on the Work & Pensions select committee. She has written a piece on the Progress website about what they are being told and why they don't believe it. The meaningless waffle they get from civil servants is familiar to many of us, but it's trying to hide the fact that UC is a grotesque failure.
There are still only about 6,000 people on UC, and they are all the "easy" cases - single, no complications. Yet the IT obviously doesn't work even for them. I reckon that the plan for the Tories is simply to coast towards the 2015 election, delaying the roll-out. After that, whoever gets in can make the decision on whether to cancel the whole grisly project or to plough on since the only people who will suffer don't count.
The same may well apply to Help to Work. It was supposed to have started, but the workfare component was delayed to give at least the semblance of legitimacy to G4S's chunk of the contracts (no one was fooled but the DWP doesn't care). The rest of it - signing on every day, spending all day every day doing "jobsearch" in the Jobcentre - was never feasible and hasn't started either. But as far as Iain Duncan Smith is concerned, who cares? The propaganda has been successful beyond his wildest dreams. And there are very few journalists out there willing to report the truth.
Monday, 28 April 2014
Help to Work - at least for G4S
At last, we know four of the companies which have won the contracts to deliver the inappropriately named "Help to Work" programme. The Financial Times reveals that they are G4S, Seetec, Interserve and Pertemps. Why it hasn't named the other two, I have no idea, but A4e hasn't said anything, and Serco has launched a rescue rights issue, so perhaps they both lost out. The FT says that G4S is the biggest winner. It also says: "It
comes less than three weeks after the British government lifted a ban
on G4S bidding for public sector work and suggests that Whitehall is
taking a favourable view towards one of its largest contractors,
despite insisting that the company remains under close scrutiny."
But hang on a minute. The bidding must have taken place during the time in which that ban was supposed to be in place. And the company was "cleared" just in time for the announcement of its success. Who is the government trying to kid?
The whole "Help to Work" story today has been utterly depressing. This morning, on Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davies had the dubious pleasure of trying to interview the appalling Esther McVey. I bet he didn't want to. When he tried to pose questions to her boss, Iain Duncan Smith, recently he ended up being complained about by ignorant listeners. McVey did the same trick this morning - spouting utter twaddle and not answering questions. The reaction to the new scheme in the media has been predictable. The Guardian and the Independent get it right, while the Express salivates at the prospect of bludgeoning the poor even harder. The BBC interviewed Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA, who said what you would expect since she's paid by the outsourcing companies, and Richard Johnson who used to work for Serco and talked sense.
So let's spell it out. This scheme is largely about IDS's temper at the failure of the Work Programme, which he interprets as the failure of the unemployed. So they must be punished. And it will have the advantage of taking loads of people out of the unemployment figures. They will be sanctioned en masse, or driven into the black economy, or forced onto workfare and so counted as employed.
Newsnight is doing something on the scheme. I don't think I'll watch.
But hang on a minute. The bidding must have taken place during the time in which that ban was supposed to be in place. And the company was "cleared" just in time for the announcement of its success. Who is the government trying to kid?
The whole "Help to Work" story today has been utterly depressing. This morning, on Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davies had the dubious pleasure of trying to interview the appalling Esther McVey. I bet he didn't want to. When he tried to pose questions to her boss, Iain Duncan Smith, recently he ended up being complained about by ignorant listeners. McVey did the same trick this morning - spouting utter twaddle and not answering questions. The reaction to the new scheme in the media has been predictable. The Guardian and the Independent get it right, while the Express salivates at the prospect of bludgeoning the poor even harder. The BBC interviewed Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA, who said what you would expect since she's paid by the outsourcing companies, and Richard Johnson who used to work for Serco and talked sense.
So let's spell it out. This scheme is largely about IDS's temper at the failure of the Work Programme, which he interprets as the failure of the unemployed. So they must be punished. And it will have the advantage of taking loads of people out of the unemployment figures. They will be sanctioned en masse, or driven into the black economy, or forced onto workfare and so counted as employed.
Newsnight is doing something on the scheme. I don't think I'll watch.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
More lies v. truth
You couldn't have a better example today of this government's contempt for the truth, and how the media collude with them.
On the one hand there are two articles, in the Express and the Mail. The very names tell you what's coming - a platform for Iain Duncan Smith to lie about some made-up figures. They are the same article, really. The Mail says: "Half of those caught out by benefits cap are 'spurred to seek work': New figures show the system is working". This is based on an Ipsos Mori poll of "more than 1,600 capped households" showed that 28% did more to find work. Pretty thin, you might say. Even thinner is the finding that 11% of capped households have found work, although you'll have to get your calculator out to work that one out. This gives IDS the excuse to claim that the cap is changing people's behaviour, etc, etc. This is the sort of nonsense which he was rebuked for, but he takes no notice.
The Express's version oozes hatred, as usual, referring to "handouts", "welfare bonanza", "workshy", "creaming off" and on and on, but it's the same lie based on the same dubious figures. Bringing in Jonathan Isaby of the Taxpayers Alliance to parrot the right things hardly enhances the credibility of this rotten propaganda.
So for an antidote we turn to the Guardian, and first to an article by Patrick Wintour. The same Ipsos Mori poll which delights IDS also shows that a third of people affected by the cap have had to cut back on essential items. Just as important are the findings of Citizens Advice. The increased ruthlessness of the sanctions regime is driving people to loan sharks and hindering them from looking for work. They point out that on the Work Programme twice as many people are sanctioned as find work.
And then there's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee. The latest employment figures will show that more people are in work; but in the last 3 months all the increase is down to self-employment. And most of it is down to desperation. Toynbee goes on to look at Help to Work. Since nobody actually calls it that, let's refer to it as workfare. She says: "For once, instead of rushing in, the DWP has done a good control trial on this with 15,000 unemployed. The pilot's results, however, were sneaked out just before Christmas with no press release. That's no surprise when you uncover the findings. First the unemployed were given a 13-week warning period to act as a deterrent, and then 26 weeks of either 'intensive Jobcentre Plus support', or the workfare 'community action programme'. Or they went into the control group with nothing special. Here's what happened: exactly the same number in the control group – 18% – found themselves jobs as those doing the forced community work. Just 1% more found jobs from the group with jobcentre support. In other words, workfare didn't work. Although 68% of the control group were still on unemployment benefits at the end, so were 66% of those who did the community work and 64% of those given jobcentre support."
Help to Work is only two weeks from launch, but there hasn't even been an announcement of the contractors, and Toynbee couldn't get an answer out of the DWP. She concludes that the only reason for going ahead with this is that it takes people out of the unemployment figures for 6 months. " Incidently," she says, "these sad long-term cases will do more than twice the maximum any court can sentence a thief to on Community Payback. To be out of work is now officially morally worse than committing a crime."
On the one hand there are two articles, in the Express and the Mail. The very names tell you what's coming - a platform for Iain Duncan Smith to lie about some made-up figures. They are the same article, really. The Mail says: "Half of those caught out by benefits cap are 'spurred to seek work': New figures show the system is working". This is based on an Ipsos Mori poll of "more than 1,600 capped households" showed that 28% did more to find work. Pretty thin, you might say. Even thinner is the finding that 11% of capped households have found work, although you'll have to get your calculator out to work that one out. This gives IDS the excuse to claim that the cap is changing people's behaviour, etc, etc. This is the sort of nonsense which he was rebuked for, but he takes no notice.
The Express's version oozes hatred, as usual, referring to "handouts", "welfare bonanza", "workshy", "creaming off" and on and on, but it's the same lie based on the same dubious figures. Bringing in Jonathan Isaby of the Taxpayers Alliance to parrot the right things hardly enhances the credibility of this rotten propaganda.
So for an antidote we turn to the Guardian, and first to an article by Patrick Wintour. The same Ipsos Mori poll which delights IDS also shows that a third of people affected by the cap have had to cut back on essential items. Just as important are the findings of Citizens Advice. The increased ruthlessness of the sanctions regime is driving people to loan sharks and hindering them from looking for work. They point out that on the Work Programme twice as many people are sanctioned as find work.
And then there's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee. The latest employment figures will show that more people are in work; but in the last 3 months all the increase is down to self-employment. And most of it is down to desperation. Toynbee goes on to look at Help to Work. Since nobody actually calls it that, let's refer to it as workfare. She says: "For once, instead of rushing in, the DWP has done a good control trial on this with 15,000 unemployed. The pilot's results, however, were sneaked out just before Christmas with no press release. That's no surprise when you uncover the findings. First the unemployed were given a 13-week warning period to act as a deterrent, and then 26 weeks of either 'intensive Jobcentre Plus support', or the workfare 'community action programme'. Or they went into the control group with nothing special. Here's what happened: exactly the same number in the control group – 18% – found themselves jobs as those doing the forced community work. Just 1% more found jobs from the group with jobcentre support. In other words, workfare didn't work. Although 68% of the control group were still on unemployment benefits at the end, so were 66% of those who did the community work and 64% of those given jobcentre support."
Help to Work is only two weeks from launch, but there hasn't even been an announcement of the contractors, and Toynbee couldn't get an answer out of the DWP. She concludes that the only reason for going ahead with this is that it takes people out of the unemployment figures for 6 months. " Incidently," she says, "these sad long-term cases will do more than twice the maximum any court can sentence a thief to on Community Payback. To be out of work is now officially morally worse than committing a crime."
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