Where are they now?

There was a time when A4e would have a stand at all the main party conferences, touting their services.  I doubt very much whether that's the case this year.  How times have changed for this company!  We don't know what their financial situation is, and won't for at least 3 months, but it was pretty dire a year ago.
Gone are the days when owner Emma Harrison could pocket £8.6m in one year.  For a few brief years she enjoyed the spotlight, the celebrity status, rising to the dizzy heights of adviser to the government.  And then it all came crashing down.  An attempt to rehabilitate herself with a Channel 4 News interview in 2012 just resulted in car-crash TV.  So where is Emma now?  There have been no sightings reported.
Mark Lovell, as we reported in July, left A4e this year and went to something called The Social Assistance Partnership.  He had been with A4e since the beginning, and his departure marked the end of the original company.
Our favourite A4e director, Jonty Olliff-Cooper, left of his own accord, or so it was said.  Nothing to do with that offensive tweet, of course.  He is now working for something called "The Young Foundation [which] is a leading independent centre for disruptive social innovation. We create new movements, institutions and companies that tackle the structural causes of inequality."  Yes, well.  Effectively Jonty has also dropped off the radar.
After it all went horribly wrong, A4e engaged the services of a PR company close to Chancellor George Osborne to try to change their image.  The advice seems to have been, "Become invisible".  There are very few planted pieces in the local press these days, and the bosses avoid publicity like the plague.  The Company has shrunk its business and faces increased competition for the contracts on offer in the UK.  They pulled out of prison education contracts because they couldn't make them pay (and that doesn't appear to have been entirely A4e's fault) and are not in the running for the probation service contracts.
For a blogger following the company it's all a bit frustrating.

Still watching

I was taken to task recently for not writing about A4e on a blog devoted to A4e.  As I said at the time, there is no news about A4e.  But, when you think about it, that in itself is noteworthy.
I started the original website (which A4e got closed down) and then this blog because A4e had a very high profile, and I believed, drawing on my own experience, that the reality didn't match the hype.  And the reality needed to be out there.  Others obviously agreed.  But the tide of publicity rolled on, as did the number of contracts scooped up by the company.  Allegations of fraud had little impact, except to raise the profile even higher.  Emma Harrison revelled in all the publicity, basking in the glow of her own celebrity, collecting her CBE and being appointed adviser to government.  Her fall from grace came suddenly and unexpectedly, and the new bosses had to pick up the pieces.  That meant seeking as little publicity as possible, a strategy that was common sense as well as, surely, the advice of the PR person brought in to help, George Bridges of Quiller.
It worked for a while.  But then Harrison was lured back into the limelight by Channel 4 News, and gave that car crash of an interview.  Less spectacular, but of no help at all, was the behaviour of Jonty Olliff-Cooper, with his offensive tweets.  But the publicity dies down, and no one apparently cares any more.
But it's a different world out there for A4e.  The competition is much fiercer in those sectors they used to find most profitable.  The contracts aren't just handed to them any more.  Companies have come in from overseas, and the really big guns here - Serco, G4S, Capita - have spread their tentacles into what was once A4e's core business.  The smaller-scale stuff from local councils has dried up.  The last financial results available, as of March 2012, showed A4e in trouble.
So we carry on watching A4e, wondering if the company will even survive.

A4e and the government

The latest edition of Private Eye has shown once again the unhealthy relationship between A4e (and the other Work Programme primes) and the government.  They have documents released under FoI relating to a meeting which Chris grayling had last July with A4e directors.  At that point it was already clear, or should have been, that the WP was failing, and the publicity around A4e had been terrible.  But Grayling tells them, "In six months it will be all forgotten," and that he's grateful for what they're doing.  Grayling was replaced by Mark Hoban, who was similarly congratulatory at a meeting with Maximus in September.  The article continues: "The most revealing document, a 'short feedback' email, says Hoban wants Maximus' views on 'how we "sell" the Work Programme'."
Hoban has since made stern noises about tackling under-performance on the WP.  But, as the Eye points out, this is indicative of the fact that the government is more concerned with covering up the failures than securing value for money.
One important link with government for A4e was Jonty Olliff-Cooper, and he has gone.  The only publication to have picked up this fact is the Guardian, with a diary piece by Hugh Muir.  He points out that Cooper used to be "assistant to eccentric [Tory] strategy guru Steve Hilton".  Muir seems to be suggesting that Cooper has departed because the WP figures, due out shortly, are going to be terrible, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's clearing his path to a seat in parliament.  Nor would I be surprised if his position became untenable after his appallingly ill-judged tweets.  His going leaves one strong link between A4e and government, however.  After the meltdown last year and Emma Harrison's departure, the company hired the PR consultants Quiller, which includes George Bridges, "a pal of Chancellor George" as Muir puts it.  This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, and Jonty confirmed that in a tweet not long ago.  But Quiller is still there.
Outsourcing by government is not a straightforward business relationship.  There are mutual interests, which are not necessarily those of the people who ultimately pay the bills - us.

Jonty leaves A4e

Some time ago an anonymous tip told me that Jonty Olliff-Cooper was leaving A4e, but nobody could find out whether it was true or not.  But today, thanks to another anonymous tip, we have confirmation.  The website BrandRepublic tells us that:

"Jonty Olliff-Cooper has left back-to-work training provider A4e, where he was director of policy and strategy.  According to an A4e spokesman, Olliff-Cooper resigned and has decided to take a few months off before starting his next role.  Olliff-Cooper declined to comment."

Since I have no other information than that, I also decline to comment.  Except to say that I wonder whether his infamous tweets had anything to do with it.

Jonty's "tweets are protected"

Jonty Olliff-Cooper, A4e's Director of Policy and Strategy, seems to have learned his lesson about careless postings on Twitter.  You can't read his tweets now unless you're a "confirmed follower".  We can't know whether he got a rocket from his employer for that offensive exchange (see our post of 9 February), but it's disappointing that journalists, even on Private Eye, missed it, or didn't think it important.

I suppose I must comment on the latest employment figures, but it's wearisome.  We all know that the figures are, if not exactly rigged, at least hiding the truth.  12% of the increase in "jobs" is accounted for by people providing free labour on the various "workfare" schemes - the ONS insists that it has to include them.  We have no idea how many of the people reported to have come off JSA are being sanctioned by being kicked off benefits.  And it all seems at odds with the recent story about Costa Coffee advertising 8 jobs at its new shop in Nottingham and getting 1,701 applications.  (One of the saddest things about that story was that a spokeswoman said that some of the applicants were former managers who were "clearly overqualified for the positions".)  Iain Duncan Smith was heard to say today that the figures showed that the Work Programme was beginning to be effective.  No, they don't.

Those tweets

Thanks to those who pointed us to this conversation yesterday.  Incredible, isn't it?
Let's just think about what was going on in Doncaster.  It would be quite normal, in a group session dealing with, say, interviews, to talk about the need to be scrubbed up and well turned out.  It could well be that one or two people in such a group have obvious problems with personal hygiene.  It should then be up to the adviser to talk to those individuals privately.  Maybe they are homeless.  Maybe they have mental health issues.  But the idea that you need to teach a "class" on washing and using toilet paper is extraordinary.  I'd love to know the reactions of the vast majority of the class.
But then there's the issue of Olliff-Cooper actually tweeting this.  What did he think he was doing?  It's a vile insult to unemployed people forced onto the Work Programme with A4e.  It says to potential employers that  there's no point in even looking at these primitive savages.  And that can't do much to help A4e's profits.  This from the man who is A4e's director of policy and strategy!

Scaremongering?

That was Mark Hoban's response to the Public Accounts Committee's roasting of the DWP for the misery caused by Atos.  The BBC reports it straightforwardly.  Margaret Hodge put the blame on the DWP rather than on the company, saying that it regarded the appeals process as an inherent part of the system, when it was actually damaging vulnerable people.  Hoban replied that they'd failed to recognise that changes had been made and that independent reports said that the whole thing was fundamentally sound.  Mind you, according to a tweet by Jonty Olliff-Cooper, Hoban has described Jobcentres as "the last vestige of the command and control economy", so are we to expect that they will soon be handed over for private profit?  (JOC calls this comment "pretty fruity from a minister", which must be public school speak for something I don't understand.)

There's an excellent article by Zoe Williams in the Guardian yesterday, in which she describes the "shadow state" created by the outsourcing of public services.  I won't quote from it because you need to read the whole of it.  Last week another Guardian article by Toby Lowe described payment by results as "a dangerous idiocy that makes staff tell lies".  Again, spot on.  And if we needed any more practical examples of how things can go spectacularly wrong, there's the report from the Commons Justice Committee on the "shambolic" situation with court translation services (something Private Eye has been going on about for ages) and the Care Quality Commission's report into Serco's out-of-hours doctor service in Cornwall, which failed the sick by not having enough staff to answer calls.

But all of this is presumably just scaremongering.

How to reform public services?

If you're looking for a little light reading, you might try this collection of essays by a group of Conservatives calling themselves Bright Blue.  All political parties have such groups, who want to demonstrate how progressive / radical they are.  This one interests us chiefly because one of the contributors is Jonty Olliff-Cooper, of A4e.  Scroll to page 47 (unless, of course, you want to read the rest as well).  It's entitled "Better, cheaper, more human - building progressive Conservative public services".  Jonty is obviously very proud of it.  To be sure, there's a disclaimer at the end of the article that it's his personal opinion and not necessarily that of his employers; but there's a great deal in it which chimes very well with ideas which A4e has been pushing since long before JOC joined them.

JOC and I start from fundamentally different positions, both philosophically and practically, on public services, privatisation and outsourcing.  I believe in a mixed economy.  There is a place for the private sector.  Conservatives believe in the free market unconfined, in the profit motif as the best incentive to doing anything.  Yet at the outset of the article JOC says: "As progressive conservatives, we should reject the orthodoxy that the private sector is the only route to growth. It is not. A flourishing economy requires quality public services too, to educate its workforce, get people back to high-quality work, keep its population healthy, reskill workers in declining industries, and attack the social evils of crime, disillusionment and addiction, which drive up taxes."  It sounds hopeful.  Public services are necessary.  But: "across the political spectrum, the expert consensus is that many public services intervene too late, are too bureaucratic and expensive, and do not give people what they really need or want."  This is an assertion without evidence, but it's preparing the ground for something which is introduced later in the piece.  Services, he believes, should be delivered on a "right to try" basis, ending the monopoly of the public sector; a position where "government stops trying to do everything itself, and instead pays whoever is best able to meet its objectives."  He continues to write in defence of the public sector.  It's not its fault if it doesn't work properly.  Where is this going, one wonders.

This country has a great deal of experience now with outsourcing.  We know exactly what can go wrong.  But this experience is never reflected in the visions of the ideologues.  As JOC developes his argument, and talks about "where we are going wrong" he neglects entirely the reality of years of private sector involvement in the delivery of public services.  "Current provision fails because it finds it hard to see the whole person," he says.  What follows is very much A4e's long-held belief in a sort of wrap-around contract which tackles all the perceived needs of the people whose behaviour government wants to change.  Mental health, addiction, offending, unemployment, debt - all should be addressed by an integrated approach rather than piecemeal with separate contracts.  While his analysis sounds perfectly reasonable, the implications are not.

He gives three options.  The first is to "Stop specifying the process; start specifying the end point."  This boils down to something like the Work Programme; a clear definition of an outcome and payment only on results achieved.  Well, that's working well, isn't it?  The WP was never solely PBR because it cost too much to deliver the service (I use the word loosely) before any outcomes could be achieved.  The new outsourcing of the Probation Service is to be on PBR but, we gather, in a modified fashion.  This option also leads to the "We don't care what you do as long as you get results" approach, which leaves the hapless client with no rights.

Second, JOC wants to "Slash commissioning bureacracy".  This is where the thesis unravels.  He wants a "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach, permitting anyone who thinks they can deliver a service to try to do so, a licence system, paying by results.  This would not exclude the public sector, he insists, which could compete if it wanted to.

In both the NHS and education we are seeing private and public sectors "competing" but the end result is not in doubt.  There was a move recently by Monitor, the body charged with overseeing the changes in the NHS, to recommend that private companies should not be charged corporate taxes because the public sector did not pay them.  This seems to have been quashed for the moment, but will certainly continue to be an issue.  In education, the public sector, i.e. local councils, are increasingly being left with no role except to pick up the pieces.  They cannot compete, and nor should they.

The fact is that, especially in the sort of services JOC envisages, the public sector cannot compete with private companies.  Who would be doing the commissioning?  A council cannot put a service out to tender and then bid for it itself.  Is it, then, supposed to watch a private company set up a rival service and pay them for outcomes?  That might be attractive to a big private business, but a council is answerable to its residents, not to shareholders, and would not be able to maintain a department which had a diminishing role; nor could it run a department at a loss, as businesses are willing to do.  There are instances of local councils bidding for contracts from government.  This works only as long as the contract is profitable.  In the current climate (or in any climate, come to that) no council or other public body would be in a position to lay out money on a gamble that it could make a PBR contract pay.

Experience also tells us that the flourishing start-ups JOC foresees would soon disappear.  We have three or four huge outsourcing companies in this country, and if the government wants to spread the net wider it has to look abroad.  Small enterprises rapidly get swallowed up or driven out by the big players, who are prepared to work at a loss if it secures them long-term business.  JOC's vision is a fantasy.

His third point returns to the delights of PBR.  "The deeper the need, the deeper the help", he heads it, and could add "the bigger the payment".  He rejects the idea that this is "naked Tory privatisation" (although nothing he has said convinces me otherwise).  He describes "a person down on their luck", with multiple problems, all of which could have a price to the organisation which could address them; "an organisation that would provide a single source of advice and support, and help you with all your issues, an organisation which understood you, your family, and the place where you grew up; one that would stand by you for the long term; treat you like a human, not a number; and back you to build a different future for yourself."  I don't think he means to be patronising.

As a vision of public service reform, this is deeply flawed.  It professes to admire the public sector whilst putting forward plans which would wipe it out.  

Punishing your customers

That sounds ridiculous - you don't punish your customers.  It would make more sense, of course, if we didn't use the totally inappropriate word "customers" when talking about the Work Programme.  A4e uses it, and I'm not sure how many other providers do, but it's one of those weasel words, distorting the language.  A customer is someone who buys goods or services.  That means that the customer of A4e is the DWP which commissioned their services, or the taxpayer who foots the bill - not the person who is required to turn up.  So I prefer the word "clients".

Okay, why would you punish your clients?  That seems to be what A4e and the rest are doing, as more and more people are "sanctioned".  Let's dispose of the myth, perpetuated by Jonty Olliff-Cooper, that it's not A4e which sanctions people, it's the DWP.  As someone pointed out, that's like saying that it's not the traffic warden who gives you a parking ticket, it's the local council.  And now that punishment means at least 3 months of destitution, the situation is really serious.  

If it's a case of people refusing to engage with the WP, or any other programme, altogether, then they know what the penalty is.  But I'm hearing more and more stories of punishment for supposed failures to comply which are very worrying.

I'm not naive.  I know that there are two sides to every such story, and I don't automatically believe what I'm told.  How could I?  But much of it rings true.  For instance, we learned recently that one in five of all the homeless people referred to the WP has been sanctioned.  It's not difficult to see how that could come about.  Homeless people can't lead organised lives, and they can't rely on getting any post.  But what about all the stories of people being punished for missing appointments they weren't aware of, or being told that an appointment was being changed and then being punished for not attending on the original date?  Such incidents have been described in comments on here, and in others which I haven't published.

There seems to be something terribly wrong with the systems, and I don't know whether they are peculiar to A4e.  Perhaps an employee could tell me whether I've got this right.  When a client is perceived to have done something wrong, like missed an appointment, a click of the mouse "raises a sanction doubt".  This may be accompanied by an explanation, but the "doubt" stands.  The system then sends all these to a central point, which forwards them, often minus the explanation, to the DWP.  The client is then notified by the DWP that he's being punished.  Thus, someone who has been told that he needn't attend an appointment because he'll be away on a training course gets his income stopped.  The articulate and persistent client can sometimes fight these sanctions, but the misery they are causing is immense.  The system should be changed.

There's another worrying trend.  Hostility between client and adviser is nothing new, and is inevitable sometimes.  But more people are reporting encounters which go against the DWP's own guidance on the behaviour of the professionals.  I recall the middle-aged chap who said he came back from his first appointment almost in tears at the bullying nature of the meeting.  A woman talks about her husband being spoken to as if he were a naughty child.  And I recently had a horrifying comment which I couldn't publish because it identified the people concerned (please, please will the author of that get back to me) describing how an ex-soldier has been punished for not showing due respect to his "adviser".  Respect, certainly in this case, doesn't seem to work both ways.

Most clients, I know, have good, friendly relationships with the staff employed to work with them.  There will always be a small minority who really shouldn't be in the job, or whose training has been inadequate.  But now, with pressures on staff ever greater and punishments so severe, the situation does seem to be getting worse.  And that's dangerous.

The question remains: why would you punish your clients?  Every client represents an opportunity to make a profit, and the DWP's answer to failing providers is to take away the clients.  I asked the same question back in June when it was reported that in the first 8 months of the programme A4e had requested 10,120 punishments, only 3,000 of which had been accepted by the DWP.  Don't those figures show what's wrong?  At the time Corporate Watch said, "By the time it's finished, more people will have been sanctioned by the Work Programme than properly employed through it."  How true.  And why?  The answer must be that every punishment is seen as a warning to others.

Please note that I can't deal with "not for publication" comments by giving individual advice or answering questions.  If you have a query or want to say something, please frame it in such a way that I and the regulars can respond on the blog.

Image

Jonty Olliff-Cooper seems to believe that A4e's problem is its image.  If only people knew the company better, and understood what it does, they would see how wonderful it is.  This is, essentially, the mistake made by Emma Harrison.
It's not a good idea to try to psychoanalyse someone you've never met.  But it always seemed to me that Harrison's image of herself was bound up with her image of the company.  "Improving people's lives" and being "passionate" about everything was how she saw herself, and A4e was supposed to reflect that.  She cannot have been unaware that the reality was rather different.  There was plenty of publicity over the years; the reported bad conditions in the Manchester office in 2008; the Benefit Busters programme showing bullying and time-wasting in the Hull office; the Radio 5 Live programme; and so on.  But none of that altered her perception.  She was the charismatic leader of a company that was doing good, and both government and the media encouraged her in that belief.
Olliff-Cooper seems to have a similar outlook.  If A4e had more "exposure" people would see how valuable its work is.  If critics would only talk to him, and come and see for themselves, they would stop criticising.  It's not surprising, given his background in Tory politics, that he doesn't see any fundamental objections to the outsourcing business, and his job, in part, is to promote it.  But he ought to realise that shedding light on the companies involved is dangerous. G4S has just lost a prison contract and has not made the shortlist for a number of others.
Over the years A4e has spent millions on marketing and PR.  Was it money well spent?  It won't count for anything when the performance data for the Work Programme comes out.

More money, please

It's tedious to have to do it, but I need to respond to a Guardian interview with A4e's Jonty Olliff-Cooper.  Part of it concerns his previously stated view that "the lines drawn between the public, private and voluntary sectors are becoming meaningless".  Many of the comments under the article make the obvious distinction; profit.  But there's more to it than that.  During the life of the last government many charities were drawn into getting all their funding by competing with the private sector for government contracts.  You could argue that that puts them onto the same footing as the likes of A4e.  But they are still charities, having to put any profits back into the organisation rather than paying out dividends to shareholders.  Of course, it's in A4e's interests to blur the boundaries.  Cooper says, "If you're a business that wants to make social value everything you do, then we get into this really anxious territory.  I want to understand why that is, and how we can change it."  Well, where to start?
You can't imagine any of the other outsourcing companies talking in these terms.  So why is A4e trying to rebrand itself as something other than a profit-making business?  That is, perhaps, obvious.  But it won't wash.
He wants more money for the Work Programme.  I don't need to spell out the objections to that, other than to say that many clients report that absolutely no money is being spent on them.  The article says: "He certainly has solutions at hand: more exposure for organisations such as A4e, describing why they're important and should be valued; government flexibility to take on contracts across a range of sectors to create a joined-up support system."  On the first point, be careful what you wish for.  The exposure suffered by outsourcing companies this year has not exactly been favourable; the more the public understand it, the more they resent it.  On the second point, this is A4e clinging to the ambition of the "super-contract".  Not even this government is going to go down that route.
The last paragraph of the article is blether with a startling obscenity - though it apparently isn't startling in Jonty's world.

The right debate?

There's been an interesting discussion on the Guardian's website about outsourcing in local government.  A "panel" of eleven people with professional interests in the subject took part - they included A4e's Jonty Olliff-Cooper - but other people could join in as well.  Ploughing through the whole thing will probably make you glaze over.  The people who are opposed to, or wary of, outsourcing are outnumbered, but raise obvious points about the way in which the private sector running a monopoly sucks money away from service delivery, the dangers of failed contracts having to be expensively returned to the public sector, and the unaccountability inherent in long contracts.

There are two aspects of this discussion which interest me.  The first concerns language.  All businesses and areas of interest have their own jargon, which saves time among insiders.  But it can also serve to shut out other people.  Worse, it can be used to create an illusion that only an elite understands these things.  The language of the discourse becomes opaque and virtually devoid of meaning - but it sounds good.  Neologisms are coined casually, and no one dare ask what they mean.  It becomes very competitive.  And language can be used to shift meaning, to redefine and rebrand.  Take the use of the word "commissioning" in this debate.  What you and I know as outsourcing, contracting out, becomes something else, in a way that's hard to define.  Olliff-Cooper's use of language throughout the discussion illustrates all of these points. It might be an interesting exercise for someone (not me) to analyse it.  But what matters is that for him and many of the other participants the question is not, "Can local government survive without the private sector?" (the original question posed by the piece) but rather how much more of the functions of local government can we contract out.  There is no moral dimension; even issues of democratic accountability can be brushed aside.

The second interesting aspect of the discussion is what it tells us about A4e's plans and ambitions. 

1. "At my firm, A4e, we are going to be crowdsourcing what data it is that people would like to see."  Olliff-Cooper then states the obvious caveats, that basically you can't do it.  If you're wondering what "crowdsourcing" means, try Wikipedia.  You won't be much the wiser, because the definition appears to be elastic, but it seems to mean most commonly "outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people".  Whatever, he is reaffirming A4e's intention to be open and transparent.
2. They have grasped that there is a difference between what Olliff-Cooper calls human and commodity services, and states the problems that this raises quite sensibly.  His solution, however, is "outcome commissioning, or, to put it in less wonky terms, picking what it is that you care about and paying for successfully getting that."  There are huge moral implications to this, of course.
3. The ambition to have contracts which embrace all aspects of people's lives is still there.  He talks about commissioning "for more than one outcome: providers being repsonsible for helping a person in the round, with their debt, their mental health, their employment, offending, etc."  

So it was an interesting debate, but not the one we need to have.

Why I nearly despair

I shouldn't do this.  I know it's only encouraging him, and when he knows I'm angry he'll be chuffed to bits.  But I've just seen this Twitter conversation:

Read the correspondence on this post.  You'll notice that when I thought he'd finished I said, " I hope that you'll engage with this blog again if you have anything to say."  He came back with another post which still didn't answer any of the points which had been put to him.  He then sent a comment which read, "Dear Historian,  I know you are not going to publish this, but I wanted to say that I am really sorry to hear that you want to end the discussion there.  I am even more sorry that you feel I have not answered any of your points. I am not sure what points you mean. If you just send me a list, I will definitely reply. My address is ********.  (I'm not going to publish it.)  Have a good weekend, Jonty"

He's now using this to tell other people that I have banned him.  Why should I give my blog over to him to say anything he wants to?  Why should I embroil myself in a pointless email conversation with him?  If this really is the sign of A4e being "a different company", then it's not a difference we should welcome.

And no, I won't publish any response from him.  He has forfeited that right.

A different company?

Andrew Dutton says, "A4e is a different company from what it was two years ago."  Is it?

 

Obviously the disappearance of Emma Harrison as its figurehead has made a difference.  She's still the owner, but is no longer the face of the company.  Indeed, it doesn't have a face any more.  Other top people have gone as well.  So maybe the ethos of the company has changed for the better.  But that can only be judged from the outside by its clients and from the inside by its staff.  And neither seem impressed by any perceived change.

Bearing in mind that A4e is not all about welfare-to-work, it's that area which most people experience.  For staff, the pressure to achieve targets is as great as ever - more so, say some people.  They've moved to "team incentives" for what are considered unachievable targets.  They have to put pressure on clients from the outset.  We were told back in June that caseloads were unmanageable.  Now we hear of people having to wait seven weeks from their referral phone-call to their first appointment; and then of clients given no individual attention.  We don't know whether this is because the number of referrals is much higher than expected or because the required staff and facilities are not in place.  

Then there's the pressure to punish, or "sanction", every perceived failure to attend.  Jonty Olliff-Cooper over on Twitter is insisting that A4e don't sanction people, it's the DWP.  This is disingenuous.  A4e files a "DNA" (did not attend) with a single mouse-click.  They can also include an explanation when there's a good reason for absence.  These go up to a central office which passes them on to the DWP, sometimes leaving out the explanation.  And, of course, there can be mistakes.  Before the WP, clients had the chance to appeal before their income was stopped.  Now they can't, and there are some very angry and desperate clients.  

The answer to all this, according to Olliff-Cooper, is "mystery shopping, customer panel, forum and visits".  It sounds just the sort of thing people come up with in those awful meetings where you're supposed to be brain-storming; I can imagine the flip-chart sheets pinned up around the room.  It's something you can't see Harrison contemplating.  But "mystery shopping" is a non-starter, and is no substitute for the Ofsted inspections which the providers persuaded the government to drop.  A customer panel is similarly irrelevant.  A forum could be more interesting; but it would have to be pro-actively moderated, and I doubt very much that A4e could resist the temptation to moderate out everything critical or hostile, as they have always done on their websites and blogs.  The plans could easily end up being entirely cosmetic; intended to improve the image of the company rather than the way in which it works.  After all, if you believe that you head "a different company", why would you think anything needs to be changed?

And then, of course, there are the results.  In those areas where A4e's results can be directly compared with those of other companies they have not done significantly worse - or significantly better.  The fact is that almost all of them have failed to come anywhere near the results they promised in their bids.  Will those results now improve?  It didn't look like it from those leaked A4e figures.  But we don't know because the DWP refuses to tell us.  

If A4e wishes to be just another outsourcing company, it has that opportunity.  The very fact that it's allowing J O-C's antics suggests it isn't there yet.

It's called chutzpah

Or brazen cheek.  I suppose I should thank him for the plug, but I was startled to see this:

This followed another:

Mr Cooper told us that he was answering questions on @happytoansweranyqs but I can't find how to gather these together.

There's a politician who's taking a lot of abuse today because he's apologised for the wrong thing; not for breaking a pledge but for making it in the first place.  Mr Cooper is in danger of similarly misplaced contrition.  Saying that you're going to "learn from our critics" is easy, but meaningless unless it's acted on.  It's just PR.

The party conferences are coming up.  A4e, like lots of other companies, has always had a presence at these gatherings, lobbying the politicians.  I wonder if they will be there this year.

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.

Reply to Jonty Olliff-Cooper

This one is for Jonty Olliff-Cooper; a more considered response to your comment.  (See the last post).  

 

I was reminded of a comment I received back in September 2009, before your time.  I didn't publish it then, but when everything was going pearshaped for A4e in February this year, I did.  (See this post).  There was a whopping great lie at the heart of it, that they'd tried to communicate with me.  

 

Let's be honest, Mr Cooper, you didn't really expect me to bite and accept your offer.  There might have been a bit of a panic if I had!  The purpose of your comment was to get me to publish it, to show what a reasonable chap you are.  You made no attempt to answer the points I made; specifically your consistent failure to meet targets.  You ignored everything ever published, not just in this blog, but in so many other forums, and stuck to the line that if critics just understood and appreciated how wonderful A4e is, they would change their minds.  

 

When, on my original website, I published comments from A4e staff (which later turned out to be completely vindicated) your company got the site closed down as "defamatory".  I had no chance to communicate with you then.  I have a stack of similar comments, some of them very recent, which I haven't published because they threaten the anonymity of the writer.  You may have noticed that I don't allow comments which are critical of individual staff, or even of your staff in general, because I know that the vast majority are simply trying to do the best job that they can.  What about you?  What are your qualifications for working in the W2W industry, let alone being Director of Strategy and Policy?  (Silly question, I know.)  

 

A4e has a chance to put the difficulties of the past behind it and become just another outsourcing company.  That industry is in no danger of shrinking, and there are plenty of pickings to be had.  But you need to stop insisting on this line that A4e is something more noble than a business.  You need to drop the focus on PR and address the criticisms of clients.  You need to be a better employer.   

 

I commend you for answering the post, and you are welcome to join in the conversation.

A4e wants a debate

A4e, in the shape of its Director of Strategy and Policy, Jonty Olliff-Cooper, wants a debate - about the real issues, he says, not "semantics".  The piece he has written for the Guardian's Social Enterprise Network site is in response to the ASA's ruling that the company can't call itself a "social purpose company".  It's a lengthy piece, so I want to take time to answer it.

First, let's clear away another bit of "semantics".  He refers several times to their "customers".  This is inaccurate and thoroughly misleading.  As with all such contractors, the customer is the body buying the service, whether that is central government or a local council.  Ultimately, of course, that means the tax-payer.

And then, a bit of background on Mr Olliff-Cooper.  I can't do better than the Daily Mail back in February  which showed his "top-drawer Conservative Party contacts".  

So, to engage with what he says.  He believes that there is "fuzziness" in our thinking now.  The previous clear distinctions between public sector, private sector and charities no longer apply, because lots of other types of organisations have grown up in the gaps.  He refers, not very wittily, to the "blurred sector".  This is manifestly true.  A great many charities now exist solely on government contracts, often doing things vastly different from what they were set up to do.  They still, however, have to plough profits back into the work of the organisation.  We now have "social enterprises", which can take many forms (Wikipedia has a good article on this) but which are defined by not offering any benefit to their investors.  Cooper wants to say that A4e fits neatly into the mix because it "attempts to tackle poverty not through corporate social responsibility but through its core business".  He insists that they combine profit and social values and that "A4e's success has been good for our customers, good for taxpayers and good for the economy".

And that's where his argument starts to fall apart.  A4e has undoubtedly been good for large numbers of individual clients.  But it has failed many more.  And it has certainly not been good for taxpayers, having consistently failed to meet its targets whilst sucking up so much profit that it could pay out £11m in dividends last year.  Any company can call itself a "social purpose company" and few would deny that they have "social values" (even those whose businesses are clearly anti-social).  A long cooment under the article is by someone claiming to run a "profit-for-purpose" company.  It's meaningless.  And there is now, perhaps more than ever, a need to recognise that if government or councils choose to contract with private companies, this is a business arrangement.  The company is paid to deliver a service.  No amount of pretentious waffle should obscure that.

"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.

At last, Newsnight - but nothing new

Well, the BBC finally got round to reporting on the A4e story, on Newsnight tonight.  But it was half-hearted, just pulling together what everybody else has reported - including using the whistle-blower Catherine who made the front page of the Independent.  She told her story briefly; and A4e had had time to come up with a refutation.  She was not told to work for one week without telling the Jobcentre, they say.  It was only one day, an unpaid trial which doesn't have to be notified to the Jobcentre.  This is what tends to happen.  A whistle-blower got it wrong / is not telling the truth / misunderstood what was said.  And what can Catherine do about that?  Margaret Hodge said that she had received an "astonishing" number of allegations and wants A4e's contracts to be suspended.  Paul Mason, who had started by describing the "pally" history between A4e and government, ended with a mention of the employment of David Blunkett and Jonty Oliff-Cooper.  So nothing new.  But the BBC may now feel that it's done its bit.