Religion and the war on the poor

In Easter week it's appropriate that the focus should be on Christianity.  David Cameron's Easter message, his declaration that he is a Christian in a Christian country and his mini-sermon, has drawn scornful comments.  But most of the journalists who have been cynical about it are atheists, and so while they are right in many respects they miss the point.
Cameron, along with Duncan Smith, is under fire from the leaders of all the mainstream Christian churches.  They first wrote to try to draw his attention to the misery which his policies were causing to individual people, real people.  IDS's response to his own church's leader was, "He's wrong; I wish he'd talked to me first."  There's no way through that insane arrogance.  Cameron waffled about having a moral mission.  The church leaders have written again.  And that's what has brought on the sermon about the big society.  Neither he nor IDS ever address what the churches are saying about the real cases of hardship.  Is Cameron trying to set himself up as an alternative focus of Christian authority?  Is he trying to appease the Tory shires church-goers who loathe gay marriage etc.?  Does he really believe what he is saying?
Many have pointed out that there might be another agenda here.  The Tories are happily dismantling the welfare state and leaving casualties to be picked up by the charities, many of them church-run.  Perhaps they envisage a US-style system where huge, wealthy church charities do the job which the state has hitherto done here.  But we don't have huge, wealthy church charities in Britain, and bleating about the "big society" isn't going to create them.
While Cameron hasn't openly declared war on his opponents, Duncan Smith has.  He can rely on the likes of Stephen Glover in the Mail to write preposterous nonsense on his behalf, and on councils like that in North Lincolnshire, where they have decided that "residents who smoke and have satellite television" are not eligible for hardship payments if they are hit by the bedroom tax.  But IDS's arch enemy is the Trussell Trust, which he accuses of "running a business" and therefore having a vested interest in the proliferation of food banks.  That'll go down well with the thousands of volunteers, in Trussell Trust and other food banks, who are giving their time and energy freely to help those in desperate need.  An excellent article on the subject appeared this week in an unexpected place - the Economist magazine.  I recommend it.  It draws attention to the soaring number of sanctions.  A similar point is made by the Citizens Advice blog, and it expresses concern that with the new regime of 4-week minimum sanctions duration this is going to get much worse.
Of course, readers of the Daily Mail don't know anything about that.  In a baffling article yesterday someone called Matt Chorley, their political editor, ranted about the "welfare state we're in" and, since Mail readers need pictures, included lots of helpful graphics.  What's peculiar is that he happily acknowledged that a huge proportion of the bill is the state pension.  And pensioners react badly to being told that they're on "welfare" when they've paid in all their working lives on the basis that they would get a pension at the end of it.  So this may well come under the heading of "shooting yourself in the foot".
There's some minor news about A4e.  Two of its non-executive directors, Sir Hugh Sykes and Steve Boyfield, have stepped down, replace by Neil MacDonald and Sarah Anderson.  It's not significant.  Non-execs are only supposed to serve for 9 years, and for Sykes and Boyfield that period was up.
So, if you can, have a happy Easter.

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."

"An incendiary idea" - or vicious and stupid?

You have to hand it to the Daily Mail; when you think it can't get any worse, it does.  Today's gem is an article by Mark Littlewood headlined "Why Osborne must publish the names of every benefits claimant - and how much we pay them; An incendiary idea to save on our £500m A DAY welfare bill".
You might already have spotted the first clue to the flaws in his argument from this headline; the use of the words "we" and "our".  He develops this, summarised in three quotations from article:

• "The amount we now spend on welfare is jaw-dropping.  The average household is taxed to the tune of £8,000 every year to finance the State's programme of handouts."
• "Taxpayers have a right to know exactly who is claiming what and how much they are getting."
• "Many people now have a third of their wages - or even more - confiscated at source by Revenue & Customs.  The biggest item this cash is then spent on is welfare.  You have a right to know who is receiving it."

It's the language of "us and them".  Personally, I don't know which category Littlewood would put me into.  I am retired and receive a state pension.  (He includes pensioners in his scheme; is my state pension a "handout"?)  I'm also a taxpayer.  But then, the majority of benefits claimants have been taxpayers, and will be again.  Most of us are both claimants and taxpayers at some points in our lives.  That's what a welfare system is for; you pay in when you can and draw out when you can't.  But the Mail has been tireless in helping successive governments to draw a line round all benefits claimants and separate them from the "hard-working families" beloved by politicians.  For someone like Littlewood, it seems to make sense.  After Oxford he worked for various organisations including the Liberal Democrats, and is now Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank which is very secretive about its sources of funding.  He can't see himself as ever being in the position of having to claim benefits.  Like all his class, he considers himself far superior to all of us scroungers.
What about his central thesis; that there should be a publicly accessible database of what benefits everyone gets?  No problems with that, surely?  It's not naming and shaming, is it?  Two more quotations:

• "Anyone ashamed to claim money from the State shouldn't be claiming it."
• "Surely no one needs to worry about violent retribution against claimants.  The British are far too reasonable to start taking up pitchforks and burning torches and assaulting imagined benefits cheats.  We are generous and fair-minded people."  (Surely this is tongue-in-cheek!)

Leave aside the fact that there are many, many elderly people who are not claiming the benefits to which they are entitled because they are ashamed.  That's not important compared to the fun we could all have looking up the incomes of our neighbours.
It isn't going to happen, and I suspect that Littlewood and the Mail know that.  The point of the article is to further demonise anyone who is dependent on the welfare system.

A lesson in propaganda

The latest exercise in propaganda by combined right-wing forces in this country is a classic of its kind.
It starts with a report by the Centre for Social Justice, the "think-tank" set up by Iain Duncan Smith and run by his adviser Philippa Stroud.  This is reported in detail by the Telegraph.  The phrase "welfare ghettos" is prominent.  That's important.  The word "ghetto" is innocent enough in its original meaning ("a part of a city, esp. a slum area, occupied by a minority group or groups") but of course it's a very loaded word now.  The report is full of figures purporting to show that almost 7 million people live in these "welfare ghettos" where more than half the working age population is dependent on benefits.
I haven't looked at the report itself, but I suppose that the Telegraph has reported it faithfully.  If so, there are a great many question marks over it.  It talks about "areas" of various cities.  How is an area defined?  At one point they talk about "neighbourhoods"; again, how do you define that?  This isn't nit-picking.  You can draw lines on a map to produce whatever figures you want.  48 charities were consulted.  96% of them (why can't they just say "46 charities"?) said that "they had come across families where unemployment was intergenerational".  All that means is that both the kids and the parents were out of work.  It tells us nothing else - certainly not how many families were involved.
They do make an important point about aspiration.  Lots of youngsters do not expect to ever have a job, and don't aspire to anything better than they have now, except to become a celebrity.  But the CSJ manage to link that with the benefits cap.
The Express's account is less nuanced, as you would expect.  The headline is "Welcome to the benefit ghettos where the majority live on state handouts".  There's a photo of a young woman pushing a toddler in a buggy; we are, of course, meant to take the point about teenage single mothers.  There is a familiar response from the DWP about welfare reforms improving the lives of these people.
The Mail is, as usual, hysterical.  It uses the same phraseology about "benefit ghettos" but there are graphics for those who need pictures with their reading.  My earlier point about the definition of an area is important in  the context of the Mail's version.  They list 6 places where there are a large number of "neighbourhoods" with more than 30% unemployed.  But to say that there are "nearly 70 neighbourhoods" in Liverpool" in this state is a nonsense.  Are we talking about a large housing estate or a small street?  The article ends by saying that the CSJ is working on a follow-up report with its recommendations.
So a minister's pet think-tank comes up with a report with the message which the minister wants to convey, and the right-wing press runs with it in its own inimitable way.  Goebbels would be proud.

Cynical manipulation

There's something sinister going on.  The DWP has released new figures ahead of the WP performance data - the figures for those who have been "sanctioned" i.e. stripped of benefits.  The papers seem to understand that they're being manipulated but fall for it anyway.  The Mail headlines it "More than 150,000 forced off benefits after refusing to participate in Iain Duncan Smith's back-to-work scheme".  So already they don't grasp what people are being sanctioned for.  Turning up late for an appointment is hardly "refusing to participate".  But they then go on to talk of, "Suspicions that figures will be used to distract from report that fewer than one in 20 on scheme have found a permanent job".  Yes.  Apparently sanctions are running at 15,000 a month.  Do the papers seriously think that these are all people who are "determined to avoid getting a job at all", in the words of Mark Hoban?
The Telegraph has spotted that "More people who take part in a flagship government jobs programme end up being stripped of their benefit payments than finding permanent work, new figures suggest."  This is a much better account of the situation; perhaps Patrick Hennessy, the author, has a better understanding of the subject.  But they still repeat the statement from Hoban: “Through the Work Programme we are offering the hardest-to-help claimants extensive support in order for them to take control of their own lives and return to work. They need to do their bit to find a job but we’ll be there to help them do that.”
The comments under both articles demonstrate both the entrenched attitudes, and the anger which is building up.

The future of A4e depends .....

All the newspapers have reported the revelations from the BBC yesterday.  The coverage ranges from the Daily Mail's usual strident reporting, complete with graphics, to the more sober account in the Telegraph, which quotes an A4e spkesperson: "While this investigation uncovered a number of areas where procedures may have been lacking, the final audit and further investigation determined that five claims were irregular and related to one former employee.  This was reported to the DWP Risk Assurance Division, which confirmed that the action taken by A4e fully met their own audit requirements and that they considered the matter satisfactorily resolved.  A4e repaid the value of these three claims in full, which totalled less than £5,000.”  

The Yorkshire Post has the full quote from the DWP: "A 2009 A4e internal audit and risk document, relating to programmes contracted by the previous government, has today been passed to the department.  The Work and Pensions Select Committee was made aware of this audit at the time and the department later received assurances from A4e that it had not uncovered any major issues."  [my italics]

Paul Mason picked up this point on Newsnight tonight.  He said the DWP is now certain that it never received the report.  Yet weeks ago it asked for all the relevant information.  The report was made public in October 2009.  (I'm not sure what he meant by this.  Presumably it wasn't this leaked draft which was made public.)  So what did the DWP get, Mason asked.  
A4e says that they reported to the DWP the results of a final audit and further investigations.  The DWP says they only got the document yesterday. So was the version of the original audit report which was given to the DWP devoid of all the damning findings and warnings?  Did it amount to a cover-up? 
Mason ended by saying that the future of A4e depends on what was actually submitted in 2009.

Those two new contracts

The Mail has reacted to the news of the two prison education contracts awarded to A4e ("worth up to £30m") with its usual stridency.  How can they do that when the company is being investigated for fraud and the DWP has launched its own enquiry?  They choose to ignore the SFA's decision to conduct an audit before the contracts are finalised.  But I suppose that would complicate the story.  The decision has "provoked anger"; from Margaret Hodge, who said it was astounding, and from an unnamed, and possibly apocryphal, rival bidder who said: "It seems deeply ironic that offenders are to be given lessons in getting back on the straight and narrow by a firm that is being investigated for fraud."
The article doesn't go into how any government department or agency could legally block A4e from getting contracts at this stage.  The bids for OLASS went in and were accepted before the storm broke.  The procurement process, ridiculously, doesn't allow a company's past record to be taken into account.  The only way A4e, or any company, could be barred would be if "systemic" fraud was found - and most of us are agreed that it won't be.  
PS.  Yesterday, we read on the TheyWorkForYou website, an MP, Andy Slaughter, asked the Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills " whether the tendering process for the OLASS4 contract was undertaken while A4e were under investigation by (a) the Department of Work and Pensions, (b) the Serious Fraud Office, (c) the police and (d) other public bodies."  John Hayes MP replied: "Under the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, decisions about the awarding of contracts are for the chief executive of Skills Funding to make.  In respect of the OLASS4 procurement process, the chief executive is undertaking a procurement process in line with the EU Procurement and EU Remedies Directives. That process is still under way and will not conclude until May 2012 at the earliest.  As part of this procurement, the chief executive of Skills Funding has made clear to A4e that he must have the results of the independent review of audit and control procedures A4e is undertaking into its own operations, and the results of the Department for Work and Pensions' investigation, before any formal contract with A4e is entered into." 

Whistles blowing an uncertain sound

The Mail has waded in again today with its own whistle-blower revelations.  But the piece shows the danger of not having done your research.

They focus on A4e's Edinburgh office.  This is interesting because we have received a number of complaints about events there.  But the "former team manager", Amy Rae, tells us that all the blame lies with A4e.  Faced with an inspection they had to fake courses, because there was no money for real ones.  Then the specific allegations begin.  "‘People would be found a job on a construction site that only lasted a day,’ she says, ‘and that was enough to claim the money. It was easy because there was just a tick-box on the form to say the job was “expected to last at least 13 weeks”, but often labourers were being put out of work again after 24 hours.’"  As we've pointed out before, this was perfectly okay in the terms of the contracts.  And it was more often the case that a client would start a job and disappear after a day or a shift, thinking that now the JC would be off his back.  

We are then told that "In the A4e office in Bradford, one whistleblower alleged staff went to Staples, the stationery store, to buy ‘make-your-own’ stamp kits to use on paperwork staff filled out if they found someone a job."  The Mail makes much of these rubber stamps, but again there is not necessarily fraud here.  The forms produced by the DWP required either a company stamp or a piece of headed notepaper.  Many small employers had neither.  It was not uncommon for providers to make a rubber stamp, with the full agreement of the employer.  Towards the end of the article A4e is quoted explaining this.  But it's a very different matter from the next allegation: "Some employers’ signatures were allegedly faked electronically, using a scanner to copy a signature off one sheet and print it on to another. On other occasions, signatures of employers were allegedly copied by hand from the signing-in book at reception."  That's fraud, straightforwardly.  

In Newcastle, we're told, employees had to take basic literacy and numeracy papers to fill the targets A4e had to meet for these tests.  The whistle-blower there talks about the appalling conditions the clients there had to endure.  There are frequent allegations of forged timesheets, according to the Mail.  As we've said before, this is often an indication of incompetent admin rather than deliberate fraud, but it's surprising that it was so widespread.

The Edinburgh woman also talks about the rewards and prizes on offer for meeting targets, including an invitation to tea at Emma Harrison's mansion.
The Mail has, naturally, been more strident than the Guardian in its whistle-blowing.  And there are probably more journalists out there busily compiling similar allegations.  We have to welcome that.  But there is a need to separate what went on under the old privatised contracts from what is happening under the Work Programme.  The old contracts were deeply flawed, and the DWP is to blame for that.  Some providers obviously stepped over the line separating expediency from fraud.  A4e's focus on the bottom line drove people to dishonesty.  Is it still going on?

It's not open season

It certainly feels like open season on A4e at the moment, with the subject raised at Prime Minister's Questions and the papers coming up with more revelations.  But as far as I'm concerned, my rules on publishing comments still stand.  No gratuitous insults.  No specific allegations which I have no way of verifying.  Please take those to the newspapers.  And no including your own email address!
It's really important now to focus on the real issues and not get caught up in irrelevancies.  For instance, the Guardian ran a piece yesterday headlined, "A4e compelled jobseekers to work unpaid in its own offices".  It turns out that this was under Flexible New Deal when the 4-week work placement was compulsory.  Now, on the previous contracts it wasn't that unusual for providers to give people placements in their own offices, doing admin, perhaps.  On FND, when the placement was compulsory, that was probably a mistake.  But I submit that it's not massively important.  In the same issue, Amelia Gentleman is cautious.  She says that a number of A4e customers have come forward with complaints, but that much of what they complain about would be common to all the providers.  But she gives two examples of people who felt that they had been badly treated by A4e.
Fiona Mactaggart MP, who raised the matter in Parliament, is now demanding an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.  The MailOnline reveals that there's a second police investigation going on.  And they home in on the relationship between Harrison and government, exemplified by A4e's employment of Tory insider Jonty Oliff-Cooper, a fact which "emerged last night".  The writers of this piece, Jason Groves and Sam Greenhill, obviously haven't been following this blog.  The fact "emerged" for us a long time ago.  They tread carefully when they mention David Blunkett's link with the company.  As a minister he "advocated private involvement in welfare reform" and is now paid up to £30k a year by A4e, but "there is no suggestion of impropriety".  That kind of half-baked reporting really doesn't help.  We need journalists to do their homework, understand the history and the issues and focus on what matters.  And that's how a single company, be it A4e or Capita or Serco or whoever, can make millions out of delivering public services badly.  And how A4e got away with it for so long.
Last night Emma Harrison's Twitter account was frantically posting links to positive stories on A4eVoice.  That won't be enough.

Suspend A4e's contracts?

The nightmare goes on for A4e and Emma Harrison.  It's not clear whether the call to suspend the contracts comes via the Daily Mail, but they report it with glee.  Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee which caused all the rumpus, will be "asking the Department of Work and Pensions 'whether, given the allegations of fraud, they will be suspending their contracts with A4e until this matter is resolved'."  A Press Association piece, which may have come first, tells us that, "The allegation concerns a very small number of former employees and dates back to 2010. As the investigation is ongoing, we (Thames Valley Police) cannot comment further."  The Telegraph also reports the "fraud probe" but not the call for suspension of the contracts.  Instead they quote Chris Grayling from an interview on Sky.  Typically, Grayling said that it couldn't happen with the Work Programme (suugesting that it could happen with the previous contracts) and blamed the last government. 
So what about that call for suspension of the contracts?  Hodge appears to mean just the welfare-to-work contracts, rather than all the other lucrative stuff.  I don't think it's practical.  The most you could do is stop any more referrals until the case is resolved.  But the other providers in the areas couldn't take on those clients.  They are not geared to double their intake suddenly.  While the potential clients might be happy to see the suspension, the government probably wouldn't.  
The Express links the revelations about A4e to the whole question of bonuses in the public sector.  In an article this morning they bemoan the lack of any links between performance and pay-out and say: "In one particularly offensive example the Government’s so-called “Jobs Czar” Emma Harrison last year received an astonishing dividend of £8.6million through her company A4e, which runs a variety of state employment schemes funded by the taxpayer.  Yet for all the company’s colossal earnings its record on finding jobs for its clients is woeful. According to evidence presented to the Commons Public Accounts Committee, just nine per cent of those on A4e’s “Pathways to Work” actually ended up in work, a finding that the committee’s chair- woman Margaret Hodge called 'an outrage'."  
Can it get any worse for Harrison and A4e?  Perhaps the Daily Politics programme (BBC1, 12.00) which had Harrison on as "guest of the day" a fortnight ago, will mention what has been happening.  Somehow I doubt it.
PS.  The Guardian has cast a bit more light on the fraud investigation.   A4e is reported as stating: "Thames Valley police visited our offices on Friday for a mutually agreed meeting in relation to an allegation of fraud that was identified by A4e's internal processes and was reported to the authorities by the company.  The allegation concerns a very small number of former employees and dates back to 2010. As the investigation is ongoing, we cannot comment further."  

"Living off the state - and how"

I brought the week to an end too soon.  The Daily Mail hasn't finished with Emma Harrison.  Its long article headlined, "Living off the state - and how: Inside the 16 bedroom, 42-loo mansion of Government's families tsar whose £8.5m payday provoked outrage" is a real demolition job.  They've homed in on the opulence of her home, Thornbridge Hall; her personal wealth, an estimated £70 million; and the history of A4e.  They've spoken to the neighbours, and to some clients.  It's painful.  And it's not all accurate.  They haven't grasped the history of New Deal, for instance.  But it really is so devastating that one could almost feel sorry for Harrison.  Is there a danger of overkill here?  It won't deprive A4e of any contracts.  All it will do is drive her off the TV for a while.

Two links

Just a couple of links to end an eventful week.

The first is to a BBC local news item on the "millions for Emma Harrison" story.

The second is the Mail Online's take on the Tesco free labour row.  Someone had the foresight to capture the offending advert before it was pulled. 

A test case

A young graduate called Cait Reilly is pursuing a legal case against the government which will be of great significance to all unemployed people. Read the story in the Mail Online first. Her case is that it was against her human rights to be forced, on pain of losing her benefits, to work for two weeks at Poundland stacking shelves. This meant that she had to stop volunteering at a museum, in a role that was related to the work she wanted to do. The comments which follow reflect the lack of sympathy of Mail readers, and the thuggishness of many of them. Then read the version in the Express. They have brought in Tory MP Philip Davies who was a senior manager at Asda, having worked his way up from shelf-stacking. Unsurprisingly, he is gung-ho about the system. There is a statement which no doubt the case will challenge: "Anecdotal evidence suggests Poundland is one of the best employers at converting work experience into jobs." The lawyers "are understood to be fighting separate rules under which the long-term unemployed can be required to do up to six months’ unpaid work. Her solicitor Jim Duffy said: 'The Government has created, without Parliamentary authority, a complex array of schemes that allow job centres to force people into futile, unpaid labour for weeks or months at a time.' "

If I had to bet on the outcome, I would think she will lose. It will be argued that the scheme she was put on by the Jobcentre, the "sector-based work academy", was voluntary and she knew what she was getting into. Anyway, the government can't afford to lose this one; too much hangs on it. Ironically, the Independent carries a piece about the firms (including Asda) which have signed up to new rules about interns. "The Government is sending out new guidance saying interns who do 'real jobs' must receive at least the legal minimum." Wait for the twist of logic which says that it doesn't apply if you're claiming benefits.

Work Programme starts

Loads of publicity today for the start of the Work Programme, most of it ill-informed. The BBC's Today programme on Radio 4 made a complete mess of it, with a dreadful interview of Chris Grayling by John Humphrys and then a brief discussion between a chap from the Work Foundation and one from CDG.

The print media are scarcely any better. As you'd expect, the Express leads with "A crackdown on benefits scroungers will be launched by ministers today" and continues in the same ignorant, not to say demented, vein. The Mail is actually rather better, but it loves the idea of "recruiting former Army officers to help instill discipline into young jobseekers".

The Telegraph takes a different line. Its writer, Louisa Peacock, asks how the scheme can succeed when it "is being delivered by the same old providers". She points out that PriceWaterhouseCoopers pulled out because it didn't think the scheme was financially viable. "If the same old providers haven't found a solution to this by now, what on earth can be different in this 'step change' of delivery?"

The BBC news website quotes A4e's Andrew Dutton, who "said it would look at removing the barriers that had been keeping people out of work. 'They [sic] may be debt issues or housing issues or problems within the family, legal issues around housing, but often very much around supporting them to really gain confidence,' he told the BBC."

The Guardian is thorough and balanced. Its writer, Patrick Wintour, cites the concerns of the Work Foundation "that in areas of Britain with the highest unemployment and fewest job vacancies, contractors will struggle".

Chris Grayling had an easy time on The Daily Politics. But when asked about the concerns that providers would focus their efforts on those areas of the country with the best job prospects, he said that there had been intense bidding and competition for all areas from the providers, so he was confident that wouldn't happen. The interview ended with a question about why the private sector was going to be better at this than the public sector. The answer was purely ideological.

Another "interview"

The Mail online is the latest propaganda sheet to give free PR space to Emma Harrison and A4e. In a long piece today we get something described as an interview but which is merely a vehicle for Harrison to repeat the myths. You won't find anything about the lousy figures for FND. This is sycophancy. "This year, the company will help nearly 20,000 people into work. Her business plan, something she laughingly admits owes more to aspiration than number crunching, predicts a turnover of £500 million by 2014." But then we can see how A4e adapts (or, at least, adapts what it says) to the politics of the moment. "Harrison says she frequently spurns approaches from the City to float or sell the company. Instead, she has rekindled a plan to change the structure into a mutualised trust whereby she can give shares to the staff. In the longer term, she aims to give equity to the unemployed people that A4e helps."

When you've digested that idea, you might be a bit bemused by the statement that "Harrison is trying to persuade the Government to pay according to the long-term outcome for the unemployed rather than buying hours in the classroom or working on CVs, regardless of whether that is actually needed or achieves a result." Why did the interviewer, someone called Lisa Buckingham, not challenge that? Presumably because she didn't know anything about the subject; the ideal qualification for anyone interviewing Mrs Harrison. There's the latest mantra about "hidden jobs", the story that A4e can persuade employers to provide jobs they haven't realised they had. And she gives figures which are entirely at odds with those produced by the DWP. She says, "it costs an average of £1,700 to get someone back to work". Oh yes? But she's plugging this chilling idea of working with "families’ whole lives rather than just work." The interviewer says, "Such improvements include getting a job, ensuring that children go to school and encouraging charity work. Companies such as Harrison’s would be paid part of the overall savings."

To show that the paper isn't entirely uncritical there's the statement that, "Harrison hasn’t escaped controversy. There were fraud allegations against a few staff a couple of years ago and the role of David Blunkett, Sheffield MP, as an occasional adviser prompted criticism." That's it. While some of you may be hopping up and down with fury, most of the Mail's readers will nod approvingly at the final statement that " These families need an Emma."

Now it's "wellness centres"

The timing of a piece in the Mail Online is surely not a coincidence. We learn that "An initiative to improve the health of the long-term unemployed is to be launched by Emma Harrison, founder of the A4e welfare-to-work organisation, and John Bird, who set up the Big Issue. The joint venture will establish 'wellness centres' staffed with GPs throughout the 250 A4e branches." In case we weren't aware of next Tuesday's TV programme, the piece goes on:
"Harrison, who will star in the Channel 4 programme Who Knows Best: Getting A Job on Tuesday, said: 'There is a correlation between poor health and people in the subsistence culture, the dispossessed and longterm unemployed.'" The timing, however, is a minor issue. What is much more important is this incursion into yet another aspect of people's lives. Everyone has access to a GP, and currently has the freedom to choose when and whether to consult one and seek medical advice. A4e now plan to erode that freedom.