Fact and fiction

The party conference season is always depressing, but this year it's frightening as well.  I've taken to avoiding the BBC's news and politics output altogether.  So what are the important issues which are not being talked about?  
Outsourcing (or privatisation - in the public mind they're the same thing) should be in the forefront.  It is in the clamour about the NHS.  As private companies move in to pick up contracts it's pointed out that i) many are American and ii) many MPs have financial interests in them.  But creeping privatisation is happening in lots of areas.  The academy chain AET has gone into an arrangement with accountants PriceWaterhouseCooper to outsource all its non-teaching staff.  It won't stop there.  
There's a great piece by Patrick Butler in the Guardian which shows that outsourcing is about driving down costs by cutting wages.  Around 5.4 million people now work in outsourced public services, and it's being driven, particularly in the "care" sector, by the cuts to local authority budgets.  That's how this government has achieved its aim, by pushing the responsibility back onto local councils and then claiming that it's their fault.
How is that veteran of outsourcing, the Work Programme, going?  Swimmingly if you believe the government.  But the Welfare News Service site did an excellent analysis of the figures showing just how badly it's letting down the unemployed.  A4e, of course, spun it frantically.  "A recent report by Europe Economics, an independent research company commissioned by the Employment Related Services Association, has also estimated that around 100,000 jobs for the long term unemployed would not have taken place without the programme and that £18 billion in value to the UK economy is likely to be generated by the Work Programme."  Neither of those figures bear examination.  
Let's hear some pearls of wisdom from Leo McKinstry of the Express: "Under Work And Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith the Government has rooted out abuses, introduced tough sanctions, ensured that work pays more than the dole and tackled the housing benefit scandal where jobless claimants could live in luxurious accommodation courtesy of the taxpayer."  In any field except journalism and politics this would be regarded as symptomatic of delusional illness.
If you have thoughts on the conferences relevant to this blog, please comment.  (I don't promise to publish unless you stick to the rules, basically be relevant, literate and polite.)

The Richard Caseby spat

Another story you will have missed if you rely on the BBC.  I first came across it when the Guardian's Patrick Butler tweeted the link this morning to a "guest blog" piece on the Press Gazette site.  It's a nasty attack on the Guardian for what the author calls smears and inaccuracies about the DWP.  It's personal and vicious.  And it's written by Richard Caseby, who happens to be Director of Communications at the DWP.  And he also happens to be a former managing editor of the Sun and the Sunday Times, which explains the personal animosity.  But he's a civil servant now, so the abusive article is inexcusable.
Butler continued to post links which helped to explain the background.  Then the Huffington Post took up the story, giving the context.  Finally (perhaps) there came a masterly piece by the veteran journalist Michael White in the Guardian.  The attack on the Guardian was "reckless", he says, considering that he is a civil servant, and IDS should "have a quiet word with his pit-bull".
(I have to amend that last para.  It wasn't "finally"; there's another Guardian piece tonight.)
All this really does matter.  The DWP press office has long been a joke, and no wonder.  IDS has very successfully put the frighteners on the BBC, which now declines to report anything to do with his department.  Now Caseby is trying to bully one of the few sources of honest reporting left in the media.

Sense and nonsense

We reported back in April this year that Richmond upon Thames council had put its contract for supporting and training local voluntary organisations out to tender, and the winning bid had come from the Foundation for Social Improvement.  Yes, the FSI, the creation of Emma Harrison, a registered charity with two other A4e directors on its board and based at A4e's Westminster offices.  The leader of the opposition on Richmond council was kicking up a fuss about handing contracts to a "scandal-hit organisation" rather than to the local CVS which had been doing the job satisfactorily.  20 days later we learned from the Guardian that the contract was worth £85,000 and that the council had decided to pull out because of the potential risks.  The author of the article, Patrick Butler, pointed out that the FSI had assets of only £90,000 in its latest accounts, and so it was odd that it had got the contract in the first place.  Now we have an update from something called Your Local Guardian.  The contract has been awarded to the Richmond CVS (Council for Voluntary Services) and the Richmond Adult Community College.  The piece shows how a bad reputation can follow you around.  "A4e was embroiled in scandal last month," it says, "when figures suggested it received £46m from the taxpayer last year, for its work on the Government's flagship Work Programme - despite finding long term jobs for less than 4% of its unemployed clients."
The FSI's accounts for the year ending March 2012 have not yet been received by the Charity Commission, but since 2008 it has received a total of £1,686,933, much of it from A4e, and spent a total of £1,691,561.

The government has come up with a "new" way of dealing with NEETs - those youngsters not in employment, education or training.  The Telegraph calls it an "earn or learn" plan, while the Express, in typical style, headlines it "Go to work or lose benefits".  It could involve "the creation of new-style 'traineeships' set up to prepare school leavers for jobs in relatively low-skilled industries."  Does anyone smell a new contract here?  Perhaps we should recall Labour's original New Deal scheme, back in the late 1990s, set up to training or work placements for NEETs.  That expanded into the full New Deal which was outsourced by David Blunkett in 2006.

From bad to worse

Another story from the Guardian's Patrick Butler details more fallout from A4e's situation.  A contract awarded to the Foundation for Social Improvement, a charity set up and largely funded by A4e, has been withdrawn.  Richmond council gave the £85,000 contract to the FSI for charity business skills training, but has now decided to pull out,citing the potential risks of giving a contract to an organisation so dependent financially on a company now under investigation.  Butler hints that it was odd that the FSI got the contract in the first place, given that it had assets of less than £9,000 in its latest accounts.  Well done to Richmond's Lib Dem leader on the council, Stephen Knight, for raising concerns.

Could this be the start?

Patrick Butler of the Guardian reports an interesting development in the outsourcing business - A4e's failure to get a contract.  The contracts are for assessing people's eligibility for Personal Independence Payments, which will replace DLA.  Ten companies have been shortlisted, including all the usual suspects - G4S, Serco, Atos, Ingeus etc.  But not A4e, who did put in a bid.  To have shortlisted A4e would have meant provoking howls of protest, because they are still under investigation.  We are still waiting to hear about that contract for the EHRC helpline.  Exaro broke the story that A4e had got the contract; the government denied it.  But we still haven't heard who has got it.  Not including A4e in the latest contracts sets a significant precedent.  When they are exonerated will they be back in the mix?  Or is this the start of the decline of the company?


It must be galling for Emma Harrison to see her former employee Hayley Taylor continuing to pull in the dosh.  She has a new American series on More4 tonight.  The Liverpool Echo sounds less than thrilled at the prospect. 

Right-wing backlash

The media coverage today has been interesting.

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

Mark Lovell v. Patrick Butler

A4e's Mark Lovell has responded to the criticisms made by Patrick Butler of the Guardian in his piece The Work Programme: not working for young people. Butler had cited the case of a charity, New Deal of the Mind, which was signed up as a sub-contractor of A4e but had yet to receive any referrals. Lovell now uses the Huffington Post website to answer him and give us The Facts Behind the Work Programme. It's a long piece, but what it seems to boil down to is that they couldn't predict the numbers, it's taking a long time to set up, but the referrals will come. He also gives us his view on tacking youth unemployment - refer young people to the Work Programme sooner.

But Butler has moved on, picking up the story about charities being exploited by Work Programme providers. He has spoken to some of these voluntary organisations, and quotes Chris Grayling's insistence that the primes shouldn't be doing this. Butler wants contact with charities which believe they're being exploited and people who have been "covertly" referred to volunteer centres.

Work Programme failure - and mutuals

A4e appeared in the news yesterday on BBC as reporter Mark Easton went to Liverpool to look at how the Work Programme is working there. It was a frustratingly short piece, but got the essence of the problem. There are far too many people chasing far too few jobs. Two clients appeared; a young man with a criminal conviction, and a woman with qualifications. The only work available for the young man was shift work via an agency in a factory where conditions are notoriously bad. Easton put the point to the A4e manager that providers would inevitably cherry-pick, ignoring the hardest-to-help. All credit to the chap, he said that they didn't do that because it wouldn't be fair.

Patrick Butler of the Guardian keeps on the case with a piece about the failure of the WP to involve the voluntary sector as it's supposed to. A charity called New Deal of the Mind has a very good track record of getting young people into work in the arts and media. It is now signed up as a sub-contractor of A4e. But it hasn't had a single referral from A4e. Butler hasn't managed to get to the bottom of this situation, but there's some evidence that JCP isn't referring many young people onto the WP. The voluntary sector is caught in the trap of not being able to invoke the Merlin rules (which is supposed to ensure that primes treat their supply chain fairly) because they don't want to destroy the relationship they have, or want to have, with those primes.

There's an interesting piece on the Public Finance website. One of this government's big ideas was to push groups of public sector workers into forming "mutuals" - companies owned by their workers - and bidding for contracts. That last bit was rarely mentioned. But now the predictions of many people are starting to come true. A health sector mutual has lost out in bidding for a contract to a private company. This does not please Patrick Burns, director of something called the Employee Ownership Association. "If you don’t do something with the commissioning environment, then in five or ten years time you will not be dealing with mutuals, you will be dealing with (outsourcing companies) Serco, Capita and Virgin. Not that they are bad companies, but it’s not the point." Someone from the Cabinet Office pointed out that there are "expert mentors" in place to help "pathfinder mutuals". These mentors include A4e. At some point this is going to bring about another interesting situation.

Success and failure

A Yorkshire publication, the Yorkshire Business Insider, reports that A4e's Emma Harrison is one of only ten women on its list of the 100 top working millionaires in the region. Hardly a surprise.

But there are more rumblings of discontent from the voluntary and other organisations which signed up to be sub-contractors in the Work Programme. Or haven't yet signed up, in some cases, where promised contracts have yet to be signed. Housing Associations were among the organisations which fell for the idea that they could earn money from the WP (although their tenants might think it was none of their business) but they are now finding that they are getting no referrals. An angry article on the Guardian's website reports that, "One housing association, Harvest Housing, was hoping for a small amount of work from A4E. But guess what? They got nothing and have chosen a different path." The writer, John Little, is less than complimentary about Emma Harrison and A4e. Patrick Butler, a regular Guardian columnist, writes on two reports by the voluntary sector and asks, "What is going wrong? Some primes claim they haven't been referred any "hard-to-reach" clients by jobcentres. It is said high numbers of appeals against work capability assessment tests have blocked the flow of these clients into the system. Others believe primes, overwhelmed by higher than expected numbers of jobless clients coming on to the books, are simply 'parking' vulnerable jobseekers and focusing solely on clients who are 'job ready' and easy to place." Butler cites the Social Market Foundation's concerns, back in August, that the WP was "at risk of financial collapse" and suggests that the most vulnerable are being pushed to the back of the queue.

That press release

Patrick Butler in the Guardian has returned to the question of the press release in which Emma Harrison was supposed to have said that the government's welfare cuts were "fantastic". What happened, asks Butler. He spoke to Emma herself, who stuck to her comments on his his original article. She hadn't said it. He checked with Hillgrove, the source of the press release, again. They cited a TV interview in which she does indeed use the word "fantastic" but it's about news of the welfare reforms and the Work programme, not the cuts. Hillgrove say that an employee who "manipulated" quotes has been "disciplined". Butler ends his piece by pointing to the comments which his original article attracted, seeing them "as a reflection of the anger and unease many people feel not just about the cuts, and unemployment, but the welfare to work industry, and its practices."

Cuts: in fact, fantastic!

That's the title of a Guardian piece in which Patrick Butler takes a swipe at a press release by A4e's Emma Harrison. He quotes the press release in full. It's the usual stuff but with a paragraph we haven't seen before:

'Perhaps the only person who is positive about spending cuts is the head of Britain's biggest employment agency A4e. "The coalition government's cuts are, in fact, fantastic!" says Emma Harrison. "Cutting benefits will put a stop to people making a profession out of being unemployed. The Government is looking to put more effort into helping people get back to work which is the most important thing." A4e controls 25% of the long-term unemployment budget for the Department of Work and Pensions. "There are about 450,000 jobs currently being advertised with the JobCentre so there are jobs out there," insists Mrs Harrison.'

Butler contacted A4e's PR advisers, Hillgrove PR, and asked if the release wasn't a bit insensitive, but they said that they couldn't speak for her.

I think she's gone a bit too far this time.