CWP contractors - the full list

Thanks to a site called TWPSolutions, we have the full list of Community Work Placements providers, after the Financial Times gave us 4 of them.
There are 18 regions.  Of these, G4S have 6; Seetec 5; Pertemps and Interserve 2 each; and Learn Direct, Working Links and Rehab one each.
Did A4e put in a bid?  It would be very unusual if they didn't, and this must be a major blow for them.  All that's left in the pipeline are the Transforming Rehabilitation contracts, and the government wants to get on with them before the election, despite Labour's pleas to postpone the decision.

Help to Work - at least for G4S

At last, we know four of the companies which have won the contracts to deliver the inappropriately named "Help to Work" programme.  The Financial Times reveals that they are G4S, Seetec, Interserve and Pertemps.  Why it hasn't named the other two, I have no idea, but A4e hasn't said anything, and Serco has launched a rescue rights issue, so perhaps they both lost out.  The FT says that G4S is the biggest winner.  It also says: "It comes less than three weeks after the British government lifted a ban on G4S bidding for public sector work and suggests that Whitehall is taking a favourable view towards one of its largest contractors, despite insisting that the company remains under close scrutiny."
But hang on a minute.  The bidding must have taken place during the time in which that ban was supposed to be in place.  And the company was "cleared" just in time for the announcement of its success.  Who is the government trying to kid?

The whole "Help to Work" story today has been utterly depressing.  This morning, on Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davies had the dubious pleasure of trying to interview the appalling Esther McVey.  I bet he didn't want to.  When he tried to pose questions to her boss, Iain Duncan Smith, recently he ended up being complained about by ignorant listeners.  McVey did the same trick this morning - spouting utter twaddle and not answering questions.  The reaction to the new scheme in the media has been predictable.  The Guardian and the Independent get it right, while the Express salivates at the prospect of bludgeoning the poor even harder.  The BBC interviewed Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA, who said what you would expect since she's paid by the outsourcing companies, and Richard Johnson who used to work for Serco and talked sense.
So let's spell it out.  This scheme is largely about IDS's temper at the failure of the Work Programme, which he interprets as the failure of the unemployed.  So they must be punished.  And it will have the advantage of taking loads of people out of the unemployment figures.  They will be sanctioned en masse, or driven into the black economy, or forced onto workfare and so counted as employed.  
Newsnight is doing something on the scheme.  I don't think I'll watch.

Telling it like it is

An excellent article was published in the Guardian yesterday.  They went to Hull, where the unemployment rate is among the worst in the country, and looked at how the Work Programme is actually operating.  This is not propaganda, but reality.  The contract is held by G4S, but is sub-contracted here to Pertemps.  "Officially," says the article, "the barrier is never simply that there are 58 jobseekers for every job available in the city (and in any case, staff point out cheerfully that the latest figure for Hull has dropped to just 22.6). The barriers they diagnose could be difficulties with basic literacy and numeracy, it could be drug or alcohol problems, it may be lack of transport, self-esteem, experience, skills or training. All of these things are problems to which Pertemps has solutions. The subtext is that external economic factors can never be the cause of someone's unemployment: the problem must somehow lie with the individual."  We know that that's a major complaint of people on the WP - that their unemployment must be their fault - and it's feeding the perceptions of government and the wider public.  Pertemps is apparently not meeting its target in Hull but the Guardian is not allowed by the DWP to publish the figures.


It would do ministers good to read about the people described here.  


Meanwhile, the voluntary sector is still complaining.  They are finding that their volunteers are being taken away to go on the WP.