Not accountable to anybody

A curious story popped up in my Google alerts the other day, from the Rotherham Business News website.  It reported on the new "Help to Work" programme, then went on to the fact that Rotherham Council had discussed a review into the Work Programme as it operated locally, with Serco and A4e.  The report was particularly concerned about sanctions.  Both companies were invited to take part in the review, in person or in writing, but declined, "with A4e taking the view – based on advice from their Department for Work and Pensions account manager - that it would be inappropriate to respond to the panel's questions."  I'm not entirely sure what a DWP account manager is.  But clearly A4e don't see themselves as accountable to anyone.
The DWP has shied away from investigating another provider, Seetec.  Private Eye broke the story some time ago.  Two whistle-blowers had reported fraud around Seetec's Work Choice contract.  The DWP has now "investigated" and exonerated the company.  But it didn't interview the whistle-blowers, and claimed that it had all the evidence needed in their emails - which contained no detail, just a short summary.  The Eye says that Margaret Hodge is on the case.
It's staggering that the value of outsourcing contracts has risen by 168% in the first quarter of 2014.  It's gone to £2.1bn.  In local government it's up by 60%.  And more than half the contracts are first-time outsourcing deals.  The government wants more.  Private Eye also reported in the latest issue on a meeting held by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, with bosses from G4S, Serco, Capita and Atos, to discuss "how to develop the government's commercial reforms".  Apparently they discussed "greater openness and trust between government and its suppliers".  But of course, you can't have openness when commercial firms are involved, unless you change the law.  And businesses are lobbying hard to avoid that.
There was an excellent, if chilling, article by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian last week.  Read it and weep.  Even if the Tories are rejected at the next election it will be too late to undo their sell-off of our public services.

Ignorance is bliss

Have you ever wondered why so few people know what's going on in "welfare" these days?  Ever shouted at the radio or TV when someone pontificated on, say, the Work Programme without appearing to have any knowledge of the subject?  Ever despaired at the sheer ignorance of most people about unemployment?  Then you might have been cheering this morning when the Today programme on Radio 4 decided to look at whether all that self-employment in the latest job figures is genuine.  Two experts were asked; one was a woman whose name I forget, the other Professor Roy Sainsbury.  I'd never heard of him, which is a pity because he's head of the Social Policy Research Unit at York University - and he knows what he's talking about.  Speaking lucidly and quickly (important if you want to get your point across without being interrupted) he pointed out that Work Programme providers were pushing people into spurious self-employment because it enabled them, the companies, to claim for a job outcome under PbR.  Cue astonishment from John Humphrys, who was doing the interview.  "You mean they get paid for it?" he gasped.  And well he might.  When did you last hear a clear and honest examination of anything this government is doing in the name of "welfare reform" on the BBC?  Oh, I know they've looked at food banks, the bedroom tax etc., but always with a timid eye on "balance" for fear of IDS launching another complaint.  At least Humphrys learned something new this morning.

However, the government's apparent ignorance about sanctions cannot be excused.  They have repeatedly been confronted with real cases of people being punished for trivial or non-existent offences, by Labour MPs and others, but have insisted that it's not true.  That has become more difficult since the Mirror published revelations on Tuesday.  Iain Duncan Smith, along with Esther McVey and Neil Couling, head of Jobcentre Plus, attended a meeting last week with a whistle-blower who has worked for the DWP for more than 20 years.  The man told them, "“The pressure to sanction customers was constant.  It led to people being stitched-up on a daily basis.”  He went on "“We were constantly told ‘agitate the customer’ and that ‘any engagement with the customer is an opportunity to ­sanction’.”  The targets, he said, are sometimes referred to as "expectations".  And this led to managers stitching up claimants by altering their appointments without telling them so that they missed the appointment and were sanctioned.  They were told to "inconvenience" the clients and to regard them as scroungers.  It's a horrific account.  And now the Labour MP Debbie Abrahams is agitating for an independent enquiry into sanctions.  It won't happen, of course.  

There's one area of outsourcing on which most of us prefer to remain ignorant.  Read Polly Toynbee's Guardian piece headed "Now troubled children are an investment opportunity".

 

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."

What would I do?

Since reading this excoriating article by Polly Toynbee in yesterday's Guardian I've been asking myself how I would react if I was still working in the welfare-to-work system.  It's many, many years since I worked for a year as a teenager in what was then the Labour Exchange; but only a few years since I worked on the New Deal contracts.  There has always been a "sanctions" system.  If you weren't available for work or actively seeking work, you lost your benefits.  But it took Iain Duncan Smith to introduce a reign of terror and direct staff to throw as many people as possible into destitution.
Toynbee says that jobcentre staff are "mostly decent people", and I would agree.  So what do you do, as a decent person, if you find yourself caught up in this?  One strategy is to make sure the facts get out there, like the "regular 'deep throat' correspondent" who has described to her how, "You park your conscience at the door".
Part of me thinks I couldn't stay in the job.  But walking out isn't that easy, unless you can walk straight into another job (which is unlikely these days).  You wouldn't get any benefits for a very long time; and when you were finally eligible to sign on you would have to go to the jobcentre.  Not much of an option if you've been loudly blowing the whistle meanwhile.  So do you stick it out and try not to become part of the culture?  That, according to the informant, leads quickly to losing your job.
It is horribly easy to become part of the culture when something as wicked as this is going on.  You start by dehumanising those you deal with.  These are not unfortunate people who deserve support and consideration.  They are idle scroungers.  All of them.  That's what you're being told, and what the propaganda has been telling you for years.  They are not part of society, as you are, not "hard-working families".  So if you treat them like rubbish and they react badly, they just confirm your opinion.  History is littered with such treatment of minority groups who have been made scapegoats for other people's sins.
So I don't know what I would do.  But I do know where the responsibility for this misery lies.  And it's not just on Iain Duncan Smith, guilty as he is.  It's on David Cameron, who appointed him and keeps him in his job, presumably because he approves of what he's doing.

Cuts you might not know about

Perhaps I should have known, but I don't remember reading about them anywhere, until I read this piece in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee.  She writes:

"Yet to come will be abundant evidence of serial DWP policy errors. Just wait for the implications to sink in of absurdities such as this. Helping the long-term unemployed into work is every government's goal, with Iain Duncan Smith spending a fortune on his failing Work Programme. Three things help bridge the gap between dole and work: a £100 job grant tides people over until payday, paying for the bus to work, avoiding Wonga loans. A one-month run-on for housing benefit stops people falling into rent arrears when waiting for their first pay cheque. A £250 grant pays the upfront deposit for a childcare place, without which single parents can't take an offered job. The cost is negligible, yet these sensible bridges into work are being abolished. How wise will voters think that?"

This is shocking.  Previous governments recognised that when you signed off your benefits stopped immediately, but you might well not get paid for a month.  You were unlikely to have anything to tide you over, so the grants were sensible.  The only alternative was a loan, and these days that means Wonga or loan sharks.  But this government hasn't a clue, and would rather shovel the money at the WP companies.  Brilliant.

There's another "Comment is Free" article worth reading: Frank Field on "How Labour can reclaim welfare".  

Catching up

Through the day it seems that Liam Byrne's intervention has paid off, in that it has forced an admission from the DWP, according to the Telegraph, that "No. 10 was not told about A4e fraud allegations".  A spokesman for the PM is quoted as saying, “I don’t think we were aware. But it’s a police investigation. If the police are investigating private sector companies, I don’t think necessarily they report regularly to the government on how their investigations are going.”

Richard Kay in the Mail asks, "Is David Cameron’s former ‘back-to-work tsar’ Emma Harrison already plotting her return?"  He tells us that Emma Harrison "has been approached by maintenance firm Aspect.co.uk to advise on a boot camp for jobless youths. Boss Nick Bizley says he is fed up with a deluge of job applications from foreigners but very few from young British candidates, and wants to change attitudes towards work."  Sadly, I can find nothing more on this.  
The most interesting article of the day is by John Harris in the Guardian.  It's always gratifying when the press catches up with what we've been going on about for ages.  He says that Emma Harrison's biggest mistake was "not keeping her head down".  He points out that she is not facing any reduction in her income and "may well be in line for a rather nice future: less heat and less work, but potentially even greater takings".  Then Harris contrasts Harrison's high profile with that of Chris Hyman, CEO of Serco, a company which has much more outsourcing business than A4e.  And he makes the leap which nobody on the supposed left of politics (certainly not Liam Byrne) has yet been willing to make.  "For decades now, the introduction of the profit motive into public services has been held to be synonymous with dynamism, innovation and increased responsiveness to the 'customer'. There is, of course, plenty of evidence to the contrary, but the more zealous minds one associates with the rule of New Labour still believe it, and most Conservatives hold it as an article of faith."  Quite.  And he concludes: "Do not rely on senior figures in the Labour party to make the running on this issue: after all, it built a huge share of the shadow state in which these people make their money. There again, if the progress of the Emma Harrison story – as with the recent controversy about workfare – is anything to go by, these things no longer need the involvement of front-rank politicians to build unstoppable momentum. One thing is certain: though long buried, the tension between public services and profit is back – and this story is only just starting."
I'm currently reading a book called The Verdict by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, summing up the Labour years from 1997 to 2010 from a Labour-supporting but critical point of view.  They manage to cover New Deal and the various measures to help the unemployed while totally ignoring the privatisation in 2006.  John Harris is right.  But I fear it may be too late.

Toynbee article. And why it matters

There's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, looking at the "benefits bonanza" of the Work Programme contracts. She points out that the big winner, Ingeus Deloitte, is run by a former director at the DWP, and that the company underbid the other providers to a worrying extent. She expresses surprise that previous performance is not taken into account, talking about the failure of A4e and Reed in the Pathways programme. We have pointed this out before, and it continues to startle people that a company can bodge one contract after another but still get the business. Toynbee asks why the providers would want these contracts now, and says that there are two reasons: "in previous contracts when they ran out of money they ganged together, demanded more – and got it. The government had no option. Not one company has ever been terminated for missing its targets. So price is flexible. The other reason is that these contracts are small beer, loss-leaders for large companies with their eye on massively lucrative future contracts in the great Cameron outsourcing bonanza."

But why does it matter if a private company provides a public service? Who cares. as long as it's provided efficiently and cheaply? Successive governments have taken this view, and David Cameron has been explicit about it. There is a market place, and the private sector can compete with the public sector to deliver the goods. Those of us who question this philosophy are regarded as socialists (a dirty word) or stupid. But I'll try to explain why it matters.

If my local council decides to contract out the maintenance of its housing stock, that would seem to be simply a matter of getting the best deal for council tax payers. But there are problems. Council tax payers won't be allowed to know how much it's costing, because the contract is "commercially sensitive". One firm may under-bid to secure the business, buying up its competitors, and then go bust, leaving my council to pick up the pieces. A contract may turn out not to serve the interests of residents, but can't be re-negotiated. One could regard these as matters of practicality rather than morality.

There are areas, however, where questions of morality are inescapable. There has always been a market in healthcare and education, the result of people being able to buy their way out of public provision. When it seems that the public provision may disappear altogether, in favour of the market, there are protests - too late. Three areas remain where many citizens expect, and assume, that the market should not operate, even as it takes over; areas where the commodity is people: offender management, advice services and welfare. Private prisons have been in existence for years; a few days ago it was announced that Birmingham jail was to be contracted out to G4S, the first time that a publicly-run prison has been sold off. Another jail is to be run on a payment-by-results contract; the private firm will get paid for the number of people it can keep from re-offending. Advice services used to be run by not-for-profit organisations like the CAB; deliberately so, because it was thought that such services should be clearly distinct from government. Now they are sold to the highest bidder. And, of course, there is a thriving market in welfare-to-work services. In these three areas, people in need of help are sold for private profit. They cease to be citizens, part of society with rights and responsibilities in a public space, and become objects in the market place.

I know this is a dialogue of the deaf. Growing numbers of people have been persuaded that the services used by other people (rarely by themselves) can be a matter of private profit, and there are no practical or moral objections to a few people getting rich from the public purse. To them, I would recommend the book Consumed by Benjamin R. Barber.