A4e's accounts

The accounts for the year ending 31 March 2013 are now available.  You can get them for only £1 from the Companies House website.
Things were bad for A4e in 2011/12 but they got a lot worse.  They had an operating loss of £10.3m compared to a £1.7m loss the previous year, and an EBITDA loss of £5.8m compared to £4m profit in the previous year.  (EBITDA means earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization - yes, I had to look it up.)  They state that they actually moved into profitability in the final quarter of the year.  They had to borrow a great deal of money.  Liabilities stood at £53.4m, compared to £35.7m in the previous year.   They have a large credit facility with Thornbridge Ltd, which is owned 50/50 by Emma Harrison and her husband.  No dividend was paid.
They confirm that they closed their businesses in France and Germany, and now the focus is on the Work Programme, OLASS 4 (prison education contracts) and on expanding the business in Australia.  They also mention Advice and Enterprise (services to start-ups).  There are confident noises about the WP becoming profitable and getting TR contracts (the outsourced probation services).
It must be stressed that this is the information as at March last year.  We don't know what's happened since then, or why their credit rating was cut in the last three months or so.

A4e's accounts for 2011 - 2012 published

The accounts for the year to March 2012 have been published.  Company accounts are not easy reading unless you're an accountant, but there are some interesting facts to be extracted.

Emma Harrison was paid £1.5 million in dividends when she stepped down as Chair in February.  There were no dividends paid after that, and no more will be paid up to March 2013, because they need to invest in the Work Programme.  It was an expensive year.  The parent company made a loss of £1,007,000 after dividends were paid, compared to a profit of £15,158,000 in the previous year.  Actual revenue was significantly down.  In the UK it was £127,126,000 compared to £215,616,000 in the year.  Revenue from Australia was up a lot because of the acquisition of a company there.

The preamble declares that they pay the Living Wage and intend to raise pay according to new recommendations in April 2013.  They have chosen to follow the Hutton Review of Fair Pay and pay the Chief Exec no more than 10x median adult full time salary.  Directors' emoluments (pay etc.) for the year total £2,327,000, less than last year.  The highest paid director got £416,000.

There are some bits and pieces of money spent on services, including:

• £188,000 to Andromeda Park, a conference management company owned by the Harrisons; 
• £816,000 to Thornbridge Ltd for lease of property (more than the previous year); 
• £81,000 to Elite Pension Scheme, of which the Harrisons are beneficiaries.

A small note tells us that on 24 April 2012 Medex Training Ltd was "struck off".  This was a company acquired by A4e in 2006 - see my post from October 2009.  It's been dormant for some time.  I wonder what happened.

If you want to examine the full accounts, go to the Companies House website.  You can download it for only £1.

Nice Work for Some

Private Eye has been scrutinising some of the outsourcing companies again. It notes that Working Links, which got three Work Programme contracts, has been caught over-claiming job outcomes in Merseyside. The company claimed for 85 recent job starts which people had secured before any intervention by Working Links.

But the Eye is even more interested in the finances of A4e. Three of its directors are paid through schemes which are common enough for the highly paid but not available to the rest of us. "In the last two years international director Roy Newey has been paid £662,000 through a company called Roy Newey Ltd," says the article, and two non-executive directors had similar arrangements. It goes on: "Newey paid himself NIC-free dividends totalling £326,000".

A4e paid Emma Harrison and her husband's conference management company Andromeda Park Ltd £462,000 last year, another of the couple's companies, Thornbridge Ltd, £627,000 for the lease of a building, and £81,000 rent on a property owned by the couple's pension scheme. And that was before profits after tax for A4e of £6.2m." A4e is definitely improving some people's lives!