Those 120,000 families

Emma Harrison reached the height of her influence with her "family champions" idea.  The government reckoned that there were 120,000 "troubled families" responsible for most of what was wrong in the country, and Harrison persuaded ministers that she had the solution.  There were many people at the time who criticised both the analysis and the proposed remedy.  One established charity, Family Action was particularly concerned about the damage which Harrison's approach could do.  Now a report has been published which shows the flaws in the original thinking.  It has been written by Professor Ruth Levitas for the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK Project, and can be accessed through the Indus Delta site.  

Levitas shows how the original figure of 120,000 families was based on a misuse of statistics, and how "troubled families" were redefined as "troublesome families" by government rhetoric.  She quotes a Cameron speech: "That’s why today, I want to talk about troubled families. Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase. Officialdom might call them ‘families with multiple disadvantages’. Some in the press might call them ‘neighbours from hell’. Whatever you call them, we’ve known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society. Drug addiction. Alcohol abuse. Crime. A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations. We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money…but now we’ve come up the actual figures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families…that is around £75,000 per family."   The government has conflated families which have disadvantages which are not self-inflicted with those who cause expensive trouble.  Levitas goes on to show how this rhetoric has fed a vindictive attitude towards the poor.  It's an excellent report and well worth reading.

Emma Harrison was not, of course, responsible for this.  It would be truer to say that she jumped on the bandwagon.  She proposed a simplistic solution; volunteers could work with these families to get them into work.  "Working Families Everywhere", a pilot scheme, was born, and we had the toe-curling suggestion that these volunteers be known as "Emmas".  But Harrison had, possibly unwittingly, ruled A4e out of bidding for the contracts for European Social Fund money to pay private companies to do the work with local authorities in a professional way.  A new "tsar" was appointed, Louise Casey, a woman with very different experience from Harrison's.  And when the torrent of bad publicity for A4e was unleashed, Harrison stepped down from the ongoing WFE scheme.

I am tempted to draw lessons from this story, but readers can do that themselves.  Perhaps the lesson for Harrison is that hubris results in nemesis. 

Give that man a bonus!

Just listening to Radio 4's Any Questions programme, debating the benefits cap. David Blunkett on the panel said he wholeheartedly supported the Working Families Everywhere programme - without disclosing the fact that he is paid by A4e. Well done, David.

People helping people?

Emma Harrison hasn't been much in the media lately. Perhaps questions about A4e's profits would be embarrassing. But her pet project, Working Families Everywhere, is still alive in a few places, and Emma has been in Poole, Dorset, where the council took on four "family champions". The write-up in the Bournemouth Daily Echo is a classic of spin. We learn that Harrison was "appointed by David Cameron to spearhead People Helping People". That's obviously Harrison's name for it, not Cameron's. She visited a children's centre and said, "There are jobs out there." Well, that's encouraging. A couple of long-term unemployed are quoted, keen to get back into work, and one says that people don't know where to start. Which, of course, begs the question of what the various expensive schemes run by A4e and others have been doing. But the confusion about Harrison's project is evident. One woman says, "We need to get everybody back out into the community and helping each other" Harrison has implied before that if you can push people into volunteering you've succeeded in making them "working families". You haven't, of course.

There's a continuing chorus of complaints from the voluntary sector about their role in the Work Programme. They don't like the "cherry-picking" which is going on and means that only the hardest to help are being referred to them. And they don't like having to wait for months to be paid what little they can earn. Chris Grayling's response is to tell them that they signed contracts and knew what they were getting into. Which is more credible than Iain Duncan Smith's assertion that his welfare cuts are about helping people rather than punishing them.

Emma Harrison and troubled families

Has Emma Harrison been shunted out of the picture in the "troubled families" scene? She was hailed as the solution to the problem of supposedly 120,000 of them after the riots, with her "Working Families Everywhere" scheme. Now Cameron is to announce £448m "to fund a national network of local authority teams charged with identifying 'chaotic families' and helping them address their problems." (Guardian) In charge of all this will be Louise Casey, with her "Troubled Familes Unit". The BBC nods to Harrison as the "family champion" but none of the other reports mention her.

With no real news from A4e (except that Roy Newey has been travelling - India and Latvia), it's the fact that 2.64 million are out of work that dominates the headlines. And still the government clings to the idea that the Work Programme will work some sort of magic. It's hard to see how. Many will go into "work placements" but most of those will not get real jobs. And what work there is, is often temporary. A young man recently appeared on a radio programme with Iain Duncan Smith in London, and said that despite his qualifications he could not get work. IDS promised to help him - and we learned today that he has indeed got a job and is thrilled to bits. But it's a temporary job, for the Christmas period.

A recent report showed that "just 20%" of those on the WP are being referred to the voluntary sector. That might just show that 80% don't need that specialist support. What we don't know is what is being done for that 80%. What actual skills training is happening?

The Welfare State

The BBC2 programme on the Welfare State tonight is being so well promoted that we don't have to watch it. I'm listening to part of it now on the Today programme. And Left Foot Forward has already analysed why Humphrys is wrong. I don't intend to watch, but feel free to comment if you do. "The age of entitlement", he says, "must be brought to an end."

I reported that Emma Harrison's Family Champions scheme was to consist entirely of volunteers. But Poole council in Dorset "has obtained funding to become part of the Working Families Everywhere Programme which provides one to one support to help families overcome unemployment and return to work." Three of these people will have contracts running to March 2013. How will that fit with the ESF contract, which is being run down there by something called Paragon Concord International?

"Lead Family Champion"

Something called the Family and Parenting Institute (a think tank) gives space for Emma Harrison to plug her Working Families Everywhere campaign. The familiar message has been refined somewhat. "The difference in the Working Families Everywhere approach is on setting a single goal, in this case employment for at least one family member, and dealing with the other needs on the path to, or subsequent to, that goal." There's a great deal about Emma's qualifications for the role, and then the final paragraph is a triumph of Emma-speak. But we learn that these "family champions" will all be volunteers. That was inevitable. But there's nothing in this piece about the ESF contracts for private companies to do this work for profit. How will the volunteers fit into this strange mix of local council employees and private companies?

Meanwhile, Mark Lovell has been using the Huffington Post to publicise his vision of young people getting themselves out of unemployment by starting their own enterprises. One would think that the Prince's Trust didn't exist.

No news, good news and questions

It's all quiet at the moment. As always, a subject is in the news for a while then drops out as if it had never been. G4S is advertising for an ESF Project Manager for the new contracts and has published its plans for the different regions. They don't seem to include Families Unlimited. Meanwhile the Working Families Everywhere website carries news, dated 13 September, of the Advisory Board meeting on 6 September, and promises to publish the minutes of the meeting when they're available. Should be interesting. But are we to assume that Emma Harrison's pet project will go ahead even when the ESF contracts are awarded? Will it just be volunteers, the paid people having been sacked or sent over to the contractors; and where will those volunteers stand in relation to the contractors?

A4e's Roy Newey has been getting excited about business prospects in Saudi Arabia and Latvia. But back in Britain the Radio 4 "Report" on the Work Programme brought out the fact that we can have no figures and no real idea of what's going on. It seems that the contractors are being deluged with clients and don't have time to do anything constructive with them. But they can still earn money. Some of those clients will get jobs - what Chris Grayling called the dead weight figure - owing nothing whatever to the private companies, but those companies will still get the payment.

The Guardian article - questions

On 7 September Emma Harrison tweeted: "First meet of cross party advisory group who are committed to helping all families become working families. Feisty determined bunch." The following day she said: "So good. I am seeing a real determination at cabinet level to help turn around the lives of 120,000 families by supporting them into work." And at the time she knew that she stood to make money from this.

If you haven't read the Guardian piece please do so. Now, let's assume that at the time Harrison set up her Working Families Everywhere project she didn't know that the government would come up with contracts, handed out to the usual suspects, to do the work. Perhaps she envisaged only that local councils would fund it with community budgets and she could bask in the prestige. But that would surely have been naive. This government's dogma is all about private profit. So perhaps she saw no hindrance to A4e getting in on the action. But in all the publicity she was manoevred into saying that she would not be making any money out of it. There is some confusion in the article. "Harrison told the Guardian she withdrew from bidding when the government announced the first tranche of contracts, worth £200m, in February. She said she had accepted the unpaid role but had been 'shocked' to learn there would be hundreds of millions of pounds in funding. 'Chris Grayling told me he had got £200m. It was a bit of a shock … I thought: 'Oh crikey, that makes me feel a bit awkward. We will have to withdraw (from the bidding).'" How could A4e have already bid before the contracts were announced? What had they bid for? Am I missing something?

But there was a way out of this dilemma, a way to make money. Set up something under a different name and go for sub-contracts. Not as lucrative, but better than nothing. The "partnership" with the "former civil servant who until this year was running the Department for Education's 'support services for families with multiple needs'" will not surprise those who follow the revolving door of business, civil servants and politicians in this government's administration. And the DWP is right, there is no legal impediment to this arrangement. But it could be a PR disaster. Cameron may well want to distance himself from Harrison, and the "advisory group" could decide that they've been conned. As for the families who are supposed to be the beneficiaries - well, they're irrelevant.

Puzzles

I am genuinely puzzled. Emma Harrison's stunt over Working Families Everywhere and family champions completely obscured the fact that contracts are coming out to provide such people with ESF money. And now Kent County Council are advertising for them in what they're calling a pilot until March 2013. The advert uses Harrison's slogans. But it also says that "there may be scope for an extension (after March 2013) depending on new funding becoming available". So when and where do these new DWP contracts apply? Since these people are currently employed by the councils, and would be TUPE'd over to the private contractors, there would seem to be nothing in it for Harrison except publicity; unless the volunteers she's trying to recruit are under her control, and that seems unlikely.

The website Children and Young People Now has tried to get some clarity from Harrison, but without much success. However, the piece does solve the puzzle of why Kent is joining in. Baroness Debbie Stedman-Scott is chief executive of charity Tomorrow's People and member of the Working Families Everywhere advisory board, and her group works in Maidstone, Kent. Helen Dent, chief executive of charity Family Action, repeats her scepticism about the whole scheme.

It would be useful if the journalists who are paid to research these things would sort it out. And pigs might fly.

There are times, just briefly, when I wonder whether I'm being unfair. Perhaps the bosses of A4e are genuinely more interested in helping people than in making money. Mark Lovell tweets: "Don't like profit motive - set up a social business and grow it globally. Compete, impact and force corporates and governments to change". And he's about to start an "Improving People's Lives" Fund. All very worthy. And unrecognisable to many of A4e's staff and clients. Another of his tweets is really interesting: "3,800 staff in our business - 63% female:male staffing ratio, higher outside UK. My 'boss' Emma and I have worked together for 20 yrs". Note the quotes around "boss". It has long been difficult to work out Harrison's real role in the company. There is a board of directors and a chief executive, so how much power does she have? Perhaps it's just useful to have her out there getting the publicity and cosying up to politicians while others get on with running the company.

David Cameron's solution - Emma Harrison

Can Emma Harrison cure our society's ills? Of course not. It's arguable that A4e is a symptom rather than the cure. But she has obviously made a great impression on David Cameron; we had the astonishing spectacle yesterday of the Prime Minister citing Harrison's "family champions" scheme as the answer to the problems thrown up by the riots.

The press this morning shows its usual lack of understanding and research (with the honourable exception of the Guardian). The Mail says: "Aides said Mr Cameron would order ministers to help his family champion, social entrepreneur Emma Harrison, who was appointed last year. Her plans will see police, social workers and jobcentres work together." Somewhat inaccurate.

The Telegraph simply reports what Cameron said without comment.

Only the Guardian is sceptical, with three articles. The first draws attention to the fact that funding for various family intervention projects has been cut. This is interesting because most of us were not aware that such projects existed; Harrison gave the impression that she had invented the concept (and Cameron appeared to believe her). The authors understand the current situation: " While the government said it would make available £200m from the European Social Fund to help fund the target, the rest would come from the early intervention grant, which is to be cut by 11% by next year and has funding for Sure Start, teenage pregnancy and youth centres to meet. Labour said Sure Start had been cut by 20%. A government source acknowledged that using these resources to fund Cameron's target could vary. They said: "It is for local authorities and their partners, including the voluntary sector, to decide how much they wish to prioritise on families with multiple problems in their area." It's a pity that they don't pick up on the fact that this ESF money is going to private companies bidding for contracts.

The second piece (by different writers) looks at the history of family intervention projects and talks to Trevor Moores, the recently retired head of child services in Westminster council (one of Harrison's pilot areas). He said that the problems were more complex than Cameron and Harrison make out. The piece then quotes Rhian Beynon of the charity Family Action who, as we have noted before, is highly sceptical of Harriosn's simplistic approach, and Katherine Rake, chief executive of the Family & Parenting Institute, who is similarly sceptical. Finally there's a brief cut-and-paste piece about Emma Harrison and the beginnings of her Working Families Everywhere programme. It says, "She will be paid by results and so aims to save the government money." This is confusing, but it highlights the confusion in Cameron's thinking. Harrison's scheme, and the ESF contracts she no doubt hopes to get, are about getting people into work, and this is the only criterion on which you could have "payment by results". As we noted yesterday, Cameron seems to equate "unemployed" with "anti-social".

Nobody has asked why WFE should be suucessful when A4e and other companies have already been paid many millions of pounds to get these people into work and failed.

It's all great publicity for Emma Harrison and A4e. But it will put them under greater scrutiny than ever before.

Explaining WFE

Getting hard information about Emma Harrison's project Working Families Everywhere has been difficult. Our correspondent in Hull, one of the pilot areas, put in a Freedom of Information request to the Council but got a very uninformative reply. To a question about how participating families were selected, the reply was that it was "through a structured process of referral". According to a blog by Anna Gaunt (who is accompanying Ms Harrison) they were "meeting with families who had expressed an interest in having support on the road to employment." There's a strong clue, however, as to what's going on in a piece on the Working Families Everywhere website. It's in the form of a Q & A with John Bell, Policy Editor of ESF Works. What's that? It "exists to share the stories of the people, practice and policy that the European Social Fund in England supports." And its website has an interesting piece about the roll-out of Community Budgets. It explains that there have been 16 pilot schemes "tackling social problems around families with complex needs" and that there are 4 new pilots to develop this. "In response to this, the DWP invited companies on the Employment Related Support Services Framework to tender for ESF funding to work with families with multiple problems, helping them overcome these and break the cycle of intergenerational worklessness." It goes on: "Payment will be made mainly by results, on progress measures and job outcomes which move family members nearer to and into work and put families on the road to recovery. Bids must be made by 30th August, and a key element in their evaluation will be how well bidders have integrated partnership working with local authorities into their proposals." So that explains everything. Another big contract in the offing.

In the WFE piece Harrison again talks about "hidden jobs". The phrase was also used by a person from Working Links in a news item on BBC radio recently, talking about the Work Programme in Glasgow. It appears to mean that the providers forge relationships with employers and persuade them to take people on.

You'll be pleased to know that Emma Harrison is writing her autobiography.

WFE

There's a new website for Working Families Everywhere.

Despite the usual hype, this project does not appear to be going to plan. Only 3 local authorities signed up, and 2 of those have not recruited new people but instead redeployed existing staff. Westminster may not even have got that far yet. If the participating authorities think that it works to have one person as the "key worker" for families which need support, there is no reason for them to continue to link to Ms Harrison's project. Are there really going to be contracts in this for A4e, or is it more about publicity for Emma Harrison? The site certainly appears to be a publicity vehicle for her. "We’ve pledged to help 100,000 families get back to work," she says, in the next five years. The words "to help" are crucial here. But her confidence that "this first stage of recruitment will allow us to start building an innovative network of Champions committed to making a real difference" is probably misplaced.

Miscellany

It's not always obvious that you're dealing with A4e.

Take Middlesborough Enterprise Gateway, marketed with the slogans "a fresh start" and "be your own boss". Nowhere on its website will you find A4e mentioned, but that's who is delivering this project. It's been running for over a year.

Then there's a video on the Flixel site, an interview with Dame Kelly Holmes. It's tagged as A4e and education. It's standard motivational stuff, follow your dreams etc. I admit I have a bit of a problem with it. The tiny minority of highly successful people tell us that we can achieve similar success, when the majority, however dedicated, won't.

It's the last Fairy Jobmother programme tonight, thank goodness. Not having watched this series, I don't know how deceptive it is. But we do know that interviews were arranged by Ms Taylor / the producers (see the Builders' Merchants Journal site), and that gives the impression that interviews and jobs are there for the taking. In fact, anyone with a long spell of unemployment on their CV is unlikely to clear even the first hurdle of an interview. Is that made clear?

Remember "Working Families Everywhere"? Only three local authorities signed up for it. Hull is employing 6 of the "family champions", but it seems likely that they are not new appointments but redeployed existing council staff. If this is the case, (and if it's true in Westminster as well) it rather takes the project out of Emma Harrison's hands. The "champions" are accountable to the councils, which can design the jobs.

More family champions

Emma Harrison has announced that two other councils have joined Blackpool in piloting her Working Families Everywhere scheme. They are Hull and Westminster. Neither council seems to have told their electorates, since there's nothing on their websites. Perhaps they are reluctant to announce, at the same time as making hundreds of council workers redundant, that they are employing "family champions".

Mark Lovell on finance

On an obscure website called myfinances.co.uk A4e's Mark Lovell gets the chance to expound his ideas about "Tackling the challenges of supporting public services". It's not so much an interview, more of an essay, and it makes interesting reading. A4e has long had the ambition to own a bank, and while that may seem an unlikely proposition, the piece shows that there are ways of getting into it sideways, as it were. He addresses the question: "In the current financial climate, what are the three most important initiatives your company is undertaking?" He talks about their debt advice services, and then: "Developing a fund with finance partners from which the people we work with who start their own business, or a social enterprise, can secure capital to help them get going. Access to capital and microcredit / finance is more important than ever in the current economic climate and self-employment or business start up is really important. - Working with likeminded organisations – banks, charities, credit unions, intermediaries, lenders, utilities – to change the way financial products and services are designed and reach low income consumers. Biting off a big challenge on that one!"

Think about the first part of that. It means that A4e clients who want to start their own businesses will borrow money from A4e (or an A4e partnership). Sounds fine, at a time when banks won't lend to start-ups with no security to offer. But a client can only make a profit for A4e if s/he is in work, or self-employment for two years. Getting the start-up loan from A4e would bind him or her into a relationship with the company which could be uncomfortable, to say the least.

The other part of the interview which worries me is: "We want to join up as many services as possible. We deal with around 400,000 consumers per year at the moment. Most of them are either out of work or on low incomes. They access a range of public services from multiple agencies and we contract with nearly 40 different organisations to deliver these services. We can provide better, joined up services at more marginal cost by bringing some of these activities together." Again, this is a long-held ambition of A4e, the "super-contract" which would see A4e having the right to be the gateway for all services to its clients. Am I overstating it to say that, in effect, a local authority would sell people to A4e? We can certainly see Emma Harrison's "working families everywhere" venture as part of this campaign to roll up access to all public services into one contract and direct people's lives.

Britain's Secret Fat Cats

I managed to watch this Channel 4 Dispatches programme on 4OD - or rather, the first two thirds of it. It seems that if you pause a programme on 4OD you can't restart it, but have to go back to the beginning. I saw enough to applaud this exposure of the reality of outsourcing.

It focussed on the three biggest companies, Serco, Capita and G4S. We were reminded that David Cameron called in these and other companies to renegotiate some contracts, but the big 3 are totally unconcerned about taking a small hit now, because there's so much business in the pipeline. They are all buoyant about the vast amounts they will make in the near future. Capita's Paul Pindar reckoned they had 30 contract opportunities, worth £4.7bn, and Serco has a £16.5bn order book. The reporter tried to get at the details of these contracts but was told by the government that they were commercially confidential - giving the lie to Cameron's promise of "transparency" in government contracts. Bear in mind in what follows that A4e are in a rather different category to these 3; it isn't a publicly listed company with shareholders, so we can't get at figures for executive pay. Last year Chris Hyman of Serco got £5m, Nick Buckles of G4S got £4m and, in 2008, Paul Pindar of Capita got £10m. And half or more of their business comes from the privatisation of the public sector. We were treated to a fascinating explanation of the self-serving system which results in obscene levels of executive pay. The tax-payer who provides the dosh for the pay of the execs of the outsourcing companies has no say in how much they should get.

The programme then turned to the Work Programme. It looked at Liverpool, where a small local outfit had used the Future Jobs Fund to secure work and / or training fpr more than 400 people. Despite Cameron's talk of the Big Society, power devolving to local people, this organisation and all those like it will not be in the running for contracts under the WP; but in the North West both Serco and G4S are on the shortlist. It was clear, we were told, that even if small, local organisations start out as players in the Big Society, they will soon be swallowed up by the big fish.

The Financial Times has maintained its interest in the finances of the Work Programme. On 8 March they reported that some of the larger providers were privately dubious about whether the payment by results system was going to stack up. They can't afford not to be in it, but they are banking on the fact that the government can't let it fall over and will bail them out if necessary. Yesterday they quoted Chris Grayling's response. No provider will have more than "a limited number of contracts", in order to spread the load if anyone goes bust. And, he said, the providers can make "shedloads" of money if they get the hardest to help into work.

All in all, quite depressing.

PS. Emma Harrison was speaking at a meeting of the Policy Exchange, a Tory think tank, today about Working Families Everywhere.

Contact - and quiet

I had a comment yesterday from someone claiming to be a journalist and wanting to make contact with me. That person can send me a comment (obviously not for publication) with his or her email address and I will get in touch.

There's nothing much to report at the moment. Emma Harrison hasn't given an interview for over a week. Perhaps her PR people have advised a period of quiet, or perhaps she's on holiday. There was, however, a piece in the Guardian last week by Rhian Beynon, who is head of policy and campaigns at Family Action. This is the charity, you remember, which is not best pleased at Emma's latest project, the Family Champions, or Working Families Everywhere, because they've been doing this work without fanfare for years. Beynon is particularly concerned in the article with the mental health strategy, or lack of it, to support children. And she is very sceptical about Harrison's capacity in this area.

Family Champions and that summit

That presentation by Emma Harrison at the UK Nordic Baltic Summit has been put online; at least, the slides have. Judging by the introduction - "Every family gets a Family Champion who sorts stuff out and gets jobs – holistically – directing all existing efforts and resources towards Families with a sense of purpose, working, independent and Helping Others" - it was big on ambition and capital letters. And we have some new jargon. "Holistically" is nice, but "poking" as a description of what agencies have been doing with troubled families is not. Still, Emma can fix it. The Family Champion is going to be "one holistic point of support" to turn 500 such families into "working families".

Perhaps there were questions after this presentation; we're not told. Someone might have asked about the qualifications needed by these Family Champions, the training they will receive, and their relationship with other agencies. Someone might have asked whether "working" is the same as "volunteering". Someone, indeed, might have raised the Flexible New Deal results.

Emma and government

A small piece in today's Mail headed Back-to-work tsar to reveal campaign plan tells us that A4e's Emma Harrison is to "meet Department of Education officials this week to finalise details of her campaign to get 100,000 unemployed families working over the next five years." With some rather strange figures, she tells us how the government can save money and people can have better lives. Finally we learn that "Later this week Harrison will speak to nine foreign leaders at David Cameron's Nordic Summit in London to tell them how her campaign could work elsewhere."

What is most concerning about this is that, with the Work Programme contracts not yet out and nobody examining A4e's record, this woman has put herself forward as the national expert, and the government is conniving at that; she is being allowed to tout A4e's services to foreign leaders under Cameron's auspices, and the right wing press is helping her.

The dire Working Families Everywhere website tells us (with A4e's usual blithe disregard for correct English) that, "On 18th January, Emma will be meeting The Department for Education, shortly after with Local Authorities who have pledged their interest to be involved. During this meeting we will finalise the first stages of the Working Families Everywhere Campaign, led by Emma Harrison." It will be interesting to see which local authorities have fallen for this.

Websites and a new year

As 2010 closes, A4e's prospects of profits look good. But I can't help wondering whether the cult of personality is going to be detrimental to the company in the long run. There's yet another website, Working Families Everywhere, spreading the word about the new opportunity (and with, of course, a video of Emma Harrison). This latest enterprise gets its own Facebook page to go with Emma's own page (which 169 people apparently "like"). I've lost count of all the websites devoted to A4e and Emma Harrison; and she's become the face of welfare-to-work for the Daily Express and, apparently, for David Cameron. But when you court publicity you draw attention to your shortcomings. A4e's results will be under scrutiny as never before.

And Emma has competition in the publicity stakes. Ex-A4e employee Hayley Taylor is back from the USA, where she was called an "international careers expert", and is preparing a new series of The Fairy Jobmother whilst appearing on ITV's Daybreak.

But let's be clear. There are only so many jobs that you can fix up with your personal contacts and with employers who want to appear on the telly. And pushing people into "volunteering" doesn't count. A huge amount of public money is going into the Work Programme and into all those other contracts which A4e has. Time to show that we're getting what we're paying for.

A follow-up to the Private Eye piece on Jonty Olliff-Cooper is on the Blood and Treasure blog. Well worth reading the comments!

A good 2011 to everybody.