A good budget - for ATOS

Only the Independent has reported this: "Atos given responsibility for new childcare scheme despite previous fitness-for work fiasco."  Yes, the French firm which has performed so splendidly on the WCA contracts that it's handing them back, and which is currently making life impossible for people waiting for PIPs assessments, has the contract to provide the IT for the new scheme to allow people £2,000 towards childcare costs.  What could possibly go wrong?  Atos won't be doing any assessments, we're assured.  But if you take this together with its new contract to extract patient data from GP surgeries (see our post on 26 February) you can see just how ridiculous the outsourcing business has become.

There was nothing in yesterday's budget to give hope to the poorest.  The unemployment figures are worthless, concealing the reality of just how many people are in work and how many are not.  But the measure which we tend to overlook is the benefit cap, the overall limit on spending on "welfare" per year (which Labour supports).  It excludes pensions and JSA.  But it includes housing benefit, tax credits, disability benefits and pensioner benefits.  So while people out of work will continue to get JSA, they could find their housing benefit cut; and those in casual, part-time or zero hours jobs (or in fictional self-employment) could find that their top-up benefits are withering away.


Then there was that poster.  Wherever it originated, the Tory party chairman, Grant Shapps, tweeted it yesterday.  At first people thought it was a parody.  But it wasn't.  And with the hashtag #torybingo it was soon trending wildly, with people having lots of fun playing the game.  A massive own goal for the government!

The Budget

Yesterday's budget contained few real surprises, but one of the measures which will affect A4e is the abolition of the Regional Development Agencies. The North West Development Agency in particular have funded a number of projects which gave work to the company. Whatever replaces the RDAs will have less money to spend, and cuts in public spending across the board will mean slimmer pickings.

Unemployment is set to rise, providing clients for the Work Programme contractors, but fewer possibilities of getting them into jobs and thereby earning outcome payments. And yet the government has made the plight of the unemployed even harder by increasing benefits in line with consumer prices inflation, rather than retail prices inflation, from next year, which means a smaller rise; and by reducing housing benefit by 10% for people who have been on a jobseeker's allowance for 12 months or more. Will this be an incentive to find work?