"Firms in fraud probe set for Whitehall cash"

That's the headline in the Observer today. "Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman, said the government should review which companies were allowed to bid for contracts working with some of the most vulnerable people in society. "The taxpayer is over a barrel to a small number of companies cashing in on the recession. It beggars belief that companies subject to investigation should be potentially in line for lucrative contracts dealing with a particularly vulnerable group," he said." It's the Work Choice contracts which have sparked the anger of Mr Webb, and the story explains why. Good to know that MPs are waking up to this situation, and that the Observer is not going to let go. The Sunday Times, however, carries a piece, "Queen of the jobless industry", which could make you despair of so-called quality journalism. I can't bring myself to summarise it - read it for yourself.

Volunteer with A4e!

Do you fancy working for A4e, that "dynamic, fast growing international organisation with headquarters based in England", for nothing? You can if you live in London. The Gumtree site has an ad dated 13 August for volunteer mentors for clients on New Deal programmes. You can work for as little as one hour per week, and in return you could get training in "Time Management, Communication & Assertiveness, CV & Job search, Equal Opportunities & Diversity, as well as ‘’how to achieve long-term success’’. Additionally, after one month of mentoring, volunteers will be able to opt for City & Guilds recognition certificate as a ‘’Community Mentor’’." Tempted? Or are you thinking that A4e is being paid handsomely to do this, so why are they recruiting free labour?

Benefit Busters

An update on the Channel 4 series starting next Thursday: Channel 4's website shows that the 2 of the 3 episodes in the series focus on A4e. We gave the details for Episode 1. There are already 12 comments about this episode and, not surprisingly, several are from people totally unsympathetic to unemployed lone parents. Episode 2 concentrates on New Deal in Hull (it was recorded well before all the bad publicity hit the Hull office). The billing says: "Unemployment is rife in Hull, but for one company business is booming: A4E has won the lucrative contract to help get the long-term unemployed back to work. Mark Pilkington is an ex-soldier who hasn't worked for 10 years. He welcomes help and within a fortnight he finds a job. But the joy of receiving his first pay cheque is short-lived; after just four weeks a business downturn results in Mark being laid off. Facing a return to A4E and potentially a four-week wait to restart his benefit payments, Mark begins to wonder if there is more security in a life on benefits. It appears to be a shockingly common perception amongst the clients at A4E, who are at the mercy of an increasingly casual labour market." That strikes me as rather worrying for the good people of Hull, if their city is to be painted in this disparaging way. Episode 3 looks at Pathways, with the Shaw Trust as the provider.

Prison Education - a survey

This is rather old news, I'm afraid, dating back to February this year, but still very relevant. You wouldn't expect a trade union to be keen on the privatisation of public services; and the University and College Union are certainly not keen on the way in which "offender learning" has been contracted out to A4e. They produced a briefing for the Learning & Skills Council, with the results of a survey of about 100 UCU members who are employed by A4e. It includes:

"We asked what A4e was like as an employer and provider of offender learning. This is what they told us:

• 89.5 per cent employees would prefer to work for a college of further education.
• Over half (50.6 per cent) rate A4e as ‘Poor’ as a provider of quality offender learning.
• Over half (54.3 per cent) say offender learning has got worse since A4e won the contract."

And:

"Asked if A4e should be awarded the contract for offender learning again an overwhelming 81.6 per cent said ‘NO’"

It also includes a number of quotes from employees, including:

“A4e do not appear to understand or care about what education should be for. In my opinion education should be about enabling offenders to further themselves as individuals. They seem to regard the contract as a business.”

Another complaint concerned the lack of training and development. In April this year the union asked the LSC to take notice of this in awarding the new contracts. By August it had become clear that FE colleges were withdrawing from the bidding process because they couldn't afford to deliver an adequate service, and the union was warning the LSC "that it risks putting quality and standards in prison education at risk if it hands out contracts to private providers." We'll see.

Publicity - lots of it

We know that A4e's strategy is to feed PR thinly disguised as news stories to the press, but it's been confined to the regional and local papers - until today. The Times carries a story, "‘Loan shark threatened to break my legs if I didn’t pay £1,000’" describing how a Stoke on Trent man went to A4e for debt advice. They're called "a debt advice agency based in Stoke" - actually they have a contract to provide money advice to Stoke's council tenants. One wouldn't, perhaps, have expected The Times to print stuff fed to them by firms like A4e, but this reads so typically of their planted stories that, sadly, one has to believe it.

And there's more publicity to come on 20 August when Channel 4 begins a series entitled "Benefit Busters". The first episode sounds like wonderful propaganda for A4e. "Hayley Taylor is a no-nonsense Yorkshire lass whose job is to persuade single mothers on benefits to go back to work. The company she works for, A4E, makes millions from helping to tackle the Government's target of getting 70 per cent of lone parents into paid work by 2010, and is the largest welfare reform company in the world. A4E is run by multimillionaire entrepreneur Emma Harrison, who believes her business is 'improving people's lives by getting them into work.' Until recently, the 700,000 lone parents receiving benefit didn't have to look for work until their youngest child was 16. Soon, they must either work, or be looking for work, once their youngest child is seven. At Doncaster A4E, Hayley runs a course called Elevate that aims to give lone parents the skills and confidence to enter the workplace and convince them they'll be better off doing so. Cameras follow her group of ten single mothers during their intensive six-week course to prepare them for work." Some of that must have come straight from A4e's handouts, and it certainly doesn't look as if the programme will be a hatchet job. A4e's own publication, Blueprint, says, "...one of our teams in Doncaster was in for a nice surprise – and more than just 15 minutes of fame – when a Channel 4 documentary maker chose the team to star in a film about the welfare system. Doncaster’s Elevate team was selected to appear in the documentary after Elevate Trainer, Hayley Taylor, made a great impression on the series producer. He felt that Hayley had the energy and passion to inspire her clients – all of whom are lone parents – to get back into work and training. You can read their fascinating story on page 12, and find out what it was really like to be in front of the camera for weeks on end." If you really want to read page 12, it's here. Can't wait.

Associating with success

Much of A4e's "news" i.e. PR output is focussed on Plymouth at the moment. They are part of something called "Plymouth Works Plus" which has an interesting website homepage. Under "Who we are" they say, "Plymouth Works Plus is a European Social Fund (ESF) and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) funded project. The organisations working together to provide this support are A4E, The Neighbourhood Learning Consortium, Pluss and RITE Associates Ltd. Our Team consists of trained advisors, consultants, employment engagement advisors and trainers." Fine. But the next paragraph, "What we do", is not reassuring. "Plymouth Works Plus are here to help imporve the employability of unemployed people. We do this by tackling barriers to worked faced by people with disabilities or helath conditions, lone parents, people aged 50+, ethnic minorities, those with no or low qualifications and anyone over 16 not in education., employmnet or training." This is copied and pasted directly from the website. So, a little exercise for you - how many mistakes can you spot in those two sentences? Why has no one from the organisation spotted them?

However, A4e's PR exercise in this area seems to be to associate themselves with the success of people who overcame handicaps to become stars. First we had AWARD WINNING PLAYWRIGHT TEAMS UP WITH A4E. I confess I'd never heard of Sue Torr, but her story is told in the Guardian. What does it have to do with A4e? Well, “A4e has teamed up with Sue to promote help for people to improve their basic skills in literacy and numeracy where A4e runs our Employability Skills programme in Plymouth and across the rest of the South West region.” What does that mean? “A4e is helping Sue with business support on her US tour by organising business cards, literature, and a Dictaphone courtesy of Apex Core Training.” So they have "organised" business cards and literature (the dictaphone, note, was supplied by someone else). Yesterday we got the story of A GENIUS PAINTER WITH A DIFFERENCE. Here we have an even more tenuous connection with A4e. They have "helped Eddy with displaying his works and with help and advice guidance on how he can develop his great talent for painting.” (I know that's not grammatical, but it's what's on the website.) I'm sure Eddy, and Sue, were grateful for A4e's support, but I can't help thinking that it's the publicity that matters. And in my treasury of A4e slogans there's a new (and ungrammatical) one from Carol Boyd of Plymouth A4e: "A4e has a talent of nurturing people’s dreams what ever age or barriers."

Work Choice

Work Choice is the new name for contracts to provide support into work to disabled people. It's a specialist area that some people will remember as Workstep. For the purposes of these contracts the country (including Scotland and Wales) is divided into 28 regions, and the shortlists have now been published of providers. A4e is shortlisted in 9 regions, including what might be considered their heartlands. The BASE website (a voice for supported employment) points out that "the majority of bidders have little or no experience of meeting the needs of these customer groups". A few specialist providers are shortlisted; The Pluss Organisation gets 9 mentions, Advance Housing gets 11. But it's the big-name generalists that loom largest. The Shaw Trust is shortlisted in 17 areas; Working Links in 16; Pinnacle People, a newcomer, gets 14; Work Directions gets 10; and Seetec gets 9. (Seetec's website proclaims, with no doubt conscious echoes of A4e, that it is "one of the UK’s leading providers of Employment, Training and IT services. Working in partnership with the Department of Work and Pensions, Jobcentre Plus, the Learning and Skills Council. employers and partners we are passionate about moving people into sustainable employment, increasing skills and changing lives for the better." )