Cuts: in fact, fantastic!

That's the title of a Guardian piece in which Patrick Butler takes a swipe at a press release by A4e's Emma Harrison. He quotes the press release in full. It's the usual stuff but with a paragraph we haven't seen before:

'Perhaps the only person who is positive about spending cuts is the head of Britain's biggest employment agency A4e. "The coalition government's cuts are, in fact, fantastic!" says Emma Harrison. "Cutting benefits will put a stop to people making a profession out of being unemployed. The Government is looking to put more effort into helping people get back to work which is the most important thing." A4e controls 25% of the long-term unemployment budget for the Department of Work and Pensions. "There are about 450,000 jobs currently being advertised with the JobCentre so there are jobs out there," insists Mrs Harrison.'

Butler contacted A4e's PR advisers, Hillgrove PR, and asked if the release wasn't a bit insensitive, but they said that they couldn't speak for her.

I think she's gone a bit too far this time.

Work Programme Prospectus

The DWP has issued a prospectus setting out more details of the Work Programme. It can be found here.

Interesting points:

• Those over 25 on JSA will still not be referred until they've been unemployed for 12 months. So they will lose 10% of their housing benefit at the same time as going on the programme!
• There is a beefed-up role for the Jobcentres, including running "work clubs" and getting people to do voluntary work.
• "We will refer customers to the Work Programme contracts for a 5 year period. Providers will then work with customers for up to a further 2 years."
• 40 contracts at £10 - 50 million each.
• The claim that there would be payment only for outcomes was untrue. There's to be an "attachment fee ..... to assist with initial delivery costs." Sounds a bit like on-programme payments. Presumably the providers insisted on this.
• "Substantial" performance incentive payments for providers.

There's information about the basis for awarding contracts and price competition. The whole document is well worth studying.

PS. The Financial Times has questioned Chris Grayling about the "attachment fees". He "insisted that the payments, understood to be in the low hundreds of pounds per client, would be paid only as people are taken on, not as a block payment in anticipation of the numbers likely to join the programme as happened under the existing Flexible New Deal scheme. Most recently, contractors have received 20-30 per cent of payments in advance." He goes on, “It is a recognition that in the early years, providers do have cash flow problems, and this is designed to make a contribution but one that will be phased out, becoming completely outcome-based payments, made in arrears, over the life of the contracts,” Mr Grayling said. He continued: “We never said the upfront payment would be zero – just as little as possible. But we will get to zero over the life of the contracts.”

ERSS Framework

The DWP has issued the list or organisations that have been selected as preferred suppliers for the Employment Related Support Services Framework. There are 11 "lots" or different areas of the country, and A4e is included in 7 of them. But there are between 9 and 17 organisations selected in each area. You can find the full list here. There's a useful description of what it all means on the Navca site. The DWP says that, "The Work Programme will be the first contract to be called off the Framework and the procurement exercise for this will commence shortly." It looks very much like contracts have been shared out amongst the main established companies; Serco, JHP, Working Links, Seetec and Reed all have 7, and Avanta has 6.

£60,000 fine for A4e

A4e has been fined £60,000 for the loss last year of an unencrypted laptop with the details of thousands of people. The data breach occurred when an employee took details of 24,000 clients of the Hull and Leicester Community Legal Advice Centres home to work on. An unsuccessful attempt to access the data was made shortly afterwards. The story on the BBC news site quotes Christopher Graham, the Commissioner for Data Protection, saying, "A4e did not take reasonable steps to avoid the loss of the data when it issued the employee with an unencrypted laptop, despite knowing the amount and type of data that would be on it. It warranted nothing less than a monetary penalty as thousands of people's privacy was potentially compromised by the company's failure to take the simple step of encrypting the data." Hertfordshire County Council was also fined £100,000 for a more serious loss of data.

..... and another TV appearance

Emma Harrison popped up again on the northern regional segment of BBC1's The Politics Show today. It was one of those pointless bits of superficial discussion, sparked by a report from Sheffield Hallam University which says that the problem for the North of England is that there aren't any jobs to push people into. A reporter went to Barnsley and looked at a job search scheme in a community project; but the Council leader said there was an urgent need for job creation schemes because the private sector couldn't fill the gap.

The interviewer, Tim Iredale, was joined by Karl Turner (a Hull MP) in the studio and Emma Harrison "from her kitchen". What did Emma make of the report? It shocked her, she said. A4e are finding jobs for people in Barnsley every day. But we must make sure that it pays to take a job. We have third generation unemployment. Turner stressed that jobs are being cut. Harrison was asked whether she was seeing evidence of new private sector jobs. Oh yes, they're finding people jobs every day. The new system will allow people to take part-time jobs. We shouldn't scare people with big numbers (!!!). The job cuts will be gradual. Turner said that Labour's schemes had put lots of people back to work. (At this point one knew that there was no chance of any of this being challenged by the interviewer.) Iredale asked Harrison how to break the culture of worklessness. This gave her the opportunity to push the idea of working with whole families.

All that was achieved was yet more publicity for Emma Harrison and A4e.

Another "interview"

The Mail online is the latest propaganda sheet to give free PR space to Emma Harrison and A4e. In a long piece today we get something described as an interview but which is merely a vehicle for Harrison to repeat the myths. You won't find anything about the lousy figures for FND. This is sycophancy. "This year, the company will help nearly 20,000 people into work. Her business plan, something she laughingly admits owes more to aspiration than number crunching, predicts a turnover of £500 million by 2014." But then we can see how A4e adapts (or, at least, adapts what it says) to the politics of the moment. "Harrison says she frequently spurns approaches from the City to float or sell the company. Instead, she has rekindled a plan to change the structure into a mutualised trust whereby she can give shares to the staff. In the longer term, she aims to give equity to the unemployed people that A4e helps."

When you've digested that idea, you might be a bit bemused by the statement that "Harrison is trying to persuade the Government to pay according to the long-term outcome for the unemployed rather than buying hours in the classroom or working on CVs, regardless of whether that is actually needed or achieves a result." Why did the interviewer, someone called Lisa Buckingham, not challenge that? Presumably because she didn't know anything about the subject; the ideal qualification for anyone interviewing Mrs Harrison. There's the latest mantra about "hidden jobs", the story that A4e can persuade employers to provide jobs they haven't realised they had. And she gives figures which are entirely at odds with those produced by the DWP. She says, "it costs an average of £1,700 to get someone back to work". Oh yes? But she's plugging this chilling idea of working with "families’ whole lives rather than just work." The interviewer says, "Such improvements include getting a job, ensuring that children go to school and encouraging charity work. Companies such as Harrison’s would be paid part of the overall savings."

To show that the paper isn't entirely uncritical there's the statement that, "Harrison hasn’t escaped controversy. There were fraud allegations against a few staff a couple of years ago and the role of David Blunkett, Sheffield MP, as an occasional adviser prompted criticism." That's it. While some of you may be hopping up and down with fury, most of the Mail's readers will nod approvingly at the final statement that " These families need an Emma."

Those figures

The DWP has released the figures for Flexible New Deal outcomes; you can download them from their site here. They are not immediately understandable, since all you get is the starts and outcomes for each month and, of course, the outcomes don't relate to the starts. What you can see straight away is how bad the figures are, and that A4e has performed comparably with the others.

There are two articles which interpret these figures in very different ways. One is by Alex Barber in the Financial Times. He asks "What has gone wrong with welfare-to-work?" and includes a graph to show how far below expectation the outcomes are. Barber argues that Grayling's criticism of the Labour government is misplaced. "Grayling argues it [paying too much money up front] destroyed incentives. But companies were still paid the bulk of their fee for getting someone into work. Not only that, but the Work Programme will also include upfront payments. It will just be called something like an 'activation fee'." And the "help based on individual needs" promised in the Work Programme will be little different from FND.

Another perspective altogether comes from Neil O'Brien in the Telegraph. O'Brien is one of those dangerous young men who provide the theoretical justification for political ideology. With no personal experience or historical insight he assumes the part of an authority on the subject, with selective use of data, and he wants to give more power to the providers to "sanction" people. He includes a table which shows that A4e's performance is slightly better than its competitor in each area. O'Brien has been around the media lately -he was on The Moral Maze last week - touting his view that we should have the time-limited kind of welfare-to-work that exists in some other countries, notably America.

Meanwhile, there's a whole new world of opportunity opening up for A4e. The government have endorsed the idea that groups of public service workers should turn themselves into "mutuals" or co-operatives. The bit they don't mention is that they would then have to bid for the contracts to provide the services. Even if the private companies don't get the contracts first time round, they will soon be picking them off.