Abandoned

The name of Emma Harrison came up in Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons again today, when Labour's Nick Raynsford asked what independent checks were made before her appointment as families champion, and what checks should be made in the future.  The Telegraph tells us that Cameron yesterday "asked the head of the civil service, Jeremy Heywood, to conduct an inquiry into what happened."  But at the time, there was no formal investigation going on.  He was concerned, said Cameron, that information should have been passed up.  It was the "nobody told me" line.  But Labour are in a tricky position, which Cameron exploited, reminding Raynsford that Emma Harrison was given her CBE by Labour, and it was his government which gave A4e all its contracts.  Harrison must feel that she's been completely abandoned by politicians of all stripes.  There could be more trouble for all the big companies, as the Public Services Social Value Bill is about to reach the statute book, requiring councils and other public bodies to take into account wider social value, and not just cost, in awarding contracts.
If you were listening to the radio at lunchtime you may have heard Anne Marie Carrie of Barnardo's breaking the news that the DWP has dropped benefits sanctions from their work experience scheme.  It won't be enough to please everybody.  But there is proof now that the DWP was playing about with evidence against the "voluntary" nature of this scheme.  Channel 4's FactCheck site has tracked the disappearing documents.  And Left Foot Forward provides a timely guide to all those schemes, including the Work Programme, where work experience is still mandatory.

A comment from the past

I've been deleting quite a few comments lately.  But one comment, from September 2009, I didn't either delete or publish; I just saved it.  Now, I think, it's time for it to see the light of day.

I set up a website in 2008.  After a year or so I suddenly found that a pusillanimous web host had bowed to A4e's claim that it was "defamatory" and closed it.  I had no opportunity to find out exactly what was supposed to be defamatory, let alone remove it.  All I could do was retrieve as much material as possible and set up again.
In September 2009 New Deal was turning into Flexible New Deal, and A4e had embarked on a marketing exercise, a road show entitled "Know Hope".  A friend in Hull saw it, and I published a short piece on 24 September.  That same night a comment came through, which I now publish in full:

"This site never fails to amaze with any attempt to try and badmouth the work A4e is doing in any capacity.  The fact is that A4e have campaigned for a new way of working after listening to clients who did not like the system under New Deal.  Flexible New Deal is an entirely new way of working where people are given a personal career coach and a structured plan over twelve months where A4e have the time and resources to assess exactly what their needs are. This has taken years of research and work with the government with the aim on improving services to help the hardest to reach.  The Know Hope Campaign is nationwide and the reason for A4e logos and branding not taking centre stage is that the emphasis is mainly on the client - Their Journey and getting them back into Sustainable Employment.  The majority of people in Hull were really enthusiastic about the changes and the new way of working. A4e are taking feedback on board and trying to make a difference. No company is perfect but A4e staff are all passionate about getting people back into sustainable employment and trying to make a difference.  A4e have tried to communicate with the person who leads this negative site to try and establish exactly what happened to make them launch this incessant tirade against the company.  We help so many people every day and there are so many positive stories that would do so much more good instead of this constant stream of negativity and accusation.  A4e want to aspire to inspire and empower people to leave benefits and improve their own lives. This is not corporate spiel but actually how everyone feels in the organisation and strives to make a difference in an economic climate that is hard to maintain a positive outlook in.  We want people to Know that there is Hope for them. It does not matter if you have barriers to employment - under Flexible New Deal we are here to make a difference.  No doubt this will be interpreted in a different way if it is even posted. But suffice to say A4e are sick of trying to find out exactly what your issue is with us. We have tried communicating and talking sense to no avail.  We genuinely want to help people - can you not find it in your heart to give us a break and see the good we can do?"

I was gobsmacked by the sheer mendacity of this.  They had never "tried to communicate", unless getting a website closed was communication.  They had never tried to find out anything.  How could they?  So what was the point of this comment?  Did they really expect me to publish it?  Probably not, but maybe they hoped it would slip through.  And who were "they", anyway?
Ah well, time moves on.

Right-wing backlash

The media coverage today has been interesting.

• The Mail began it with another attack on the Harrisons' finances.  After bashing away at the relatively minor point that the DWP knew about the fraud investigation when Cameron appointed Harrison as his "families champion", they tell us that, "Mrs Harrison, 48, and her husband Jim, 52, are joint sole directors of two businesses, Andromeda Park Ltd and Thornbridge Ltd. ........ These are used to manage their investments......... The companies owe the couple a total of £9.3m."  Once again, this is old news.  On 13 April 2011 we published this, unashamedly pinching it from Private Eye.  The Harrisons deny that they have received £9.3m through these companies.
• The Guardian has run several pieces which seek to widen the argument.  One by Pollyanna Perkins is headed "Private sector isn't always best".  She writes: "At a time when we are counting every pound and limiting access to services it is particularly galling to see public money – £478m – being misspent by one obviously untroubled family.  But we in the public sector have to wake up and stand up to this kind of development and be assertive in our condemnation of such approaches. The new troubled families initiative led by the then families tsar is a classic example.  Horrified as I was by the outline proposals, I was surprised by people welcoming this approach, muddling it up with the very valuable 'Think Family' work being done in mental health and other adults and children's teams."   Another, more general article by Patrick Butler targets the Work Programme specifically.  He speaks to an "industry insider" who would have preferred to see A4e's millions going to a social enterprise which reinvests its profits.  Butler says, "A4e is notorious for its now threadbare pretentions to being a 'social purpose' company. It proclaims to have one sole aim: 'To improve people's lives.'  Well, show me a business that claims otherwise."  He has a quote from another work programme executive about the way it works: " It's not about supporting 100 customers. It's about getting 50 of them into a job. The other 50 are collateral damage. At the end of the day, they [ministers] don't care about that other 50. It's an outcome contract, not a service contract."  Butler also points us to a bill being presented tomorrow by Conservative MP Chris White.  "In theory, he says, this "will mean contracts cannot be let on price alone, but must take account of wider social benefit. White believes it will put a brake on what he has called the 'supermarketisation' of public services and create a level playing field for charities and social enterprises." 
• But it was inevitable that there would be a right-wing backlash, and it comes in the shape of Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.  A4e, he says, "is a company that matches unemployed British workers with jobs, and has grown by being able to do so far better than government agencies. Coaching and training the unemployed are costly, but nowhere near as expensive as keeping them on the dole. Labour found that every pound spent with welfare-to-work companies saved the taxpayer three times as much. Soon, A4e was being given multi-million-pound contracts, and growing at what was probably too fast a rate. It was only a matter of time before something, somewhere, went wrong."  Note the highlighted statements.  Rubbish, untrue, unverified, as always with such statements.  And he goes on to castigate Margaret Hodge because a) she's rich and b) it was her government which got us into this.  He says, "What matters now is ideology, and beating up a government that seems comically unable to fight back (as the pantomime over the NHS Bill shows). The battle that Mrs Hodge is fighting is one the Left considered lost only 10 years ago: to make 'profit' a dirty word again and see the companies expelled."  Well, Nelson is one of those all-purpose right-wing journalists who needn't bother actually to know anything about his subject.  But at least we're having a debate.
  

At last, Newsnight - but nothing new

Well, the BBC finally got round to reporting on the A4e story, on Newsnight tonight.  But it was half-hearted, just pulling together what everybody else has reported - including using the whistle-blower Catherine who made the front page of the Independent.  She told her story briefly; and A4e had had time to come up with a refutation.  She was not told to work for one week without telling the Jobcentre, they say.  It was only one day, an unpaid trial which doesn't have to be notified to the Jobcentre.  This is what tends to happen.  A whistle-blower got it wrong / is not telling the truth / misunderstood what was said.  And what can Catherine do about that?  Margaret Hodge said that she had received an "astonishing" number of allegations and wants A4e's contracts to be suspended.  Paul Mason, who had started by describing the "pally" history between A4e and government, ended with a mention of the employment of David Blunkett and Jonty Oliff-Cooper.  So nothing new.  But the BBC may now feel that it's done its bit.

Catching up

Through the day it seems that Liam Byrne's intervention has paid off, in that it has forced an admission from the DWP, according to the Telegraph, that "No. 10 was not told about A4e fraud allegations".  A spokesman for the PM is quoted as saying, “I don’t think we were aware. But it’s a police investigation. If the police are investigating private sector companies, I don’t think necessarily they report regularly to the government on how their investigations are going.”

Richard Kay in the Mail asks, "Is David Cameron’s former ‘back-to-work tsar’ Emma Harrison already plotting her return?"  He tells us that Emma Harrison "has been approached by maintenance firm Aspect.co.uk to advise on a boot camp for jobless youths. Boss Nick Bizley says he is fed up with a deluge of job applications from foreigners but very few from young British candidates, and wants to change attitudes towards work."  Sadly, I can find nothing more on this.  
The most interesting article of the day is by John Harris in the Guardian.  It's always gratifying when the press catches up with what we've been going on about for ages.  He says that Emma Harrison's biggest mistake was "not keeping her head down".  He points out that she is not facing any reduction in her income and "may well be in line for a rather nice future: less heat and less work, but potentially even greater takings".  Then Harris contrasts Harrison's high profile with that of Chris Hyman, CEO of Serco, a company which has much more outsourcing business than A4e.  And he makes the leap which nobody on the supposed left of politics (certainly not Liam Byrne) has yet been willing to make.  "For decades now, the introduction of the profit motive into public services has been held to be synonymous with dynamism, innovation and increased responsiveness to the 'customer'. There is, of course, plenty of evidence to the contrary, but the more zealous minds one associates with the rule of New Labour still believe it, and most Conservatives hold it as an article of faith."  Quite.  And he concludes: "Do not rely on senior figures in the Labour party to make the running on this issue: after all, it built a huge share of the shadow state in which these people make their money. There again, if the progress of the Emma Harrison story – as with the recent controversy about workfare – is anything to go by, these things no longer need the involvement of front-rank politicians to build unstoppable momentum. One thing is certain: though long buried, the tension between public services and profit is back – and this story is only just starting."
I'm currently reading a book called The Verdict by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, summing up the Labour years from 1997 to 2010 from a Labour-supporting but critical point of view.  They manage to cover New Deal and the various measures to help the unemployed while totally ignoring the privatisation in 2006.  John Harris is right.  But I fear it may be too late.

Questions

Inevitably the publicity has died down.  Liam Byrne has sought to revive it - he's Labour's shadow Work and Pensions Secretary - by claiming that Cameron and the government knew about the fraud investigations at least 10 days before Emma Harrison was appointed, in a blaze of publicity, as Cameron's "families champion".  The Independent reports this, along with Margaret Hodge's plans to submit a dossier of whistle-blowers' allegations to the DWP.  They get a statement out of the DWP:  "We have been clear that if there is any evidence of systematic fraud at A4E... we will terminate existing contracts. We welcome A4E's decision to have a full independent audit. These cases all relate to previous back-to-work schemes. None of these apply to the Work Programme."  So define "systematic".  But Liam Byrne is on sticky ground rather than the moral high ground, and he knows it.  A4e's rise and rise was down to his government.
The Telegraph has the same story, but it also reports A4e's response to the "claims that its staff stole vouchers intended to help the unemployed buy clothes to prepare for job interviews."  A4e says that it's the company which buys these vouchers.  "'It’s our profit margin that is affected by buying them, not the taxpayer.' He said that A4e was not aware of the alleged thefts and had any such action come to light a “robust” internal investigation would have been carried out."  This is a remarkable example of not getting the point. 
If you didn't read newspapers or the internet, and depended entirely on the BBC for your knowledge of what was going on, you'd still be largely ignorant of the A4e story.  The Mail drew attention to this reticence on the part of the BBC, which ignored the growing chorus in the press following the meeting of the Public Accounts Committee and didn't mention the company until the news broke that four employees had been arrested.  Since then the coverage has been minimal.  They have had to report Harrison's resignation as "families champion" and then as chair of A4e, but with hardly any background.  The Daily Politics, which had Harrison as their guest of the day only a few days before, seems to have taken a vow of silence on the subject.  Newsnight mentioned it, but with a tinge of sympathy for Harrison and little background.  So why has the BBC been so reluctant to report this?  One of our correspondents suggests that it's because Chris Grayling used to work for the BBC.  How very cynical!  It's been obvious for the last few years that while Emma Harrison popped up on all sorts of BBC programmes, from The Moral Maze to Masterchef, there was a remarkable ignorance in the Corporation about her company.  We need some sort of explanation.

Where do we go from here?

Whether this weekend is the last fling for the media in A4e-bashing, or the start of a wider debate, we can't tell.  It's certainly still very uncomfortable for Emma Harrison and the company she still mostly owns.
The Observer returns to the amount of money Harrison has been taking out of the company.  "The couple were paid £316,000 for allowing A4e to use their country home for board meetings and other events. Emma and James Harrison were paid another £1.4m for leasing out two other properties to Emma Harrison's own firm, including its Sheffield headquarters.  The payments were in addition to Emma Harrison's £365,000 annual salary and the payment of an £8.6m shares dividend, bringing the total earnings of the Harrisons, who share their 20-bedroom home, Thornbridge Hall in Derbyshire, with 11 friends, to some £11m between 2009 and 2011."  The article also reveals something we hadn't realised; that the DWP "has exempted private companies in the Work Programme from inspections by Ofsted, the standards body that previously inspected companies involved in welfare and training."  Was that part of the price for getting the companies involved?  A4e's Ofsted reports had never been better than "satisfactory".
The Express picks up the Observer's story about the money, including the fact that it was paid into two companies and a pension fund.  They have a statement from the Harrisons, insisting on the legality and transparency of their arrangements and threatening "appropriate legal action if claims to the contrary are made."  
The Mail has a story of a new "fraud probe" in the Thames Valley.  The allegations concern the misuse of vouchers by A4e staff.  The vouchers, worth between £10 and £50, are redeemable at various retailers and are meant to provide things like new clothes for claimants going for interview.  According to a police source: "There are suggestions that some were given out as bonuses for getting unemployed clients into jobs and there are suspicions that some members of staff may have helped themselves to the vouchers without consent."  They also suggest that this was happening on a very large scale.  The Mail also manages to get the inside story on one of the four people originally arrested, and they have a whistle-blower who talks of the immense pressure staff were put under by management to get results at any cost.  Since one of the arrested staff got £50 for a job outcome, the pressures are obvious.
The Independent is the only paper to put the A4e story on the front page.  Whistle-blowers have been much in demand by the media, and the Indy has one with unusually recent experience.  25-year-old Catherine Verwaerde's story should be read carefully.  A4e got her an interview with a sales company, and it was A4e which told her that she'd got the job.  That could sound like A4e being admirably pro-active.  But Catherine was told that the pay was £7,000 plus commission.  As with any job, but particularly with a situation like this, she was entitled to see written terms and conditions.  But A4e told Catherine that this was not how business worked and  "I would look awkward if I asked for information in writing."  She had been offered a job, so would be sanctioned (deprived of her income) if she didn't take it.  But - she could try it without telling the Jobcentre!  As with so many stories about A4e, it's hard to know whether we're looking at fraud or just incompetence.  The article also has the story of 58-year-old Ram from Edinburgh.  He was wrongly deprived of two weeks' benefit by A4e when they falsely claimed that he had failed to attend an appointment.  His formal complaint has been successful.
In another article, the Observer uses the A4e saga to question the political consensus which has driven the privatisation of public services, in health and education as well as in welfare-to-work, and which has concentrated the work and the money in a few large companies.  This is the debate that is vitally important now.  The ideology which asserts, without evidence, that private profit is best guarantee of efficient services should now be rigorously examined and vociferously challenged.