Thanks to a site called TWPSolutions, we have the full list of Community Work Placements providers, after the Financial Times gave us 4 of them.
There are 18 regions. Of these, G4S have 6; Seetec 5; Pertemps and Interserve 2 each; and Learn Direct, Working Links and Rehab one each.
Did A4e put in a bid? It would be very unusual if they didn't, and this must be a major blow for them. All that's left in the pipeline are the Transforming Rehabilitation contracts, and the government wants to get on with them before the election, despite Labour's pleas to postpone the decision.
Wednesday, 30 April 2014
Monday, 28 April 2014
Help to Work - at least for G4S
At last, we know four of the companies which have won the contracts to deliver the inappropriately named "Help to Work" programme. The Financial Times reveals that they are G4S, Seetec, Interserve and Pertemps. Why it hasn't named the other two, I have no idea, but A4e hasn't said anything, and Serco has launched a rescue rights issue, so perhaps they both lost out. The FT says that G4S is the biggest winner. It also says: "It
comes less than three weeks after the British government lifted a ban
on G4S bidding for public sector work and suggests that Whitehall is
taking a favourable view towards one of its largest contractors,
despite insisting that the company remains under close scrutiny."
But hang on a minute. The bidding must have taken place during the time in which that ban was supposed to be in place. And the company was "cleared" just in time for the announcement of its success. Who is the government trying to kid?
The whole "Help to Work" story today has been utterly depressing. This morning, on Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davies had the dubious pleasure of trying to interview the appalling Esther McVey. I bet he didn't want to. When he tried to pose questions to her boss, Iain Duncan Smith, recently he ended up being complained about by ignorant listeners. McVey did the same trick this morning - spouting utter twaddle and not answering questions. The reaction to the new scheme in the media has been predictable. The Guardian and the Independent get it right, while the Express salivates at the prospect of bludgeoning the poor even harder. The BBC interviewed Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA, who said what you would expect since she's paid by the outsourcing companies, and Richard Johnson who used to work for Serco and talked sense.
So let's spell it out. This scheme is largely about IDS's temper at the failure of the Work Programme, which he interprets as the failure of the unemployed. So they must be punished. And it will have the advantage of taking loads of people out of the unemployment figures. They will be sanctioned en masse, or driven into the black economy, or forced onto workfare and so counted as employed.
Newsnight is doing something on the scheme. I don't think I'll watch.
But hang on a minute. The bidding must have taken place during the time in which that ban was supposed to be in place. And the company was "cleared" just in time for the announcement of its success. Who is the government trying to kid?
The whole "Help to Work" story today has been utterly depressing. This morning, on Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davies had the dubious pleasure of trying to interview the appalling Esther McVey. I bet he didn't want to. When he tried to pose questions to her boss, Iain Duncan Smith, recently he ended up being complained about by ignorant listeners. McVey did the same trick this morning - spouting utter twaddle and not answering questions. The reaction to the new scheme in the media has been predictable. The Guardian and the Independent get it right, while the Express salivates at the prospect of bludgeoning the poor even harder. The BBC interviewed Kirsty McHugh of the ERSA, who said what you would expect since she's paid by the outsourcing companies, and Richard Johnson who used to work for Serco and talked sense.
So let's spell it out. This scheme is largely about IDS's temper at the failure of the Work Programme, which he interprets as the failure of the unemployed. So they must be punished. And it will have the advantage of taking loads of people out of the unemployment figures. They will be sanctioned en masse, or driven into the black economy, or forced onto workfare and so counted as employed.
Newsnight is doing something on the scheme. I don't think I'll watch.
Thursday, 24 April 2014
CWP - is it a secret?
Community Work Placements are supposed to start next week. That's the "help" for the long-term unemployed who have been failed by the Work Programme; months of unpaid work "in the community". But there has been no announcement about which companies have won the contracts to organise this. It seems certain that the contracts have been awarded. G4S is advertising dozens of posts to do with CWP on the Indus Delta site. So why are the public not being told?
Could it be that the DWP wants to avoid the inevitable media outburst which would follow an announcement that those lucrative contracts had been given to G4S? After all, this is the company which defrauded the government (which means you and me) of millions over the tagging contracts. It is obvious that the tendering process for CWP was going on while G4S was still supposedly under investigation and suspended from bidding. Yet it was "cleared" just in time to be given another opportunity for oodles of dosh. Perhaps Serco, with a similar record, is also on the gravy train.
Community Work Placements could come to grief not just on the incompetence of its providers, but also on the lack of actual placements. We know that lots of voluntary organisations want nothing to do with it. CWP is a popular concept with the right, but even the commercial sector could find it attracting too much bad publicity for comfort.
We will just have to wait and see. Those of our readers who are referred to the programme will no doubt keep us informed.
Could it be that the DWP wants to avoid the inevitable media outburst which would follow an announcement that those lucrative contracts had been given to G4S? After all, this is the company which defrauded the government (which means you and me) of millions over the tagging contracts. It is obvious that the tendering process for CWP was going on while G4S was still supposedly under investigation and suspended from bidding. Yet it was "cleared" just in time to be given another opportunity for oodles of dosh. Perhaps Serco, with a similar record, is also on the gravy train.
Community Work Placements could come to grief not just on the incompetence of its providers, but also on the lack of actual placements. We know that lots of voluntary organisations want nothing to do with it. CWP is a popular concept with the right, but even the commercial sector could find it attracting too much bad publicity for comfort.
We will just have to wait and see. Those of our readers who are referred to the programme will no doubt keep us informed.
Monday, 21 April 2014
An Easter story with a happy ending
Once upon a time there was a publication called the Mail on Sunday. It pretended to be a newspaper. Its editor hated poor people, and published lots of stories about how they were all too lazy to work and got lots of money for doing nothing. The people who worked at the paper particularly hated food banks because they showed that some people were so poor that they had no food. And the Trussell Trust which ran food banks angered the paper's best friend, a man called Iain Duncan Smith who was Secretary of State; he didn't like anyone who said he was wrong.
So the Mail had an idea. It sent two people called "reporters" to food banks in Nottingham and London to make up lots of stories. One reporter, called Ross Slater, went to the CAB in Nottingham and told lots of lies to get a voucher. He took that to the Trussell Trust food bank and was asked some more questions, so he told more lies. He was given about £40 worth of groceries. When the reporters took their story back to the Mail, the sub-editors added some more lies, such as "no questions asked", and "vouchers for sob stories" and this was published in the paper.
But the Mail had not realised that this particular Sunday was special. It was Easter Sunday. And they had not realised that many people in this country would get angry at the lies. On Twitter lots of real journalists started making up headlines for the Mail of 2,000 years ago, like "Outrage as carpenter feeds 5,000 people with no questions asked". The Mail reporters didn't understand this, but they knew that people were angry. So Ross Slater tweeted, "All food returned to saint Philip church Notts at 0930 plus small donation". (Despite calling himself a journalist he did not understand punctuation.) This did not help, because many people answered him with insults.
Some people had a good idea. They tweeted that if people were angry about the Mail's lies they should give money to the Trussell Trust, and they gave the Trust's JustGiving page. This brought in lots of donations, more than the Trust had ever had in one day, and they were very pleased.
But no one lived happily ever after, because the Mail went on making up stories.
So the Mail had an idea. It sent two people called "reporters" to food banks in Nottingham and London to make up lots of stories. One reporter, called Ross Slater, went to the CAB in Nottingham and told lots of lies to get a voucher. He took that to the Trussell Trust food bank and was asked some more questions, so he told more lies. He was given about £40 worth of groceries. When the reporters took their story back to the Mail, the sub-editors added some more lies, such as "no questions asked", and "vouchers for sob stories" and this was published in the paper.
But the Mail had not realised that this particular Sunday was special. It was Easter Sunday. And they had not realised that many people in this country would get angry at the lies. On Twitter lots of real journalists started making up headlines for the Mail of 2,000 years ago, like "Outrage as carpenter feeds 5,000 people with no questions asked". The Mail reporters didn't understand this, but they knew that people were angry. So Ross Slater tweeted, "All food returned to saint Philip church Notts at 0930 plus small donation". (Despite calling himself a journalist he did not understand punctuation.) This did not help, because many people answered him with insults.
Some people had a good idea. They tweeted that if people were angry about the Mail's lies they should give money to the Trussell Trust, and they gave the Trust's JustGiving page. This brought in lots of donations, more than the Trust had ever had in one day, and they were very pleased.
But no one lived happily ever after, because the Mail went on making up stories.
Friday, 18 April 2014
Religion and the war on the poor
In Easter week it's appropriate that the focus should be on Christianity. David Cameron's Easter message, his declaration that he is a Christian in a Christian country and his mini-sermon, has drawn scornful comments. But most of the journalists who have been cynical about it are atheists, and so while they are right in many respects they miss the point.
Cameron, along with Duncan Smith, is under fire from the leaders of all the mainstream Christian churches. They first wrote to try to draw his attention to the misery which his policies were causing to individual people, real people. IDS's response to his own church's leader was, "He's wrong; I wish he'd talked to me first." There's no way through that insane arrogance. Cameron waffled about having a moral mission. The church leaders have written again. And that's what has brought on the sermon about the big society. Neither he nor IDS ever address what the churches are saying about the real cases of hardship. Is Cameron trying to set himself up as an alternative focus of Christian authority? Is he trying to appease the Tory shires church-goers who loathe gay marriage etc.? Does he really believe what he is saying?
Many have pointed out that there might be another agenda here. The Tories are happily dismantling the welfare state and leaving casualties to be picked up by the charities, many of them church-run. Perhaps they envisage a US-style system where huge, wealthy church charities do the job which the state has hitherto done here. But we don't have huge, wealthy church charities in Britain, and bleating about the "big society" isn't going to create them.
While Cameron hasn't openly declared war on his opponents, Duncan Smith has. He can rely on the likes of Stephen Glover in the Mail to write preposterous nonsense on his behalf, and on councils like that in North Lincolnshire, where they have decided that "residents who smoke and have satellite television" are not eligible for hardship payments if they are hit by the bedroom tax. But IDS's arch enemy is the Trussell Trust, which he accuses of "running a business" and therefore having a vested interest in the proliferation of food banks. That'll go down well with the thousands of volunteers, in Trussell Trust and other food banks, who are giving their time and energy freely to help those in desperate need. An excellent article on the subject appeared this week in an unexpected place - the Economist magazine. I recommend it. It draws attention to the soaring number of sanctions. A similar point is made by the Citizens Advice blog, and it expresses concern that with the new regime of 4-week minimum sanctions duration this is going to get much worse.
Of course, readers of the Daily Mail don't know anything about that. In a baffling article yesterday someone called Matt Chorley, their political editor, ranted about the "welfare state we're in" and, since Mail readers need pictures, included lots of helpful graphics. What's peculiar is that he happily acknowledged that a huge proportion of the bill is the state pension. And pensioners react badly to being told that they're on "welfare" when they've paid in all their working lives on the basis that they would get a pension at the end of it. So this may well come under the heading of "shooting yourself in the foot".
There's some minor news about A4e. Two of its non-executive directors, Sir Hugh Sykes and Steve Boyfield, have stepped down, replace by Neil MacDonald and Sarah Anderson. It's not significant. Non-execs are only supposed to serve for 9 years, and for Sykes and Boyfield that period was up.
So, if you can, have a happy Easter.
Cameron, along with Duncan Smith, is under fire from the leaders of all the mainstream Christian churches. They first wrote to try to draw his attention to the misery which his policies were causing to individual people, real people. IDS's response to his own church's leader was, "He's wrong; I wish he'd talked to me first." There's no way through that insane arrogance. Cameron waffled about having a moral mission. The church leaders have written again. And that's what has brought on the sermon about the big society. Neither he nor IDS ever address what the churches are saying about the real cases of hardship. Is Cameron trying to set himself up as an alternative focus of Christian authority? Is he trying to appease the Tory shires church-goers who loathe gay marriage etc.? Does he really believe what he is saying?
Many have pointed out that there might be another agenda here. The Tories are happily dismantling the welfare state and leaving casualties to be picked up by the charities, many of them church-run. Perhaps they envisage a US-style system where huge, wealthy church charities do the job which the state has hitherto done here. But we don't have huge, wealthy church charities in Britain, and bleating about the "big society" isn't going to create them.
While Cameron hasn't openly declared war on his opponents, Duncan Smith has. He can rely on the likes of Stephen Glover in the Mail to write preposterous nonsense on his behalf, and on councils like that in North Lincolnshire, where they have decided that "residents who smoke and have satellite television" are not eligible for hardship payments if they are hit by the bedroom tax. But IDS's arch enemy is the Trussell Trust, which he accuses of "running a business" and therefore having a vested interest in the proliferation of food banks. That'll go down well with the thousands of volunteers, in Trussell Trust and other food banks, who are giving their time and energy freely to help those in desperate need. An excellent article on the subject appeared this week in an unexpected place - the Economist magazine. I recommend it. It draws attention to the soaring number of sanctions. A similar point is made by the Citizens Advice blog, and it expresses concern that with the new regime of 4-week minimum sanctions duration this is going to get much worse.
Of course, readers of the Daily Mail don't know anything about that. In a baffling article yesterday someone called Matt Chorley, their political editor, ranted about the "welfare state we're in" and, since Mail readers need pictures, included lots of helpful graphics. What's peculiar is that he happily acknowledged that a huge proportion of the bill is the state pension. And pensioners react badly to being told that they're on "welfare" when they've paid in all their working lives on the basis that they would get a pension at the end of it. So this may well come under the heading of "shooting yourself in the foot".
There's some minor news about A4e. Two of its non-executive directors, Sir Hugh Sykes and Steve Boyfield, have stepped down, replace by Neil MacDonald and Sarah Anderson. It's not significant. Non-execs are only supposed to serve for 9 years, and for Sykes and Boyfield that period was up.
So, if you can, have a happy Easter.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
More lies v. truth
You couldn't have a better example today of this government's contempt for the truth, and how the media collude with them.
On the one hand there are two articles, in the Express and the Mail. The very names tell you what's coming - a platform for Iain Duncan Smith to lie about some made-up figures. They are the same article, really. The Mail says: "Half of those caught out by benefits cap are 'spurred to seek work': New figures show the system is working". This is based on an Ipsos Mori poll of "more than 1,600 capped households" showed that 28% did more to find work. Pretty thin, you might say. Even thinner is the finding that 11% of capped households have found work, although you'll have to get your calculator out to work that one out. This gives IDS the excuse to claim that the cap is changing people's behaviour, etc, etc. This is the sort of nonsense which he was rebuked for, but he takes no notice.
The Express's version oozes hatred, as usual, referring to "handouts", "welfare bonanza", "workshy", "creaming off" and on and on, but it's the same lie based on the same dubious figures. Bringing in Jonathan Isaby of the Taxpayers Alliance to parrot the right things hardly enhances the credibility of this rotten propaganda.
So for an antidote we turn to the Guardian, and first to an article by Patrick Wintour. The same Ipsos Mori poll which delights IDS also shows that a third of people affected by the cap have had to cut back on essential items. Just as important are the findings of Citizens Advice. The increased ruthlessness of the sanctions regime is driving people to loan sharks and hindering them from looking for work. They point out that on the Work Programme twice as many people are sanctioned as find work.
And then there's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee. The latest employment figures will show that more people are in work; but in the last 3 months all the increase is down to self-employment. And most of it is down to desperation. Toynbee goes on to look at Help to Work. Since nobody actually calls it that, let's refer to it as workfare. She says: "For once, instead of rushing in, the DWP has done a good control trial on this with 15,000 unemployed. The pilot's results, however, were sneaked out just before Christmas with no press release. That's no surprise when you uncover the findings. First the unemployed were given a 13-week warning period to act as a deterrent, and then 26 weeks of either 'intensive Jobcentre Plus support', or the workfare 'community action programme'. Or they went into the control group with nothing special. Here's what happened: exactly the same number in the control group – 18% – found themselves jobs as those doing the forced community work. Just 1% more found jobs from the group with jobcentre support. In other words, workfare didn't work. Although 68% of the control group were still on unemployment benefits at the end, so were 66% of those who did the community work and 64% of those given jobcentre support."
Help to Work is only two weeks from launch, but there hasn't even been an announcement of the contractors, and Toynbee couldn't get an answer out of the DWP. She concludes that the only reason for going ahead with this is that it takes people out of the unemployment figures for 6 months. " Incidently," she says, "these sad long-term cases will do more than twice the maximum any court can sentence a thief to on Community Payback. To be out of work is now officially morally worse than committing a crime."
On the one hand there are two articles, in the Express and the Mail. The very names tell you what's coming - a platform for Iain Duncan Smith to lie about some made-up figures. They are the same article, really. The Mail says: "Half of those caught out by benefits cap are 'spurred to seek work': New figures show the system is working". This is based on an Ipsos Mori poll of "more than 1,600 capped households" showed that 28% did more to find work. Pretty thin, you might say. Even thinner is the finding that 11% of capped households have found work, although you'll have to get your calculator out to work that one out. This gives IDS the excuse to claim that the cap is changing people's behaviour, etc, etc. This is the sort of nonsense which he was rebuked for, but he takes no notice.
The Express's version oozes hatred, as usual, referring to "handouts", "welfare bonanza", "workshy", "creaming off" and on and on, but it's the same lie based on the same dubious figures. Bringing in Jonathan Isaby of the Taxpayers Alliance to parrot the right things hardly enhances the credibility of this rotten propaganda.
So for an antidote we turn to the Guardian, and first to an article by Patrick Wintour. The same Ipsos Mori poll which delights IDS also shows that a third of people affected by the cap have had to cut back on essential items. Just as important are the findings of Citizens Advice. The increased ruthlessness of the sanctions regime is driving people to loan sharks and hindering them from looking for work. They point out that on the Work Programme twice as many people are sanctioned as find work.
And then there's an excellent article by Polly Toynbee. The latest employment figures will show that more people are in work; but in the last 3 months all the increase is down to self-employment. And most of it is down to desperation. Toynbee goes on to look at Help to Work. Since nobody actually calls it that, let's refer to it as workfare. She says: "For once, instead of rushing in, the DWP has done a good control trial on this with 15,000 unemployed. The pilot's results, however, were sneaked out just before Christmas with no press release. That's no surprise when you uncover the findings. First the unemployed were given a 13-week warning period to act as a deterrent, and then 26 weeks of either 'intensive Jobcentre Plus support', or the workfare 'community action programme'. Or they went into the control group with nothing special. Here's what happened: exactly the same number in the control group – 18% – found themselves jobs as those doing the forced community work. Just 1% more found jobs from the group with jobcentre support. In other words, workfare didn't work. Although 68% of the control group were still on unemployment benefits at the end, so were 66% of those who did the community work and 64% of those given jobcentre support."
Help to Work is only two weeks from launch, but there hasn't even been an announcement of the contractors, and Toynbee couldn't get an answer out of the DWP. She concludes that the only reason for going ahead with this is that it takes people out of the unemployment figures for 6 months. " Incidently," she says, "these sad long-term cases will do more than twice the maximum any court can sentence a thief to on Community Payback. To be out of work is now officially morally worse than committing a crime."
Thursday, 10 April 2014
G4S "cleared"
The news slipped through. The Telegraph reported it briefly, the BBC website more fully. But, apart from Paul Lewis on Twitter, no one else has noticed, or thinks it's important. G4S can again bid for government contracts. Yes, after bodging contracts and then, along with Serco, defrauding the government over the tagging contract to the tune of £109m, the company was temporarily barred from bidding for its slice of public money. But now, "The Cabinet Office said G4S had taken steps to address weakness in its operations and its 'corporate renewal plan represented the right direction of travel to meet our expectations as a customer'." And this comes while the Serious Fraud Office is still investigating. So keen is the government to get G4S back into the fold that they are not even waiting for the outcome of that.
What's the urgency? Well, there were those prisons which Grayling wanted to privatise but couldn't because Serco and G4S, the only bidders, had been banished. And there are more contracts coming up. We still haven't heard who the providers are to be for Community Work Placements. And another nice little earner is up for grabs, barely noticed. This is the Health and Work Service (HWS), contracts to "intervene" in the lives of people who are off work sick and get them back to work. Read about it here. It won't be payment by results, and it needs the consent of employees. One can expect the usual suspects, including A4e and, of course, G4S, to be bidding.
It makes no sense at all to people outside the weird world of government procurement and outsourcing that providers which have failed to deliver and have ripped you off should be welcome to bid again. The Public Accounts Committee was astonished that previous performance couldn't be taken into account.
What's the urgency? Well, there were those prisons which Grayling wanted to privatise but couldn't because Serco and G4S, the only bidders, had been banished. And there are more contracts coming up. We still haven't heard who the providers are to be for Community Work Placements. And another nice little earner is up for grabs, barely noticed. This is the Health and Work Service (HWS), contracts to "intervene" in the lives of people who are off work sick and get them back to work. Read about it here. It won't be payment by results, and it needs the consent of employees. One can expect the usual suspects, including A4e and, of course, G4S, to be bidding.
It makes no sense at all to people outside the weird world of government procurement and outsourcing that providers which have failed to deliver and have ripped you off should be welcome to bid again. The Public Accounts Committee was astonished that previous performance couldn't be taken into account.
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