Hope Springs Eternal

On Tuesday this week the government announced the figures for their flagship work programme designed to reward contractors if they find jobs for the long-term unemployed. You may recall that this topic was discussed at some length a couple of weeks ago when former A4E boss Emma Harrison continually told Channel 4 news that the figures they had "were wrong." 

Well of course it turns out that they were spot on with no contractor achieving the government's minimum of 5.5% of those referred obtaining employment. In fact the average achieved of 3.5% is actually less than if people hadn't been referred to the programme at all. So much for the huge success of Payment by Results then, particularly as it's being hailed as the government's answer to tackling high reconviction rates within the criminal justice sector. 

So far the scheme has cost £485 million with little obvious benefit. Contractors such as Ingeus achieved only a 3.3% success rate and A4E only 2.8%. Funnily enough Emma Harrison has appeared loathe to comment on these official figures. 

Although a huge embarrassment for government, and you can bet these figures were the subject of many recounts, why on earth should it come as any great surprise? Here we are still in the middle of a worldwide recession, with high levels of unemployment, and these work programme providers are expected to somehow magic jobs out of thin air for some of the most challenging clients imaginable.

It is of course 'mission impossible' at the best of times and certainly requires a great deal of coaching, support, perseverance and dogged determination on the part of staff in order to achieve a change of mindset in many cases. Huge numbers of those referred have been 'languishing' as Ian Duncan Smith put it, on Disability or ESA for years and have now failed the dodgy eligibility tests administered by Atos. Significant numbers would be regarded as unemployable by many without some intensive and expensive interventions which are simply not regarded as economically worthwhile by contractors paid on the present results only basis. 

The most obvious point to make in all this is that in most cases work programme contractors are not doing anything more than that formerly undertaken by Job Centre Plus staff, but at considerable additional cost to the public purse. There will surely come a time when the penny finally drops that the 'work' could be brought back in-house in view of the very poor outcomes, and save all the money being paid over to the likes of A4E. Now there's an idea..... 

             

Nice Work if You Can Get It

The Work Programme is a government flagship policy and can't really be allowed to fail. After all it was only last week that new Justice Secretary Chris Grayling was citing the fantastic success of the payment by results scheme as reason for rolling it out as fast as possible across the whole criminal justice sector. 

Unfortunately for him and the government though, Channel 4 News have got wind of the fact that it isn't working. It would appear that A4E have come no where near their minimum target of a 5.5% success rate in getting people into work on the programme. In fact it seems that, despite being paid handsomely with taxpayers money, they actually did worse than if people were just left to their own devices in order to find their own job. 

In what can only be described as a disastrous interview on Channel 4 News last Wednesday, former managing director Emma Harrison could only repeat endlessly that 'the figures are wrong' without being able to quote any correct ones. 

She was clearly unprepared for the interview and I can only assume that the current management team must have been collectively hiding behind the sofa, hoping it was all a bad dream. In what was a public relations nightmare, as majority shareholder, it turns out that she has rewarded herself a further £250,000 dividend payment since stepping down.  

Now there is a very well-known saying that 'bad figures always take longer to add up' so I think it can be safely assumed that much midnight oil is being burnt at DWP HQ in order to put as much positive spin as possible on some very crap numbers due for release shortly.           

Shit Happens

Continuing my theme of what the possible consequences might be for the probation service if large chunks of it were privatised, my attention has been drawn to another piece of investigative journalism by the BBC.

As a result of a Freedom of Information request to the Care Quality Commission by the Inside Out team, it transpires that 217 companies supplying care staff in peoples homes have failed to carry out any CRB checks on staff. They also failed to check if any of these employees had been disqualified by relevant professional bodies and therefore were not deemed as 'suitably qualified' as required by the relevant legislation. 

The CQC also found examples of employees that had criminal convictions, but were working unsupervised and without having been risk-assessed. Apparently Care Minister Mr Lamb described the findings as "deeply disturbing" and said that care providers "obviously" needed to be held to account by the Care Quality Commission. But he stressed individual failings did not mean "the whole system has failed." He went on "Inevitably, in all walks of life, sometimes things go wrong."  

Now I absolutely love that last bit! Things do indeed go wrong sometimes and in our line of work people can get seriously injured or killed as a result. I do hope the responsible minister can think of something rather more nuanced to say than 'shit happens' when private contractors are supervising high risk probation cases and it goes horribly wrong. Believe me, the resulting media storm is simply unremitting and unforgiving, so it's to be hoped that any private contractors are well prepared for the inevitable negative publicity.  

On a slightly different tack, I was bemused to see Emma Harrison of A4E giving an in-depth interview at the weekend in the Sunday Times. It would seem that she feels to have been unfairly treated by politicians and the media and is still smarting from the experience of being forced to resign. She just doesn't seem to understand that the public are not going to take kindly to her living the high life courtesy of huge government contracts, trousering dividends of £8.5million in one year, and all as allegations of fraud filter to the surface by her staff. But then shit happens, doesn't it? 

The Penny Drops

I didn't want to let this story about A4e from last week on Channel 4 news pass without comment. As we all know A4e, run by the Prime Minister's former muti-millionaire friend Emma Harrison, is the governments largest provider of the Work Programme. Designed to get the long term unemployed off benefits and into work, the idea is that success, as measured by 13 weeks employment, is rewarded by considerable payments to the Contractor.

In dealing with this challenging group, many of whom are former or current clients of the Probation Service, it should come as no surprise that it would prove so difficult a task, especially in a period of economic decline, that resort should be made to 'massaging' the figures. In a sense this was always going to be the outcome if payment was going to be on a 'payment by results' basis because many of these people are almost unemployable without some considerable, and very expensive assistance. 

Since A4e was 'rumbled' in relation to cooking the books, I think it's reasonable to assume that practices have changed and hence Channel 4 has managed to glean that only 3.5% of clients have met the 13 week criteria for substantial payments to be made. This is nowhere near the governments minimum target of 5.5%, but is probably an accurate reflection of the huge task involved, rather than the former misguided and falsley optimistic hyperbole.

So what is to be done about this embarrassing situation? My guess is that A4e will simply be tempted to give up on chasing the ever-elusive higher payments, adjust their staffing levels and simply carry on accepting the basic £300 per head which they receive for every one of the 115,000 referrals from the DWP. In effect there will be every incentive to do very little in the face of a seemingly impossible situation. The only trouble with this is that it raises the very obvious question that £300 of taxpayers money per head could be saved if they wern't referred at all and something else was tried.            

Real Change or Smoke and Mirrors?

Emma Harrison CBE is just the sort of person that really irritates me. Always smiling, utterly self-confident with boundless ambition, enthusiasm and energy, she seems to fit perfectly the profile of the 'oustanding self starter' required by those equally irritating job adverts in the quality Sunday papers. She has risen from engineer in a Sheffield steel works to multi-millionaire owner of A4E (Action for Employment) with nothing short of world domination in her sights. She and her company benefitted enormously from Labour government contracts and counted David Blunket as an adviser. But that was then and unbridled ambition means that she can now claim David Cameron no less as a close ally.

As a passionate entrepreneur, no doubt she has been working assiduously behind the scenes lobbying the new Prime Minister into giving her the opportunity to prove that her seemingly unique philosophy will work with some of the most challenging families in Britain. On Friday it paid off as the Prime Minister announced the launch of a new initiative 'Working Families Everywhere' as part of a major speech on support for relationships and families.

According to David Cameron, "We have known for ages that a relatively small number of troubled families are responsible for a large proportion of the problems in our society." I don't think probation officers would demur from this and certainly Inspector Gadjet regularly highlights this group. He went on to say that just 46,000 families in the UK with little or no history of employment are estimated to cost the state a staggering £4 billion per year in benefits and services such as social workers, police time and YOI places. He wants the new initiative spearheaded by Ms Harrison and her company to focus attention on 500 such families and offer them tailored support. The website states:-


"Now, under this programme, every troubled family will have their own champion able to use every existing resource to help them get going, face up to and sort out their problems, whether they be parenting challenges, poor health, debt, addiction, dependency or lack of motivation. Most importantly, it will involve helping people into meaningful employment to help create happy, working families with a new sense of purpose and an active role in society."

Interestingly on her website she talks about helping 100,000 'never-worked' families, but is making a start with a modest 6 that will be carefully chosen and exposed to media attention. Do I sense a bit of self-publicity here in the form of another Ch 4 tv documentary? Whatever, she does have a business to run as well as changing the world.

I guess I might sound a touch cynical or negative about the whole thing. After all as professionals haven't we struggled for years trying to help this same group? This is just the sort of pioneering, experimental, non-bureaucratic, potentially life-changing stuff that I've always wanted to hear in order to prove to the Daily Mail and Inspector Gadjet that people can change if given some positive attention. But the trouble is I've also got this nagging doubt that the whole thing just might be more 'smoke and mirrors' so loved by Tony Blair and his ilk. Exactly how many families are going to be funded? There's no mention of helping re-house people away from sink estates. Or help with kids excluded from school. I hear on Ch 4 News that the Sure Start budget is not ring fenced at all and will be 'discretionary' spending by Local Authorities. If that is true, it's a direct contradiction of what David Cameron said on Friday:-


"That’s why we are not only protecting funding for Sure Start children’s centres, but increasing their focus on the neediest families."

I really do wish I could believe what politicians tell us, but the track record isn't good and I guess we're all a bit 'edgy' at the moment.