BENEFIT BUSTERS
First thing yesterday morning I was celebrating the demise of one 'reality TV' programme only to watch another again last night. It is a series about a company called A4e, owned by Emma Harrison, which offers the long term unemployed training for work. Anna Raccoon has an excellent post all about A4e and it is well worth a read. Also read Burning Your Money's post which she recommends.
This week we were introduced to two young men - one with a criminal conviction and the other who openly admitted his mother had lived off benefits during his upbringing. He wanted a full-time job too and anything less wasn't good enough. The first young man lasted over a week at his landscaping job (I suspect that was a success in A4e's book) and the second refused to attend an interview as the work was not full time.
Companies like A4e are not new. 'Training' companies have been on the go since the dissolution of the old Industrial Training Boards. My older readers will remember these were organisations set up for training in specific industries and a levy was paid to the relevant Board by associate members. They were a success because they were partly industry funded and therefore the respective industries had a subjective interest.
Back in the 80s, with the ITB's now part of history and many being made redundant from our traditional industries, there were hundreds of these 'training' companies springing up all over the UK and they received funding in a similar manner to A4e - 50% on recruitment and 50% on job placement. Many fell by the wayside because they didn't have the skills (anyone could set up a training company in those days) to manage the programmes required by the then Manpower Services Commission (MSC) and were unable to produce the work placements. The MSC's supervision of these businesses was patchy and I am sure many produced less than satisfactory results but continued to trade and receive government money.
The MSC was then abolished and TECs (Training and Enterprise Councils) introduced but they didn't survive for long and were replaced by the LSC (Learning and Skills Council) but its abolition was announced in 2008 when it was replaced by the SFA (Skills Funding Agency).
Billions of pounds have been pumped into training organisations in the past 25 years but the continual reinvention of the government agency responsible for them ensures no solid, quality training/retraining has taken place because, with every new identity the aims are altered to suit the unemployment market.
Emma Harrison's father survived by retraining redundant steel workers and Emma, with her sound contacts, has continued to acquire many lucrative training contracts. In some ways I admire her success and in others I cringe at the quality of training provided.
As Burning Your Money states, the uncomfortable story behind Benefit Busters is the fact the benefits many receive are often far more in excess of any wage the person could wish to earn. It's a perfect example of how our benefit system encourages unemployment in too many cases.
Which politician will put their head above the parapet to ensure today's children don't suffer the same fate at those in this programme?
My thanks to Anna for the subject matter of this post.
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17 comments:
SR - I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it was due to a Training Agency in the late 80s that I and hundreds of others received good,practical training in Fife. However, I have a friend down south who was actually employed by Govt to investigate training agencies and she uncovered the most outrageous frauds.
It's a hard one for politicians to stand up against without media support. It would be spun as someone attacking the poor and needy.
Morning madame,
I saw the tail end of this, or should that be tale end? Anyway, when Emma H was challenged over the 20% of people getting back into work through her £146M turnover company - she couldn't give him an answer, she said she'd think about it and ask if anyone in her company was thinking about it and thanked the interviewer - she said I don't work miracles (words to that effect).
What the fuck - so 80% do not end up getting a job. So why is HM Government paying this woman's company for achieving the square root of fuck all? Oh they're Labour toadies as pointed out in the Anna's link.
What a surprise - socialism my arse - it's a long road and we must have the guts to face the task of travelling down the road.
The woman the week before reminded my of "Pauline" from the League of Gentlemen - classic!
Have a great bank holiday y'all.
Crazy D
Alan, Fife had one of the best training providers in the UK back then and they were very few and far between believe me.
Bums on seats was the main effort from many. Did you notice it still is the same? (When the 'supervisor' reprimanded the chap for leaving early?)
Pauline in League of Gentlemen? Superb!
You have a great bank holiday too Daisy. Up here few seem to recognise them these days.
I've blogged on this subject before and it's pretty clear from last nights programme where the problem lies in getting people from unemployment to work: its the risk and cost involved in changing from one to the other.
If you take on a job you sign off. Then if that job only lasts a week, you have to start a brand new claim, which means you wait for weeks before your claim is approved and you get any money and more crucially, you go back to day one, which means any help* from the DWP you would have had as a long-term unemployed person disappears.
Also, if you do find a minimum wage job, you find that its not £5.73 an hour in your hand, you have to pay tax and NI on that, so its a lot less. On top of that, any other benefits you had are reduced and guess what? Yes, they take weeks to be reinstated.
The fact is that the DWP need to modernise their systems and processes to take away the risk and support people taking extremely short-term jobs.
* I say help, but the reality is unless you fall into specific targetted groups, there is no help from the DWP.
Morning Delphius. You're far more 'qualified' than me about the system and I know you think it should be overhauled too. But why hasn't it been done?
Is it labour are worried they'll lose voters and the tories are worried people will think they're attacking the vulnerable?
I think the benefits system, like the tax system and most other government systems is too complex.
Its also a broken system.
As an ex-engineer, on of the crucial parts of any system is feedback. If you make an input into a system, feedback tells you if the output from that system after you've made a change meets the criteria you wanted to achieve.
What seems to be lacking in government systems is reliable feedback. We get the rhetoric, the plan of what SHOULD happen, changes are made to the system, but feedback is either non-existant, weak, or skewed thanks to government manipulation of statistics.
So for instance as in my case, the rhetoric and plan says that you only get jobseekers for 6 months. So my jobseekers duly disappeared. But, because I keep making new claims because I take a temp job or move house, every time making a new claim, I have never got to the six month point where I get extra help from the DWP in order to get work, like a training course.
Thats because the change to the system says that you lose jobseekers 6 months after paying NI contributions, without an approriate change to the other parts of the system which says you have to be continuously unemployed for 6 months before you get help to retrain or find work.
Thats where the discrepancies lie and where you get people reluctant to move from welfare to work. The aim was clear: stop unconditional jobseekers after 6 months and then switch over to conditional support. The reality is far from that simple or perfect.
I forgot to add: I don't think its a deliberate ploy to keep labour voters, although now with 5 million unemployed eligible to vote, they are a substantial block of people.
To be honest its not easy to say whether the unemployed will vote Labour. The early rhetoric about getting everyone back to work has been matched by poorly implemented plans and systems.
They see it getting harder to get off benefits, while all the time immigrants come in and take the low-paid jobs that with a few tweaks of the system, could be theirs.
So its really hard to say how the unemployed will vote. I suppose the long-termers will avoid change, while those newly-unemployed will vote for it.
Subrosa
Scunnert Nation has a blog today about an article in the Times about Labour planning to cut benefit.
Crisis the housing charity, said that it could mean that people on £65-a-week jobseeker’s allowance losing 20 per cent of their income.
Re training in Fife, a large part of the success was down to the Reverend Dane Sheppard (apologizes if spelling wrong) at Buckhaven.
Many people benefited from a spell "on the god squad" but no fancy offices and brochures for him.
I may be an old cynic, but it appears to me that "presentation" and numbers are what is important now, and not practical useful training.
Should we not scrap these schemes and instead subsidies local plumbers , joiners etc to take on and train apprentices of all ages?
Delphius, thanks so much for your excellent comments. I hope others pick up on them. Nearer the GE we have to bring this to the fore and hammer the government with this.
Aye I read that Dubbie.
It's true about Fife Dubbie but it was a unique setup there.
Didn't he give it up when the government started setting down limited hours and lots of other daft policies? I didn't have anything to do with the system in Scotland but I did hear wonderful reports about Fife.
The old YTS system was bashed a lot but looking back, it did produce apprentices. Of course the problem there again was lack of standards. The good training providers were really good and the others just drifted along doing as little as possible without any worries that they would be sacked.
Then of course that changed to Skillseekers in an attempt to envelop the over 25s but that failed. Since then various 'programmes' have come in and the main people to benefit are the service providers such as A4e.
Seeing what I saw on that programme, they wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes in my day as a training provider.
Then of course in my day qualifications were quality such as City & Guilds and the RSA. NVQs/SVQs dumbed down qualifications. I know employers who were sickened by the quality of them.
Subrosa
I may be wrong, I often am, but my recollection was that it was down to the lack of funding.
Maybe they just did not produce enough fancy brochures, cant have that can we.
My memory's terrible Dubbie, but yes I think it was lack of funding caused by the fact the government changed the goalposts and withdrew funding because the Rev wouldn't conform to new parameters.
Delphius1 - "a broken system".
Spot on - the NHS and too many other creaking public services have to put up with continuous shovelling in of politico-managerial toot, dressed up as "modernisation", and then before we know it - more change again and again and again. No notice taken as to the strain and damage this does to its working parts nor the harm to the achievement of its end purpose. No feedback, no long-term rationale and definitely no listening to those professionals at the sharp end only too aware of how broken the system is.
Double-loop thinking and practice remains an intellectual step too far for public managementerialism. I recall Sir John Harvey-Jones and then Sir Gerry Robinson, on TV, both at the end of their tether over the idiocy within NHS management incapable of planning from input right through to practice outcomes. They refused to take appropriate remedial action by failing to recognise the input and feedback on initial, intermediate and completion data and requirements from the professionals.
I have previously suggested that NHS management look as to how the physiological processes of the body interact and function effectively to sustain healthy outcomes and take a lesson from it's intrinsic 'engineered' structure, feedback and repair systems that sustain life. The human seems to have evolved and worked with remarkable efficiency (twice as efficient as an internal combustion engine I'm informed!) only requiring an average 2500 calories per day to make up the energy losses of the daily grind.
Additional medical maintenance is required from time to time but medicine is all about working out what is wrong with a known system and its processes (feedback/diagnosis) and replacing or altering the component parts to allow adapted or recovered function to continue for as long as is within reason.
NHS management, along with too many other lumbering outfits - like old clapped out useless components - need chucked on the scrapheap and lets start engineering something that will generate success.
I don't think anyone would argue with you Clarinda.
Who would be prepared to do it though? I wish the tories would pick up the baton and run with this, but they prefer the status quo by the sound of it.
I blogged about Dane and Buckhaven back in June - http://wwwthepartysover.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-i-despise-party-politics.html
It doesn't matter what training systems you put in if you have snidey wee no-mark politicians trying to score party political points.
Do you know Allan, I've looked everywhere for that post of yours. I knew I'd read about Fife in the past couple of months and I knew it was possibly on a blog.
I knew it was something about funding which had caused the problem but couldn't remember what.
So it was Henry was it? Dirty.
Such a pity McLeish wasn't shouted down by the locals but there's something about Fife folk and their loyalty to labour.
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