09/04/15
I must, first of all, acknowledge the work of Thomas G Clark of the "Another Angry Voice" blog and Mike Sivier of the "Vox Political" blog, both of which have provided the majority of the facts and figures in today's letter.
Dear Claire,
I bet you’re secretly waiting for me to start writing about everybody’s favourite Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the haughtily dislikeable, hubristic, untruthful, arrogant, and deeply despicable Iain Duncan Smith!
Well, I promise that we’ll start on him very soon, but before we work our way round to that particularly unpleasant side of the current coalition cabinet, I’d like to talk about the Tory employment minister, Mark Hoban.
I must, first of all, acknowledge the work of Thomas G Clark of the "Another Angry Voice" blog and Mike Sivier of the "Vox Political" blog, both of which have provided the majority of the facts and figures in today's letter.
Mark told us: “Unemployed people have taken benefits for granted as a way of life and must ‘Roll up their sleeves and stop gaming the system’”. Gaming the system eh? Like claiming £35 on a toilet roll holder, £100 for a chrome shower rack and £79 for 4 silk cushion covers, on his second home allowance. Not his first home, his second home. Nice work if you can get it!
Unfortunately for us, Mark has the same battles with the truth as IDS does. It does seem to be a prerequisite for high office within the coalition. Let’s look at some examples:
1 Mark said: 15% of appeals against ATOS work capacity assessments were successful.
WRONG! It’s closer to 40% and above 70% if the appellant has expert legal representation.
2 Mark will not acknowledge that there has been significant cost to the taxpayer (so that’s people like me, but clearly none of your non-doms or industry leaders working the off-shore systems)
WRONG! The figure was £50 million, but I’m guessing that’s risen quite a lot now. Whoever negotiated the contract with ATOS failed to put any financial penalties into the contract for ATOS miscategorising so many people as “fit for work”
3. Mark said: The 18 private sector companies that are signed up to administer the flagship Tory “work” programme (sic) will only make money if they get people into work.
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WRONG! In the first full year of the Work Programme 877,880 people ("clients") were enrolled onto it, yet only 31,240 (3.56%) of them were helped into full, or part time work. In fact not a single one of the 18 Work Programme contractors managed to meet the minimum target of finding work for 5.5% of them. Not only did all 18 of the contractors fail to meet the minimum target, the figure of 3.56% is significantly below the 5% figure expected if the unemployed were left to go through the old fortnightly routine of demonstrating to how they had been seeking work to staff at the Jobcentre. The government's own figures show that to date, the Work Programme has been worse than doing nothing at all!
The cost of this dismal performance may be hard to quantify, as it depends on how long each of the 31,240 ‘clients’ keep their jobs for – it will range from between £40million and £213million, with the upper figure being paid if each ‘client’ hangs on to their job for 2+ years. The media have adopted a figure of £75million, so we’ll stick with that.
The ‘attachment fees’ which are paid every time a person is enrolled on the Work Programme is from £400 to £600. For the first year, this cost £326million - £10,400 spent on attachment fees for every person that actually went on to get a job.
This shows us very clearly that Mark’s statement in point 3 above was very misleading, given that the 18 work programme contractors made more in attachment fees then they would ever have managed to get as results payments!
This “payment before results” makes it look very easy to manipulate the system to the advantage of the contractors involved, and to the detriment of all those “hardworking families” (© D Cameron stupid sound-bites).
What this tells us is that the Work Programme contractors have figured out a way of "gaming the system". They expend as much effort as possible in signing people up to their schemes to collect the unearned £400 - £600 they get for simply submitting the paperwork, and they expend as little effort as possible on finding work for hard-to-place clients such as the disabled, the uneducated or unskilled and those that are approaching retirement age. These suspicions are supported by the accusations that one contractor called Triage actually referred to the policy of neglecting difficult clients as "parking".
What this tells us is that the Work Programme contractors have figured out a way of "gaming the system". They expend as much effort as possible in signing people up to their schemes to collect the unearned £400 - £600 they get for simply submitting the paperwork, and they expend as little effort as possible on finding work for hard-to-place clients such as the disabled, the uneducated or unskilled and those that are approaching retirement age. These suspicions are supported by the accusations that one contractor called Triage actually referred to the policy of neglecting difficult clients as "parking".
The statistics also back up this interpretation that "hard-to-place" clients are simply being parked. Of the 68,000 disabled clients put into the Work Programme, only 1,000 ended up in work, a success rate of just 1.47%.
Given that the majority of Work Programme contractors are profit driven private companies, it makes clear economic sense for them to sign up as many clients as possible in order to collect the easy money "attachment fees", rather than spending a great deal of time and effort finding work for people, in what, thanks to Gideon's failing ideological austerity experiment, is a very difficult employment market. The reason for this is that even if the contractor pulls off a miracle and finds a job for one of their "hard-to-place" clients, there is significant risk that they will quit (for deteriorating health reasons perhaps) or be fired in the first six month period, leaving the company with absolutely no profit to show for all of their efforts.
I know I said I’d finished with Gideon, but I know you’d secretly like to see his name back in the frame for something! Our Mark tries desperately to defend a classic example of a poorly designed government contract which actually encourages contractors to "game the system" in order to minimise risks and maximise profits.
It is stunning to see Mark Hoban, a man who has a track record of making accusations of "gaming the system", tell outright lies to the BBC to cover up the fact that there seems to be an awful lot of contractor "gaming the system" going on in the flagship Tory party Work Programme scheme that he has ministerial responsibility for.
Given that the majority of Work Programme contractors are profit driven private companies, it makes clear economic sense for them to sign up as many clients as possible in order to collect the easy money "attachment fees", rather than spending a great deal of time and effort finding work for people, in what, thanks to Gideon's failing ideological austerity experiment, is a very difficult employment market. The reason for this is that even if the contractor pulls off a miracle and finds a job for one of their "hard-to-place" clients, there is significant risk that they will quit (for deteriorating health reasons perhaps) or be fired in the first six month period, leaving the company with absolutely no profit to show for all of their efforts.
I know I said I’d finished with Gideon, but I know you’d secretly like to see his name back in the frame for something! Our Mark tries desperately to defend a classic example of a poorly designed government contract which actually encourages contractors to "game the system" in order to minimise risks and maximise profits.
It is stunning to see Mark Hoban, a man who has a track record of making accusations of "gaming the system", tell outright lies to the BBC to cover up the fact that there seems to be an awful lot of contractor "gaming the system" going on in the flagship Tory party Work Programme scheme that he has ministerial responsibility for.
But why let the evidence get in the way of a good justification narrative?
We may need another letter about Mr Hoban, but I promise we’ll get on to IDS before ‘ere long!
Kind regards
Polly
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