Category Archives: welfare

Victim’s Code – More Window-Dressing???

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This is an important blog and worth following. If you are either concerned or interested in the issues surrounding the treatment of child abuse survivors it provides a valuable insight. I cannot reveal the identity of the person who is behind it for legal reasons but I can assure anyone following my blog that the person knows what he is talking about.

Second Nature's avatarSupport for Survivors of Childhood Abuse

The Police clearly have a difficult job in investigating allegations of historical abuse.

These people are specialists in this area, and spend much of their time wading through the filth of our society. Their focus is on apprehending criminals, but they are human beings, and generally trying to make the world a better place. The time spent working in this area is limited, mainly due to the huge personal impact on them. Spare a thought for the officers who pursue allegations, aware that there is insufficient support for victims, but who do their utmost to make the best of a bad situation. Like a tanker, they leave a huge wake, and they know this but try to control this as best they can.

The Police do not have access to proper support for victims – and they know this! They understand that this is a force-wide issue, and people within…

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Guilty: The four A4e staff who fiddled the books helping lone parents get back to work

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A4e: Improving People's lives -obviously not for lone parents in this case

A4e: Improving People’s lives -obviously not for lone parents in this case

Remarkably unreported this month (outside one Daily Mail report) is that four of private work provider A4e’s staff who ripped off the taxpayer and lone parents have pleaded guilty to 30 acts of fraud and forgery. 

 I am indebted to FE Week for a report from Reading Crown Court that saw the four admit their crimes and now face sentencing later. It reports:

 “Ex-A4e recruiters Julie Grimes, Aditi Singh, Bindiya Dholiwar and Dean Lloyd, pleaded guilty to more than 30 charges of forgery and fraud when they appeared  at Reading Crown Court  on Monday, February 3.

The case followed a police investigation into financial rewards claimed for helping the unemployed into work through the European Social Fund  ‘Aspire to Inspire’ Lone Parent mentoring programme, which ended in July 2011.

It is alleged that they forged documentation to support fraudulent claims for rewards for work with learners who had not found work or did not exist over a period of four years until February last year.

Grimes, 51, of Staines, admitted nine charges of forgery and Lloyd, 37, of Milton Keynes, admitted 13 offences of forgery.

Dholiwar, 27, of Slough, admitted seven counts of forgery while Singh, 30, of Slough, admitted two counts of forgery and one of fraud. No date was set for set for sentencing.

The magazine reports that the trial of eight other ex-A4e defendants, who pleaded not guilty to all charges at Reading Crown Court, including conspiracy to cheat, is expected to start on October 6.

A further defendant, Nikki Foster, aged 30, of Reading, recruiter, was not at court on Monday. She was due to appear later this month.

The magazine also carries a statement from the chief executive of A4e  who appears to be remarkably complacent that everything is OK in the rest of the company.

Andrew Dutton, A4e chief executive, said: “I am deeply disappointed that a small number of people who formerly worked for A4e on the Aspire to Inspire contract in the Thames Valley up to 2011 clearly let down the people they were supposed to help, and in turn the taxpayer, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and A4e.

“A4e co-operated fully with the police enquiry, after our own internal investigation first brought these incidents to light.
“Since these events took place, we have augmented our controls and processes to seek to ensure that nothing like this could ever happen again…..

 He goes on: “I would also like to say thank you to our 3,000 loyal, hard-working and principled staff who each day deliver public services to the highest standards that help to improve the lives of thousands of the most vulnerable in our society.

“I am intensely proud of what they do and deeply sorry that the allegations have for so long cast a shadow over their good work.”

There is a little bit of amnesia here. I seem to remember a certain Commons Public Accounts Committee report in 2012 following hearings from whistleblowers  who worked for A4e among others.

Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts, is reported as saying at the time “Where the Government chooses to use private companies to deliver public services it is essential that proper arrangements are in place to prevent and detect fraud and malpractice. In this instance, the DWP’s arrangements for overseeing and inspecting its contractors were so weak that vital evidence on potential fraud and improper practice was not picked up. The Department failed, for example, to obtain from A4e damning internal audit reports produced in 2009 which pointed to instances of potential fraud and malpractice across the country.” …

“If it had not been for whistleblowers, a range of systemic issues would not have been identified. The Department might have identified these issues if it had asked the right questions of providers. The recent investigation into A4e looked at particular allegations of fraud but not at the more fundamental question of whether the company was a ‘fit and proper’ contractor.”

 

Need I say more! I won’t in respect of the eight other A4e employees so they get a fair trial.

 

Tweet Wars: How humourless Jobcentre Plus was humiliated by bolshie bloggers

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People queuing outside Jobcentre Plus. Pic courtesy: The Guardian

People queuing outside Jobcentre Plus. Pic courtesy: The Guardian

For the last year an extraordinary war has been going on between the Department of Work and Pensions and  some of Britain’s  tweeters and bloggers.

The battle has been over the centuries old right to free speech, to send up self-seeking bureaucrats and insult and satirize government ministers and the heads of private companies profiting from public services. This example is very modern, the battleground is Twitter rather than over some pamphlet.

 The row began over a year ago when the Department of Work and Pensions used Twitter’s complaint procedure to lodge a trademark complaint against @UKJCP, a satirical  account attacking Jobcentre Plus.

The application came from one Jon Woodcock, calling himself brand and information manager – his actual title is senior public information publishing manager – objecting to the site using the Jobcentre Plus trademark.

 What was extraordinary was his reasoning. I quote from the document :

 “The @UKJCP account has been set up with deliberate and malicious intent to devalue and criticise the work of Jobcentre Plus. In addition, there are a number of rude and potentially libelous tweets aimed at UK government, elected politicians and the heads of large private sector organisations who are committed to working with government on reducing unemployment.”

Not surprisingly Twitter quite rightly rejected such a request.

But the ministry came back – this time I am told using a discreet phone call – specifically objecting to what are called PTs – parody tweets – which were frankly taking the Mickey out of Jobcentre Plus – but where quite clearly linked to information that showed it couldn’t possibly have come from them. Some were true. One was a link to an article showing Jobcentre Plus backed sending claimants to work at strip clubs and for porn film companies – providing they didn’t participate- which I ‘m afraid is correct.

There has been storm of protest from bloggers and tweeters who used Twitter’s appeal process to overturn the decision. The  account was restored on February 8 after ten days.

An official spokesperson from the DWP Press Office told me :

“The changes we’re making to the welfare system to ensure that work pays are important to many people, and we work hard to make sure claimants have access to correct factual information. 

 “We alerted twitter to an account that was falsely sending out tweets claiming to have been published by our official account. It’s for twitter to decide what action is appropriate – we have not asked for any account to be taken down or suspended.”

 An official spokesperson for @UKJCP told me:”I am sure @DWPgovuk has no basis to complain about anyone who does a Parody of a Parody Tweet …Some of what was tweeted by me after 9/1/14 was focused on letting followers know what DWP and Jobcentre rights they have. I take the view that the DWP inspired suspension of @UKJCP was not only to censor Freedom of Expression and criticism of the Government but an attempt to suppress the sharing of rights based information.”

What is interesting is that I have been told that NO minister – not even Iain Duncan Smith – asked for Jobcentre Plus  to close down this Twitter account,. The idea that ministers, MPs, and anyone running a big private business should be immune from rude comments or libelous views seems to have been taken by managers at Jobcentre Plus’s HQ in Sheffield

Sorry DWP there is a very long tradition in this country from John Wilkes and Liberty to Hogarth,Steve Bell and comedians like Mark Thomas, to poke fun and be rude and tear the governing classes apart. David Cameron is regularly portrayed by Steve Bell as a condom ( he doesn’t like it and has complained to no avail to The Guardian).

If Mps and big bosses don’t like it they should take out a writ and sue. But they know that under the coalition the cost of a writ has risen to £1600 and legal fees are phenomenal. And they know claimants aren’t worth suing because they could never recover their money. That’s why they would love the government to resort to censorship, particularly if they haven’t even asked them to do it.

The next NHS scandal: Taking cash from the deprived and handing it to the affluent

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Sunderland Clinical Commissioning Group- the biggest loser of NHS funds in England

Sunderland Clinical Commissioning Group- the biggest loser of NHS funds in England

Next April NHS England plans to take away money from some of the most deprived parts of the country and give it to areas that are the most affluent.
An arcane formula that decides how much your local NHS clinical commissioning body has to spend on you is expected to be changed by removing a weighting that automatically gives a bit of extra cash to areas of social deprivation. It will also mean that less money will go to areas where people die younger and more to areas where people live longer.
I am indebted to research by the Royal College of Nursing who have recalculated the effect of the change and I have already written about it for Tribune Magazine.
The political implications of this change- just over a year before the next general election are enormous. While NHS England is obviously not a branch of Conservative Central Office, its decisions will be remarkably helpful to the coalition government.
Without spending an extra penny it will appear that there is more spending on the NHS in many Conservative and Liberal Democrat marginals by election day and far less spending in many Labour strongholds where there is more social deprivation.
As the table illustrates the changes at the top and bottom are going to be dramatic.
Losers and Gainers; Health spending per head

Losers and Gainers; Health spending per head


Translate this into Westminster politics this means extra help for Tory and Liberal Democrat seats in the south. Gainers include Tory strongholds in Royal Windsor, Ascot and Maidenhead – the latter the seat held by Theresa May, the home secretary; South East Hampshire, Eastbourne, Hailsham and Seaford ( Liberal Democrat seats); the West Sussex coast, Gosport and Fareham and Newbury.
Most useful is Reading North and West, which includes a Tory marginal, and has an extra £98 per person to spend; Dorset (£89) which is both a Liberal Democrat and Tory area, and South Gloucestershire, part of the Cotswolds, which gains £86.
While the losers with the exception of Carlisle ( a Labour Tory marginal with a 853 Tory majority) are all Labour.Worst affected will be Sunderland which will lose health care spending worth £146 per person. Nearly equally badly affected will be South Tyneside, Newcastle West and Gateshead.
Also if you take the latest Office of National Statistics life expectancy figures you will live much longer in Dorset than in Blackpool.
In 2009–11, male life expectancy at birth was highest in East Dorset (83.0 years); 9.2 years
higher than in Blackpool, which had the lowest figure (73.8 years).
• For females, life expectancy at birth was also highest in East Dorset at 86.4 years and lowest in
Manchester where females could expect to live for 79.3 years.
• According to 2009–11 mortality rates, approximately 91% of baby boys and 94% of girls in East
Dorset at birth will reach their 65th birthday. The comparable figures were 77% and 86% in
Blackpool and Manchester respectively.
No wonder the RCN is furious. As Glenn Turp, regional director for the RCN Northern region says: “The North East and Cumbria suffers from some of the worst health inequalities in the country. NHS England should be aiming to reduce inequalities in health outcomes, not make them worse.
“Given the size of health inequalities in this region, I believe that NHS England should actually be increasing funds to the areas with the worst outcomes. However, NHS England’s own data shows these proposals will do the opposite.”
Of course this figures are not yet in stone. But taken together with welfare cuts, big drops in the standard of living for the majority,and slashing support for the disabled – NHS England is merely helping the wealthy and rich in Windsor, Maidenhead and Hampshire villages get better NHS services all paid by the taxpayer at the expense of a Sunderland council tenant. All helping the coalition win the next general election.

Atos deaths: A letter to Mr… Smith

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This is an appalling situation. Officlal statistics on the deaths of disabled claimants -particularly in the climate where individual suicides have been already been reported- should be kept. I can well see it is remarkably convenient for the DWP to save money by not bothering to produce them. It seems to me part of  nastyagenda- saying the government does not want to know the consequences of its own policies. Part of the view of the right wing that there is no such thing as society as Margaret Thatcher once said.

Mike Sivier's avatarMike Sivier's blog

Atos: Welcome to Hell

Is the Department for Work and Pensions unable to compile data about the number of incapacity benefits claimants (including IB and ESA) who have died because it is underfunded – or understaffed?

That is the main question in Samuel Miller’s latest letter to Iain (Something) Smith, which you can find over at http://mydisabilitystudiesblackboard.blogspot.ca/2013/06/my-latest-letter-to-iain-duncan-smith.html

This blog mentioned a few days ago that LieDS and his department have decided to withhold up-to-date information on the number of deaths involving people going through the assessment process for benefits (via Atos), who have been refused benefit or who are appealing against a decision.

Vox Political has put in a Freedom of Information request, requiring the DWP to produce that information, and we know that many of you have followed that lead.

Mr Miller has been in the fortunate position to write an authoritative inquiry – as the person who made the original request all…

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Work Programme providers’ plea is an insult to everyone they have mishandled

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This is not good news for the BBC, the work programme or the government. If you take in context the scandal involving A4e which provided placements under first programme I did an extra investigation on top of the work done by the Public Accounts Committee exposing failings in A4e internal audit. My investigation revealed in one small town Bridlington A4 e had placed people with as firm going into liquidation, one run by people from a a house in Rotherham that never filed accounts, another with a company not registered at Companies House, and two with a cafe and taxi firm that subsequently went bust. In other places it turned out they had sent one person to a lap dancing club in Liverpool and a person with a criminal record to a firm which didn’t want to employ people with criminal records. See my own blog https://davidhencke.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/exclusive-how-you-got-state-funded-work-experience-in-a-strip-club-with-a4e/

Mike Sivier's avatarMike Sivier's blog

It isn’t very often one can say a news report was shocking – not because of the subject matter, but because of the way it was reported.

That was the situation tonight with the BBC’s item in which Work Programme providers complained that they need more money to “help” the most challenging jobseekers into work.

This group, of course, being benefit claimants in the work-related activity group of Employment and Support Allowance.

This group being the most consistently abused and neglected element of the new underclass created by the Conservative-led Coalition government, demonised and hated by the right-wing press, often attacked in the street (to judge from first-hand accounts), many of whom have been driven to suicide or death caused by their conditions, which have been worsened by the unacceptable (and to most people reading this, inconceivable) amount of stress the DWP, Atos (the private company assessing their fitness…

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Iain Duncan Smith’s most shocking statistical lie yet: Child poverty

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what a brilliant solution for a Downing Street Lynton Crosby spin machine. Keep reducing average wages in the UK until they reach the level of China and Bangla Desh and then you can reduce the numbers in absolute poverty because they will need smaller incomes to qualify. That will help meeting your statistical targets. And you can argue that people must only be paid a pittance so Britain can compete, Just one of the many nasty things Iain Duncan Smith is doing at the moment.

Mike Sivier's avatarMike Sivier's blog

According to a TUC report, average wages have dropped by 7.5 per cent since the Coalition came into office. This has a direct impact on child poverty statistics, which the government has conveniently ignored in its latest, Iain Duncan Smith-endorsed, child poverty figures.

Child poverty is calculated in relation to median incomes – the average income earned by people in the UK. If incomes drop, so does the number of children deemed to be in poverty, even though – in fact – more families are struggling to make ends meet with less money to do so.

This is why the Department for Work and Pensions has been able to trumpet an announcement that child poverty in workless families has dropped, even though we can all see that this is nonsense. As average incomes drop, the amount received by workless families – taken as an average of what’s left…

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An Ed Balls up on rich pensioners benefits

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Ed Balls explaining his balls up on rich pensioners: Pic Courtesy:Left Foot Forward

Ed Balls explaining his balls up on rich pensioners: Pic Courtesy:Left Foot Forward

Update: Since posting this comment  the Labour Party have formally adopted this policy of taking away winter fuel allowances from higher rate pensioners.

 But the Revenue have confirmed that they do  not collate figures showing how many households have higher rate and standard rate taxpayers who are currently eligible for winter fuel payments. They do not need to collect the information as taxpayers are assessed individually. So they don’t know the breakdown. The only figures they have are the number of higher rate taxpayers who are pensioners. He does have  a parliamentary answer from the department of work and pensions based on an estimate for the £100m savings but it does not deal with the situation outlined below.

I am  used to David Cameron shooting from the hip with knee jerk, ill thought out policies to respond to public opinion but I thought that Ed Balls would be cleverer than that.

Evidently not. His latest pronouncement  promises to save £100m by withdrawing winter fuel payments from pensioners who pay higher rates of tax sounds good. Labour expected this to show they are being tough on the rich and offering savings. Actually it will do neither.

As a punter and pensioner who pays higher rate tax because my freelance earnings top up my pension I expected to be one of the people targeted by Ed Balls. In fact it will have zilch effect, a load of old Balls if you like.

Let me explain why. The fuel allowance is currently paid to individual pensioners with a cap of £200 per household. So for a start I only receive £100 of   fuel benefit. The other £100 goes to my wife, also a pensioner, who is a standard rate taxpayer. So his planned saving will be halved anyway in my case.

But it is actually worse than that. My wife became a pensioner before me and was entitled to the full household fuel allowance in her own right. So when I was on The Guardian, our household was receiving then  a £250 fuel subsidy for a short time. What will happen under the Balls changes is that my wife will get back the full benefit of £200 – so we will still continue to receive exactly the same subsidy.

I suspect I am not alone. I know of many people around me in the shires, where in traditional families of that generation the main earner is the male who may well pay high rates of tax. His spouse who brought up the children, and did part-time work instead, would be a  standard rate taxpayer. These wealthy households will continue to get the subsidy.

Now Ed Balls could get round this by imposing a household cap equivalent to the income level set by the higher rate of tax. But if he does this he will run into fresh problems.

The text of his speech reads:  ( see http://www.labour.org.uk/striking-the-right-balance-for-the-british-economy)

“can it really remain a priority to pay the Winter Fuel Allowance – a vital support for middle and low-income pensioners – to the richest 5% of pensioners, those with incomes high enough to pay the higher or top rates of tax?

We believe the winter fuel allowance provides vital support for pensioners on middle and low incomes to combat fuel poverty. That’s why we introduced it in the first place.”

If he does this he will have misled people in this speech because this would mean that two pensioners with say a combined income of £44,000 will lose the allowance – extending the cuts  right into the middle-income group – the so-called ” squeezed middle”. Millions more people will be hit than Labour claims. Or he could change the entire tax system going back to household not personal incomes, which would be enormously costly.

This proposal seems typical of a metropolitan political elite.  Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper are both high rate taxpayers – just like David and Sam Cameron – and would expect to be hit when they reach retirement age – probably 75 by then. But the rest of the country is nothing like that.

Either you are going to hit more households and take away the benefit from standard rate taxpayers or leave a proportion of wealthy households still receiving the fuel allowance. And the Parliamentary answer does not provide the answer to this.