Category Archives: Whitehall

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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Will data journalism save investigative journalism?

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The collapse of the print media and the rise of the free internet is threatening to destroy the income that allows traditional journalism to thrive.

As papers  and TV cut and cut again staff  they have fewer and fewer  resources to scrutinise and investigate government, business, crime and the dodgy guys have a much greater chance of getting away with it.

So just like the ancient search for the Holy Grail  journalists have been looking for a way to fund their time-consuming and expensive investigative operations. Some have sought world-wide alliances like Alan Rusbridger,editor of The Guardian, to bring an international flavour – like the Prism survellience scandal – to journalism. Others like Rupert Murdoch have thought pay walls  and monopoly control will fund journalism.

But they might just be a third way. The government’s decision enthusiastically endorsed by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, to open up data has provided an amazing opportunity for a new breed of journalists – data journalists – to exercise their amazing mathematical  and computer savvy skills- and create new stories. But they have also opened up an extraordinary lucrative way to raise cash from business for a tailor-made service to meet their individual needs.

Exaro, the news organisation, who employ me on a freelance basis, may have just found the answer to marry this. By exploiting government data  Exaro’s data journalists have  produced a major story on the state of liquidations in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland ( see http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5008/liquidations-are-running-at-four-times-level-before-credit-crunch ). But this journalism led investigation – by Tim Wood, Henry Taylor and George Arnett – also has a very lucrative spin-off that may bring an income worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

As Jasper Jackson ( son of the late Mark Jackson. my friend and one of Fleet Street’s great colourful  journalist characters) discloses ( see http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/exclusive-exaro-news-channels-investigative-journalism-into-data-products) the possibilities of a tailor-made service that can change the finances.

As Mark Watts, editor in chief of Exaro, puts it: ”

“There are data journalism teams out there, but they traditionally don’t worry about making things commercial. What we are doing is rather different because it is journalists who are doing it, generating material for editorial purposes, but in the same breath doing it for commercial purposes.

The editorial aspect is important. The data interrogation techniques are very specific and journalists are also able to present things in a meaningful way. There is a sense of having to distil it, and make sense of the data.”

So have we discovered the Holy Grail, the way to break stories, subsidise other important investigations, without compromising editorial integrity? Francis Maude may have to put up with data journalism providing an income stream enabling us to investigate  and scrutinise him and Cabinet ministers even more thoroughly. A double-edged sword at times.

Exclusive:Honoured by the Queen, mugged by David Cameron

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National child abuse hero Graham Wilner: Picture reproduced courtesy Rory Wilmer Photography

National child abuse hero Graham Wilmer: Picture reproduced courtesy Rory Wilmer Photography

This is  Graham Wilmer who received an MBE in The Queen’s Birthday Honours at the weekend.  He received the honour because of his tireless work to provide support for the survivors of child sexual abuse through the Wirral based Lantern Project (.http://www.lanternproject.org.uk/)

His citation reads:“For services to survivors and victims of abuse.”

The letter from the Cabinet Office says the award was made on the recommendation of the Prime Minister.

But what the Prime Minister gives, the PM also takes away.

Just as he receives his award – a pinnacle of achievement and recognition for a sexually abused kid who now helps others – the government is stripping him of any funding which virtually means his operation has no cash after September. The full story can be seen on Exaro News – http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5010/mbe-for-head-of-project-helping-sex-victims-but-funding-is-axed

Funny  that. Cash is no longer available just at the point when  the Met Police investigations from Operation Yewtree ( Jimmy Savile and friends); Operation Fernbridge and Fairbank ( 300 leads into mainly gay sexual abusers of young boys) and Operation Torva ( just beginning to look at the Roman Catholic Salesian school order ( 30 or more victims, 20 or more priests and teachers under investigation) started by Graham Wilmer himself are bringing forward unprecedented numbers of people who need support. The Met Police has no money for supporting victims. And the extension of the North Wales investigation under Operation Pallial, is also bringing to light new victims, though to her credit Theresa May, the home secretary, has offered Home Office support to those victims.

How different is David Cameron whose Downing Street press office told me that he had put aside £10.5m over three years – and it turned out this was for rape crisis centres.

As Graham put it himself: “It is really time that David Cameron got his act together over funding to counsel people who have been sexually abused as children. You can’t have the police encouraging people to come forward as child abuse victims and then have no system of support for them.”

And then there is Liberal Democrat Home Office junior minister Jeremy Browne. All he could offer was a weasely worded letter to Mr Wilmer suggesting he contact the Merseyside police commissioner, Jane Kennedy for some cash.  But I can’t see how Merseyside police should be expected to fund counselling for three major national child abuse investigations. I think they have a few other matters to deal with.

Jeremy Browne and David Cameron describe child sexual abuse as an abhorrent crime. Obviously not abhorrent enough to find any money to support what looks like thousands  of victims.

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.

Defamation Act 2013: A boost for free speech, Part 2: Public Interest and Privilege – Timothy Pinto

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This is a second good piece of news for bloggers who follow political scandals, local councils, the NHS and bad practice in public services. You needn’t worry if you don’t get it 100 per cent right.You are going to have new rights protecting your reporting and comments so long as you can justify it is the public interest and produce fair accounts of public events. The great thing is you can report public protest meetings with full protection. Another invaluable piece of legal advice for all those following public affairs.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

Houses of ParliamentIn this second part of four posts by Timothy Pinto of Taylor Wessing, he considers the changes to common law and statutory privilege which will result from the Defamation Act 2013. Part 1 on “Serious Harm, Truth and Honest Opinion” can be found here.

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Defamation Act 2013: A boost for free speech – Part 1: Serious Harm, Truth and Honest opinion – Timothy Pinto

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I am reblogging this post because it provides free of charge some vital legal advice from an expert for bloggers who challenge power and authority. It makes it pretty clear that bloggers can now without fear of libel threats be highly critical of private companies who provide bad services to the public. It also makes it tad more difficult for nasty public figures- I am thinking of Barnet councillor Brian Coleman recently convicted of common assault of a member of the public – to bring actions when they acquire a bad reputation. This is good news for free speech, democracy and holding companies and public figures to account.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

Defamation Act 2013This is the first of four posts by Timothy Pinto of Taylor Wessing where he provides analysis of the key provisions of the UK’s Defamation Act 2013 and its likely practical implications under English law. The four posts will cover: Serious harm, Truth and Honest opinion, Privilege, Intermediary liability, and Other key provisions.

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Am I bovvered? The Ministry of Defence on sexual abuse and bullying of forces’ kids

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Ministry of Defence: Not safeguarding forces children

Ministry of Defence: Not safeguarding forces children

A virtually  unreported hearing of the Commons defence committee has revealed an extraordinary complacent state of affairs of the Ministry of Defence towards complaints from forces parents of sexual abuse and bullying at private schools.

MPs from all three parties have condemned the attitude of officials responsible for paying out school fees for forces children who evidently admit to refusing to move their children from a school if they are bullied or sexually abused.

A full report is  published today on the Exaro website by Frederika Whitehead and myself ( see http://www.exaronews.com/articles/4971/mod-policy-on-claims-of-child-sex-abuse-at-schools-stuns-mps ).

The MPs anger in part stems from a report on The People  ( see http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/police-probe-sexual-assault-claims-1781432 ) which revealed that Stanbridge Earls School in Hampshire where soldier’s children are sent by the MOD  was now the subject of a sexual abuse police investigation.

But the real anger came from three  MPs. Madeleine Moon, Labour MP for Bridgend, said “The MoD should put the protection of children first, not the protection of the ‘continuity of education allowance’ first.”
Two other MPs on the committee – Sir Bob Russell, Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester, and Penny Morduant, Conservative MP, for Portsmouth North, also had strong views.

And Tom Watson has also expressed concern. “This has highlighted the inadequacies of the MoD’s rules for military education. In not offering parents greater choice, the system is too rigid. Worse, the ‘don’t cause a fuss’ attitude of the department makes it hard for the families of service personnel to publicly voice their concerns. This has to stop.”

In its defence the MOD said it did not always enforce this rule. However it is a pretty bad state of affairs in the present climate that the MOD do not seem to have a duty of care towards the children of its forces personnel – given many are serving abroad and not on hand to easily intervene when their kids face bullying or sexual abuse. It all suggests that the forces still have some very antiquated attitudes towards these issues. Expect more investigations from Exaro in this area.

Revealed: Cameron’s nudge,nudge survey to woo marginal voters

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David Cameron outside Downing Street. Picture courtesy: Guardian

David Cameron outside Downing Street. Picture courtesy: Guardian

David Cameron has started his re-election campaign by sending out a private questionnaire and personal letter to targeted voters in marginal seats with leading questions on cutting benefits,encouraging immigration and freezing petrol. My story is in this week’s Tribune magazine.

The survey bears all the “dog whistle”  hallmarks of libel trigger happy Lynton Crosby and the execution of Giles Kenningham, now at Conservative Central Office.

The survey also wants to get hold of e-mail addresses of all the participants for future use by Conservative Central Office. It purports to be a simple request to evaluate how the government is doing to help families and asking for advice on how to continue existing policies. The tenor of Cameron’s letter is couched in party political terms.

He says: “Even with the enormous deficit we inherited from the last government forcing us to make tough decisions in every area, I am committed to doing everything possible to help families with the cost of living in these tough times. So I’d like to know what you think about some of the steps we’ve taken so far – and I’d like to know your ideas about what more the Government can do to help families like yours.”

cameron's survey letter to marginal voters

cameron’s survey letter to marginal voters: click on it to read better

There follows a detailed questionnaire on the economy, welfare benefits. And direct questions on attitudes to life  and to political leadership – such as whether or not you believe in rugged individualism without the support of state and that people can get on regardless of  background or not.

The choice is between “How well I do in life is first and foremost down to me. OR How well I do in life is primarily decided by forces outside of my control.”

The main economic question is slanted against Labour saying : “Even before the banking crisis hit in 2008, the UK was borrowing too much money to pay for public services and public sector jobs that, in the long-term, we couldn’t afford.” Some of the choices are extraordinary – such as a question asking whether a two tier benefit system should be introduced – and existing benefits cut by more than half for those who have only just started paying tax and national insurance.

Voters are invited to put in figures for benefit levels, new caps for the “bedroom tax”,and to comment on evicting council tenants who earn too much money.

David Cameron’s and Ed Miliband’s leadership the questionnaire proposes a dramatic choice. People are asked to choose between “We need leaders who are prepared to listen and to do what people really want” or “We need leaders who will stick to what they believe is right, even if it is unpopular.”

Three rather different questions are asked on immigration, same sex marriage and education  – one definitely pre UKIP surge. The immigration question is ” On balance immigration has been a good thing for this country”. The other on education looks like it had been inserted by Michael Gove: ” Educational standards have been steadily improving in recent years”.

Altogether a very interesting disclosure from a Labour marginal seat in the Midlands. One wonders what that Lynton Crosby  fan (NOT) ‏@LordAshcroft would make of it for fairness and as a tactic. It does suggest Labour need to wake up and small the coffee on campaigning double-quick and start working hard in these marginal seats.

welfare questions - click on it to read it better

welfare questions – click on it to read it better

Ed Lester gets new £135,000 a year Whitehall job

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Ed Lester heads the land registry whose HQ was sold for £37m recently. Pic credit: trevorcoultart.wordpress.com

Ed Lester heads the land registry whose HQ was sold for £37m recently. Pic credit: trevorcoultart.wordpress.com

No problem for top people – even in centre of controversies – getting a new job in Whitehall.

Ed Lester, the former chief executive of the Students Loans Company, whose tax arrangements caused a furore and led to a Whitehall wide inquiry, has been appointed by the  Department of Business, Innovation and Skills to head the Land Registry.

Not surprisingly there is no mention of his controversial past in the Whitehall news release .The same ministry who approved his appointment to the SLC on a deal which meant he received no deductions for tax and national insurance at source, has now appointed him to head the Land Registry – the body  alongside Companies House I used to trace his company and address.

Mr Lester will get a £135,000 a year – somewhat less than at the SLC – and he will pay tax and national insurance at source. He will be eligible for a 20 per cent performance bonus.

Business and Energy Minister Michael Fallon said:
“Ed Lester has the right skills, experience and ambition to meet the new challenges that face the Land Registry. His previous experience of running the Student Loans Company will help to ensure that the Land Registry can become a more nimble, digitally driven organisation.

He is taking on a tough job. The Land Registry  is in  the middle of a controversial plan to slim down its workforce and could eventually be seen as a candidate for privatisation. It has to improve efficiency by 60 per cent and cut costs by £40m a year over five years.

He is likely to find himself under close scrutiny and his decisions will affect every home and business owner in the country when they come to sell or buy a property.