Thursday, 27 August 2009

Benefit Busters (2)

Oh G-d that programme is depressing.

To take a step back, in my normal working life, I deal with HM Revenue & Customs. We know what we send in and we know what comes out again. If you take individual cases, there is very little logic and although we have little idea of the inner workings, on the basis of the thousands of tax returns and letters we send in, and thousands of responses we receive every year, we can somehow piece together what triggers what and are constantly trying to hone our tax returns and letters in such a way as to make life easy for our clients.

OK. Let's apply the same deductive reasoning to A4E. The two main 'stories' in this evening's episode, which plenty of you will also have watched, were Mark and Sherrelle, who seemed keen to work, and were indeed helped into work, but were both made redundant again within four weeks (it appears that Mark ended up out of pocket overall). We also know, as a matter of fact, that A4E have signed up to a £700 million contract with HM Government over the next four years to do whatever it is that they do and that A4E receive £100 for every week that one of their 'clients' attends their back-to-work classes, plus another £x00 for everytime they get somebody into a job.

So A4E have, on the face of it, every incentive to get people into short term jobs; often with the same employers (one of A4E employers boasted of having done so) just long enough to trigger A4E's £x00 bonus; for the employer then to make those people redundant again; and for the Job Centre to then send the very same people back to A4E for yet another round of lucrative (from the point of view of A4E) back-to-work classes.

Just for the heck of it, let's mention David Blunkett's consultancy role, that's always fun.

Just sayin', is all.

8 comments:

RantinRab said...

I watched it too. I was going to do a blog post on it, but I was speechless.

A4E reminded me of a vulture picking at a corpse. Then I remembered they are getting shit loads of cash for pretty much bugger all.

Norton Folgate said...

Yes and it's the poor unemployed buggers caught in the middle being used as fodder for the easy money training scam whilst also not being a pesky jobless statistic for a week or so.

Bloody parasites

Sue said...

Its a temp agency in effect where the clients are expected to build stuff out of paper and sellotape in between temp jobs!

If anything, it kills hope, loses them money and is totality demoralising!

What a waste of sodding money!

Anonymous said...

Hi Mark

This isn't the sort of programme that I normally watch, but it happened to be on, and I'm glad that I got caught up in it.

Being a right wing proponent of "Get on yer bike" sort of policies I started off expecting to be sympathetic to A4E in their efforts to get the unemployed to work, but by the end of this programme I felt very sorry for the way Mark and his fellow unemployed were cynically treated by the system. A4E are only a small part of the problem. In fact most of the A4E staff appeared to be doing their best in the face of an impossible task.

I'm left wondering if, for the duration of the current recession, it wouldn't be more humane to just pay the benefits to these poor sods rather that subject them to the humiliation and bullshit they currently must go through to "earn" their £65/week.

My god, am I developing socialist tendencies?

Steven_L said...

I watched it too. I had a good snigger at it in fact. I'm a little bit more peeved now that you point out how much it is all costing though.

One thing that did strike me is the guy that said he got bored into finding a job.

Perhaps if you had to go 'back to school' and do long division and spelling tests to get your jobseekers every day that might work?

I notice that they didn't show what kind of 'telesales' job that girl got laid off in after 4 weeks.

I did some pretty dodgy telesales jobs when I was 18/19, I'm not surpised they didn't want to cameras anywhere near. I can't help wondering if she lost the job because she had the film crew trying to follow her around!

JuliaM said...

"A4E reminded me of a vulture picking at a corpse. "

Except that vultures provide a useful function...

"My god, am I developing socialist tendencies?"

No, because just paying them the dole money would be cheaper. If you want to get people back into work, ensure the jobs are there and then cut down on the money.

That'll do the trick.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Rab, NF, Sue, agreed to all that.

SL, he had a good point with the 'boredom' factor, but the major discouragement is deregistering for all your benefits, realising you're no better off, then losing your job and having to live off fresh air for a month until you get your benefits restarted. Plus right now there aren't that many jobs.

John East - that's not socialist, that's more like libertarian, as JM explains. Inventing more taxpayer-funded make-work jobs is socialist.

Anonymous said...

A4e = arse for elbow?