Liz Hodgkinson

I had only vaguely heard of the welfare-to-work company A4e before the scandal broke. Until then I had no idea of the scale of payments made to the company bu the government; that's us, the taxpayer. Nor did I know that Emma Harrison, the charismatic, pushy woman who started the company, pocketed over £8 million last year of public money. The contracts awarded by the government to this company ran into the hundreds of millions of pounds. Yet why was this outsourced in the first place?

As I understand it, A4e (Action for Employment) is a training company which imparts skills to the long-term unemployed to get them back into work. But they can't get them back into work if there are no jobs so I'm wondering what sort of skills they impart? Presumably they don't offer degrees in law or medicine, or train people to be plumbers and electricians, or do they? I suspect the 'training' is more of the rather vague confidence-building type than actually imparting valuable new work skills which would guarantee work, such as computer programming or gas fitting.

Anyway, it doesn't look good that a company which purports to be a public service kind of business, rather like a charity, should have its executives living so high on the hog. Harrison and her family live in a huge mansion house, paid for entirely with government contracts. Has A4e actually increased the UK's GDP? I doubt it. It also seems as though the jobs that they secure for their trainees are very low level - supermarket shelf stacking and so on - rather than getting these people into high-level or professional type jobs. One supposes that if they are off benefits and paying tax, then A4e is doing its job -- but what I can't understand is why the contracts were so huge in the first place? Apparently it's an Australian idea which flourished during the Howard administration.