Here’s the latest ConDemned brainwave to force scroungers to work: get middleclass volunteers to sort out trouble families:
It began in December when the prime minister said: “All evidence suggests that it’s no use offering a range of different services to these families – the help they’re offered just falls through the cracks of their chaotic lifestyles. What works is focused, personalised support.” This fits neatly into Cameron’s big society narrative – cut government funding, let amateurs fill the gap, and clap yourself as social deprivation segues into riot. The government has already slashed Connexions, the catch-all advice centre for 13- to 19-year-olds, and abolished the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the Future Jobs Fund, which existed to find jobs for the young. The careers advice service for school-leavers, meanwhile, is now only a memory – and a website. But no matter – an army of Emma Harrisons is waiting.
Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron’s behalf. You may know her from Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed “family champions” (FCs), will enter “never-worked” families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into “working” families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. “Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs,” says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.
As insanely stupid social initiatives go, this is about average for the coalition. It seems tailor made for trousering yet more money from already existing social programmes to dodgy private firms like erm, Emma Harrison’s A4e while making sure the actual worth of the work these firms do is not easily quantifiable. Money for old rope, in other words.
I would hope therefore that some enterprising journalist asks Harrison the questions Watching A4e would like her to answer:
- Has A4e bid for the contracts the DWP is putting out, to use European Social Fund money to pay private companies to run the same scheme that you’re promoting? Are you trying to pre-empt these contracts by getting your scheme up and running first?
- You have argued in the past for “super-contracts” in which a private company would run all the services in a local authority area. Is this scheme a step on the way to that?
- Given your company’s record of missing targets by some distance in previous welfare-to-work contracts, why do you believe you will be any more successful with this?