DWP Corruption
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© 2009-2010, New Deal Scandal Do not copy articles without permission. Feel free to link to blog posts. If you link to an article and we receive a trackback we will accept it (unless the article is automated spam). Usage subject to the Terms as stated above in the header. New Deal Scandal is part of Ipswich Unemployed Action.
Hi i have been signing on at the jobcentre for six months now and have been told i have to attend a 13 work new deal at a4e. i was told that it would be better for me to go straight onto the 13 week new deal instead of the 2 week gateway 2 work. could you tell me if this is right and can they do this is. Thanks
Age 18 Town Slough
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Gateway 2 Work is better!
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Godldie: I’d check with the Citizens Advice Bureau. I did the 13 week New Deal program at A4e Edinburgh last year without doing the 2 week Gateway To Work before (which my so called PA at the jobcentre never mentioned anyway).
What the jobcentre say to you depends on your age, length of unemployment and what discretion they have.
Also, the New Deal is being replaced by the Flexible New Deal starting in October this year, so the jobcentre may not want you to do the 2 week gateway course because with the 13 weeks of New Deal that would take you into mid-October -and clash with the start of the Flexible New Deal. But as I said, check with Citizens Advice
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I thought you might be interested in this outfit (TNG).I’ve done a course with them they’re specialists in exploitation. They’ve got people doing night work at ASDA for their dole money. It was the same old story that is familiar to all of us who have been on the courses. Overcrowding, no training, no jobs, work for your dole. People were just stood about bored, swearing, arguing and even fighting. People were signing off to get away from it. It was like something out of Shameless. They even sacked a member of staff who was found to be screwing a young girl who was classed as a vulnerable adult. Another outfit to keep an eye on is i2i or Inspire 2 Independence. This outfit was like something out of the League of Gentlemen. I’m sure its run by the church of scientology.
From The Times November 24, 2007
Doing well out of welfare – how compassionate capitalism is driving Avanta
Janette Faherty has built a thriving business around getting people off benefits and into jobs. Work ethic is the key, she explainsMartin Waller
Janette Faherty is deploring today’s shallow celebrity culture. “The whole reality TV thing is awful for youngsters,” she says. It is dispiriting, she says, when faced with a teenage school-leaver, to hear them set their ambitions at being a DJ, a supermodel, or simply a “celebrity”.
If they even consider a job in business, then they have to go straight to being Branson, Sugar or some other Dragon’s Den-style TV star, with no concept of the hard graft needed to get there. “They think Richard Branson just emerged from an egg, fully formed in a fluffy jumper,” she says.
These are the difficulties of placing someone with no experience of work on the first, unglamourous step on the ladder and then equipping them with the skills to move up further in due course.
It is the job done by Avanta, where Ms Faherty is chief executive and owns a majority stake. This sometimes requires tough decisions, not least when the “client”, as she calls her charges, is not playing the game but moonlighting on the black market. In such cases, her duty is to contact their local Jobcentre and advise that their benefits should be withdrawn.
Ms Faherty has clearly come a way from her left-wing roots and a career that started doing voluntary work among women’s groups in Haringey, North London. Along the way she was able to buy for very little what had been a public sector body. She is now a businesswoman running a growing enterprise that employs 650 people and has a turnover of £45 million a year.
Avanta has helped to create almost 7,500 new businesses over the past three years. Three quarters survived into their third year, about twice the national average. Over the past six months it has equipped almost 2,000 people with additional skills to advance their prospects. Another 2,225 have come off benefits and into paid work.
“Perhaps it’s because I come from a more Fabian background,” she says. “It was never the intention of the welfare state to pay people who didn’t want to work. That’s not the best way to spend taxpayers’ money.
“I don’t think there are many parts of the country where there aren’t any jobs these days. They might not be the jobs that people want to do or people would expect to do.” In particular, jobs in the customer service sector – those in call-centres or shops, for instance, are often anathema to traditionally raised people. “They aren’t necessarily the ones people are brought up to see as classic breadwinners’ jobs.”
But she insists: “People have a right to work. That’s a left-wing view, isn’t it? I’m going back to my Marx and Engels.”
Ms Faherty’s experience of these two dates back at least to 1968, when she enrolled at the University of Manchester to read politics and history. These were the days of student radicalism. She had come from working class stock in Birkenhead, council estate bred and the first of her family to go to grammar school and to university. Her mother was a Presbyterian, and the work ethic was ingrained. She was expected to find jobs during holidays and did time on the Castrol production line.
Ms Faherty had a stab at a couple of jobs in academia, but they fell through and she “drifted into teaching”. Once her first child arrived – she has two grown-up daughters – she went into the voluntary sector. “After-school clubs, sewing groups for Bengali women where they learnt English, gardening for elderly people.”
She began working on unemployment projects for the old Manpower Services Commission. “Even these days, it’s never been bettered at getting people into jobs. The person was given to you. You had control of their benefits and their training allowance, all rolled into one. If they didn’t train up, you didn’t pay them.”
This approach, she believes, remains the best way of getting people back to work. “Where we control the money, we have exactly the same rate of achievement of job entry.”
Part of the problem, as anyone who scans the public sector job ads soon becomes aware, is the incredible proliferation of bodies involved, an alphabet soup of quangos, training councils, and local authorities. This duplication of effort would never, one suspects, survive in any profits-driven private sector area. But these are the bodies from which Faherty’s business, through competitive tendering for contracts, obtains its work.
“It is an alphabet soup,” she admits. “The way it’s operating now is dysfunctional. But I see signs that we’re bringing all those functions together.”
In 1988, after a reorganisation of the system, she was given the chance to buy the business, then known as Network Projects, for a nominal sum. “It wasn’t really worth anything at the time. The voluntary sector was very keen to get rid of the risk.” It employed about 20 people. With her former husband, the late property developer Matthew Faherty, she took £5,000 out of their savings. “We never thought it would be a £45 million business.”
Last year TNG, as it had become known, merged with a similar business, InBiz, to become Avanta as the top company. They help unemployed people find jobs, and work with employers seeking staff with particular qualifications – or none at all. They compete for work with quoted companies such as Carter & Carter, whose founder, Phillip Carter, died in a helicopter crash in May, and Serco. A stock market float “has to be one option to consider”, she says.
Ms Faherty accepts that it can be difficult to place some people in jobs. “There are people who are extremely reluctant, for a variety of reasons, to work. In some cases there are whole areas where there’s no history of working over two to three generations. You have got to start with how they get up in the morning and go to work. Some people have no reason to have an alarm clock.
“We’re not running some kind of soft regime. We say, you’re going to be here at 9 o’clock until whenever. It’s a structured work experience. The idea is to get people into the work ethic.” This could involve mentoring, in classes of up to ten, or one-to-one training.
There are schemes whereby benefits can be protected for the first six months, for example, while they start work on a trial basis. Ultimately, there is the sanction of stopping benefits for those unwilling to make the effort. “We already have that lever. We don’t talk about it a great deal.”
There are, at the last count, 2.6 million people on incapacity benefit. No one believes that all of these are genuinely incapable of entering the work-place. Ms Faherty believes that a million of them genuinely want to go back to work but are held back by lack of skills, by real but surmountable disabilities or by psychological factors such as depression. She is convinced that they can. “It’s going to happen. It’s definitely going to happen.”
For it to happen, though, plenty of work will have to go the way of Avanta and its competitors. Aren’t you in the business of, in the old song lyric, “doing well by doing good”? “It’s about wanting to do something for other people,” she insists of her decision to buy and develop the business.
But life on the breadline, forced out of benefits into a tedious, arduous job on the minimum wage is no fun, is it? Especially competing with the uncounted wave of workers from overseas, particularly Eastern Europe, whose driving ambition is to do the same?
“Every part of this country has buses. Why are we importing people from the Ukraine to drive buses in Middlesborough?” she asks. “We want people to do those sort of jobs because we don’t want to do them ourselves. You have to get a bit real about that.
“It’s about getting people into a job at entry level and then pushing them up the ladder.”
Curriculum vitae
Born 1949
Education 1968-71: student at Manchester University.
Career 1974-78: teacher, Aylward School, Edmonton.
1978-81: researcher, Unesco Project, Institute of Education, London.
1983: Researcher at Islington Council.
1983 to present: chief executive/owner, Avanta.
1988: management buyout, Avanta (then TNG).
April 2006: TNG and InBiz merge to form Avanta.
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Ironically, our sister site New Deal Complaints (if it dont load refresh a few times) initially had a space for TNG – we couldnt find much information on TNG – so renamed that category to Pertemps.
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I used to work for Avanta and could point you in the direction of significant claims which could not be justified – move over A4e and RIP – Avanta and their money grabbing Chairman (200% + profit on self employment options) would make these guys look like saints.
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RIP = Reed in Partnership. I thought you meant Remain In Peace (or even Remain in Pieces) A4e.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcrZP4FU9_w
A4E ‘ALL FOR EMMA’ Watch the above link.
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A4E ‘ALL FOR EMMA’ Watch this link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcrZP4FU9_w
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