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PM's favourite welfare-to-work firm under police spotlight
One of the companies contracted by the government to get people back to work is at the centre of a fraud investigation.
News that Thames Valley police visited the Slough offices of A4e on Friday will come as a shock to ministers, since the company’s chair had been hailed by David Cameron as a key player in plans to get troubled families into work.
Although the company claims only a “very small” number of employees have been referred to police, Labour MP Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the public accounts committee, wants the government to consider suspending its welfare-to-work contracts with A4e until the matter is resolved.
Hodge has described A4e’s record on previous welfare-to-work schemes as “abysmal” and questioned why the company had been given new contracts for the coalition’s Work Programme. Earlier this month A4e confirmed that all of its UK turnover last year – estimated between £160m and £180m – came from government contracts.
David Cameron appointed A4e chair Emma Harrison to help some of Britain’s 120,000 most troubled families. In the aftermath of the English riots last August, the Prime Minister announced he was putting “rocket boosters” under Harrison’s ideas around ‘family champions’ – people who work intensively with families with two or three generations out of work.
The police are investigating activities dating back to 2010. Employment minister Chris Grayling seized on the dates to suggest Labour’s arrangements while in office were to blame. He told Sky News: "The truth is that some of the schemes put in place under the previous government were, I think, contracted very badly and mismanaged.”
Elsewhere, a group of backbench Conservatives are putting pressure on George Osborne to make it easier to sack people.
The Free Enterprise group of Tory MPs believe cutting the “red tape” of employment laws will allow small businesses to take on staff, safe in the knowledge they can let them go without having to give a cause. The unions, unsurprisingly, are not best pleased.
