Profits from the coalition war on poor

Louise Nousratpour
Friday August 19, 2011
The Morning Star

Multimillionaire welfare-to-work privateer Emma Harrison is in charge of finding work for thousands of "troubled" families whom David Cameron blamed this week for rioting that swept across England.

She was appointed in December as the Prime Minister's "family champion"" to identify so-called workless households and get them off benefits and back into work.

At the time she said there were roughly 120,000 "troubled families" who had never worked in their lives.

She also claimed that much of Britan's problems "stem from" them.

In his "fightback" speech this week Cameron promised to put "rocket boosters" under his back-to-work programme targeting 120,000 families as part of his strategy to mend the "broken society."

Leading the initiative through her Working Families Everywhere campaign, Harrison will be paid by results under the government's controversial Work Programme.

Her company Action for Employment (A4E) has already been awarded 25 per cent of the government's £5bn budget for the flagship welfare-to-work programme, where contracted companies are paid "bounties" of between £4,000 and £13,700 for every unemployed person they put back into work.

Ten per cent is paid upfront and the rest 18 months later.

The targeted families are among the poorest in society who struggle in the face of multiple and complex problems such as mental health issues, physical disability, drug addiction and huge debts.

They are already being helped by a range of different government agencies, many of which are facing budget cuts and even closure because of the Con-Dem's so-called austerity measures.

Built on Labour's family intervention model, the "family champions" initiative is funded through councils' early intervention grant, which was cut by 11 per cent this year and which will also have to fund Sure Start children's centres, teenage pregnancy and youth support services.

Under her Working Families Everywhere campaign Harrison plans to recruit social workers employed by local authorities and train them to become "family champions."

Harrison explained in an interview with the European Social Fund this month: "To date, the family champions have been coming from the local authorities because that's where the initial money went into. My role is to help recruit those family champions, train and develop them.

"Family champions at the moment are people who are already employed by the local authority.

"In the future, there are volunteers. People who are volunteering to be family champions, so some will be paid professionally and others may be volunteers."

This planned army of "champions" will then target "troubled" families with the sole purpose of getting them off benefits and back into work.

"We have already worked with three local authorities in Hull, Blackpool and Westminster," Harrison said following Cameron's speech this week.

"This is just the beginning."

She has antagonised social support agencies by claiming that they only "poke" at troubled families in unfocused ways.

But she also admitted that without those very agencies her "champions" would not be able to cope with the complex issued faced by the targeted families.

Family Action group Rhian Beynon brands Harrison's remarks "galling."

"Defining families with complex multiple needs primarily through worklessness is highly problematic," says Beynon. "If someone has mental health problems you cannot make that person work."

Meanwhile Public-sector union Unison has warned that the massive shortage in the number of social workers is "a ticking bomb."

In March, the union published a dossier of cutbacks hitting social work departments. It warned that, on top of existing shortages, they will put the lives of children and vulnerable adults at risk.

Admin support, training and early intervention support work - all of which social workers depend on - are being slashed, exacerbating the "perennial problems" of crippling caseloads and high vacancy rates.

Unison national officer for social work Helga Pile said at the time: "Every day the safeguards and support that social work departments offer are being stretched thinner and thinner - at a time when more and more families are struggling to cope."

Action for Children highlights the impact of government cuts to local authority budgets, warning that some family intervention projects were being starved of funding and faced closure.

"They are seeing them not necessarily as the priority that they used to be," the charity's head Dame Clare Tickell told BBC Radio 4 this week.

And Child Poverty Action Group says the government must reverse its cuts policies if it wants to help troubled families get their lives back on track.

"Attacking child benefit, cutting tax credits and reducing support for childcare all flunk the family test, hurt families and weaken our society," says its head of policy Imran Hussain.

"The government came in promising to cut child poverty, saying the previous government hadn't done enough, but the IFS has shown that its policies will increase child poverty by 300,000 in the next three years."