I am getting a bit sick of the “fat cats” in the welfare to work sector taking huge salaries whilst so many of their frontline staff face redundancy as a result of recent bidding announcements for Work programme. Take the case of Emma Harrison, the head of A4e.
The woman appointed by David Cameron to help troubled families get off benefits and into work has a joint income with her husband estimated at more than £1.4m after building a business empire based on lucrative "welfare to work" contracts with government.
A4e's latest accounts show that Harrison, who lives with her husband in Thornbridge Hall, a 12th-century stately home in the heart of the Peak District, has an 85.5% shareholding in the Sheffield-based company. She receives a salary of £365,000 a year. On top of this, last year she and her husband received an additional £462,000 from A4e for the company's use of her home for conferences and administrative work. From what I hear this ‘administrative’ work includes inviting staff members over to her place for a cuppa. I guess this is to show the oiks how the rich live. After all, one really must keep the working class in their place.
Her husband received an additional £626,856 for the lease of another property to A4e. Nice for some – I guess money breeds money.
Last December Cameron offered Harrison a role championing government efforts to help troubled families get back on their feet. "Emma and others will be helping to pioneer a new way of doing things: less bureaucratic, less impersonal, more human, more effective," the prime minister said. "Above all, treating the whole family as a unit, not just a collection of individuals.
What does Emma know about hardship, other than the fact she was born in Jaywick, now recorded as being the most deprived town in the UK? I’ll bet Emma didn’t see too much if it when she was growing up.. Indeed, she openly admits that as a child she moved to Sheffield and lived in a ‘big’ house. From details of her life, I doubt she ever experienced hardship, or living off welfare benefits.
Today she heads up a company reputedly worth £100 million.
All this at a time when A4e have placed all their staff on redundancy notice, though admittedly a proportion of them will be re-employed (albeit on lower salaries) as a result of the company winning in five areas in the UK.
It emerged last week another major player in the welfare to work industry, Serco, which has won two more contracts, had awarded its top executives bumper pay packets. Chris Hyman, Serco's chief executive, enjoyed an 18% rise to £1.86m, while Andrew Jennings, the finance director, received an increase of 7% to £948,295. The company's diverse range of contracts includes running several prisons, London's bicycle hire scheme and the Docklands Light Railway.
Serco have yet to publicise the extent of any redundancies within their organisation, but logically it is unlikely they will be able to maintain the same level of staffing. Large sections of the country were served by Serco employees and with the ending of Flexible New Deal on 1st June we can anticipate many of them will be consigned to the dole queues.
Working Links, one of the successful contractors of the new work programme, is from today sending redundancy letters to almost 600 of its 2,000 workforce, with the threat that more could follow if staff numbers for the new contracts are lower than existing levels. Meanwhile, their managing director, Breege Burke enjoys a handsome salary of over £220, 000 a year
The news about the Harrisons, Burke, Hyman and Jennings’ ' income will fuel a growing row over the extent to which the private sector is set to benefit increasingly from Citizen Dave, the people’s toff’s determination to widen its role in the provision of public services.
In a recently published report for the government, Will Hutton called for a fair pay code to be extended into the public services industry. He also called for details on justification of an executive's annual salary to be published and for more employees to become involved in companies' remuneration committees. The report, which is being considered at the highest levels of government, said remuneration "must be brought back into the context of the pay of the rest of the workforce through the disclosure of the ratio of top to median pay".
It seems the “fat cats” in the sector never read that part of the report.
Union leaders have described the salaries earned by private entrepreneurs whose businesses were taking on government contracts as "obscene". They said private firms were queuing up to reap massive rewards from plans to open up the National Health Service to "any willing provider".
Once again, it’s another example of how Citizen Dave looks after the rich whilst the rest of us scrabble around for any spare pickings as pushes us day by day to become an “alright for some” society.
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