Wednesday 30th June 2010, 16:22Welfare ReformsI get asked a lot what my thoughts are on this, and where A4e aims to be, in the context of the increased press interest. I’ve done this now for nearly 20 years and there are moments in time when you see a number of threads coming together. You think ‘right, time to bring all these things I’ve seen and experimented and succeeded and failed with together to make a difference’. Now is that time. Why?
A4e delivers lots of services. They are all centred around the needs of our ‘consumer’. People still ask me why so varied? Answer – the n..
View Complete Post Tuesday 29th June 2010, 12:55Budget 2010 and Public ServicesThought it was about time I posted a couple of comments on the Budget. There is lots of speculation about the impact on public services – that’s the bit I am focused on in the context of making an impact on the public sector borrowing requirement. So, what can we do?
At Board meetings of the RDA and the PCT (I’m a Non-Exec Director on both) one of the consistent points I have been making over the last 18 months is that we need to explore ‘new ways’ of doing things. However, we can only succeed in that regard if decision makers in Whitehall are a..
View Complete Post Thursday 27th May 2010, 08:1221st Century WelfareI was at the Department for Work and Pensions this morning to see the Secretary of State and his ministerial team launch their vision for modern welfare in the UK. The SoS was very clear and focused on building on strategies developed by members of the previous government whilst addressing core issues of coordination and simplification. That’s good. We set out with Flexible New Deal to have a simple, more unified programme for employment and welfare to work, but before we started, the fragmentation and proliferation of programmes kicked in. I understand why but it wasn’t helpful.. View Complete Post Monday 24th May 2010, 09:04Big SocietyHad a good session this week with our policy team and a wonderful chap from Demos. He has worked in government across the last ten years – strategy unit, Treasury etc. – and helped the Conservative party define and refine the high level vision for ‘Big Society’ a while back. It was a really interesting discussion and last Autumn I blogged after a meeting with Stephan Shakespeare on the use of technology and data sets by government. His aim is to increase transparency and third party use (think i-app developers) and how that could benefit public services through innov.. View Complete Post Thursday 20th May 2010, 07:48Moral Capitalism?I’ve blogged before on our ideas around being a Social Purpose Company. We have been doing some work to share our ideas on what this means in terms of the values of A4e and the way we want to work and how these principles apply to a broader body of organisations. Allied to that, I have been working with the CBI and a number of other businesses to shape ideas on how we can support ideas around mutuals and co-operatives as the country tackles the challenges of the public financial deficit whilst continuing to i.. View Complete Post Friday 14th May 2010, 14:07Welfare Market DevelopmentI noticed a couple of reports in the press around the next phase of welfare reform now that a new government is getting down to business and minsters have been appointed. As Emma said in the interview with The Guardian recently http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/30/long-term-unemployment-a4e , this next phase is an extension of the.. View Complete Post Thursday 13th May 2010, 14:49Contributing to Policy DevelopmentThere was an interesting article in the FT this week on the era of ‘new politics’ which is being debated in the media. Have a look here http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/be63eb70-5d34-11df-8373-00144feab49a.html if you’re interested. One of the responsibilities A4e has as a public service supplier is to feed its front line experience in.. View Complete Post Wednesday 10th February 2010, 13:32Total PersonNew concept. Very cool. Well, as cool as public policy gets. Bit geeky some might say.
Hopefully a simple concept. A4e is about higher performing public services at lower cost. Better outcomes for citizens, better outcomes fo..View Complete Post Wednesday 3rd February 2010, 13:33Social Purpose CompanyOver the last 18 years I’ve had lots of people tell me that a private company shouldn’t be doing what we do. I’ve also had loads of people tell me they are amazed at what we do. I have never had a problem reconciling good business principles with the social values that are so important to the work A4e does.
View Complete Post Friday 4th December 2009, 09:18BloggingNot blogged for a while. Been busy times. Also been experimenting with Twitter and feeds off LinkedIn.
Pondering how we create the social networks and technology access – then suitable networks – to support more v..View Complete Post Wednesday 28th October 2009, 08:51Business strategy – common sense?Every now and then you see something written down that sums up your intuition. Your gut instinct. A few years ago the Harvard Business Review wrote up a piece of research that said long term revenue growth – as opposed to short term profit focus of the markets – drove long term shareholder value. For that read, long term sustainability and opportunity for everyone working in a business.
View Complete Post Friday 9th October 2009, 14:37Public Spending: Influencing the Future
The start of Flexible New Deal is new and exciting. It is also the culmination of 5 years intensive, hard work by a lot of people in A4e. We have worked hard to inform the debate about reforming and continuously improving the provision of employment and skills. Making these services relevant and successful in boom and recession economies has been a core focus. Taking our experience over 18 years, our successes and failures, our learning from the UK, France, Israel, Germany and Poland, we have sought to help shape the design of the programme nationally and create a vibrant n.. View Complete PostTuesday 14th July 2009, 08:44German Welfare Policy
Interesting day in Germany. Achim had worked with our advisers in Germany to pull together a short 'discussion lunch' to talk about the evolution of the welfare, employment and skills programmes in Germany. I was there talking about A4e's experiences in the UK, Australia, France and Germany. Some interesting questions - not least because I had to have it translated back and forth, curse my lack of language skills!
Few big issues came out, which are similar to other countries where we work, or are developing opportunities
- need to ensure that employme.. View Complete Post Monday 13th July 2009, 15:20Observations on FT article about sickness benefit
The article on the number of people claiming sickness benefit but who are able to make a positive economic contribution and enter the workforce comes as no surprise to those working in welfare over the last 20 years. This should be seen as an opportunity to provide a group of people that has often not had access to personalised job hunting support and, more importantly, assistance with those other barriers (debt, housing etc.) with a route to sustainable employment.
In the late 80's and early 90's many people leaving the manufacturing and coal industries were.. View Complete Post Wednesday 8th April 2009, 15:48Rating A4e's Service
One of the areas we always try and improve is the way we respond to customer feedback. This includes giving a voice to satisfied customers, listening to suggestions for improvement and putting right complaints about services we provide. Broadly the feedback we get falls into three areas:
- Dissatisfaction because we are providing a service badly
- Complaints about the service we provide because our customers do not like the service we have been asked to provide by governments
View Complete Post Tuesday 7th April 2009, 15:15Australia 2Even more exciting news. We had two years of hard work establishing whether we could make an effective contribution to welfare, employment and social policy in Australia. There were a number of long, testing visits to Australia from various members of the teams in UK. At the end of last year, we appointed a senior team in Australia – experts who shared our vision for improving people’s lives – to work on the opportunities under the 2009 ESA tender. And today we were informed we had been successful!
We will be working in three areas – two in Sydney (Eas.. View Complete Post Tuesday 31st March 2009, 16:06Social Policy ReformA lot of press coverage questions whether reforms to social policy - particularly welfare services - should be taken forward in the current economic climate. My own view is that they need to be put in place more quickly but such measures need to be agile and designed to respond to various 'shocks' to the market we see taking place. Predicting unpredictable events is hard but designing flexible solutions, that can be iterated, is core to reducing the impact of recession on those most vulnerable as well as newly unemployed. This sits at the centre of much of our discussion with governments ar.. View Complete Post Monday 23rd March 2009, 08:53AustraliaBusy times as we found out a few days ago that we had been short-listed – alongside 200 other organizations – to help develop innovative approaches to tackling unemployment amongst some of the hardest to help communities in Australia. The Innovation Fund has some interesting similarities to ‘Right to Bid’ in the UK. Over coming days, our team in Australia and the extensive group of people in the UK who have spent time in Australia over the last two years sharing ideas and building our understanding of the market, will be waiting with baited breath for the outcome of .. View Complete Post Friday 16th January 2009, 14:31Green Shoots? Leadership?It’s nice to be able to catch the news anywhere in the world, any time of day. The downside to a 24/7 news cycle is that we get locked into some pretty daft discussions. I was struck by the hammering Baroness Vadera got for daring to talk about green shoots of recovery. This was then picked up and turned into a story around whether business people can make effective politicians or not.
I see green shoots of recovery. I’m not being insensitive to the many thousands of businesses and client I work with at A4e who are still reeling from the impact of the economic downturn ..View Complete Post Wednesday 14th January 2009, 14:05It’s Liquidity – but not as we know it!One of the most important issues we have needed to tackle to minimize the impact of the recession and support those organizations that can create jobs and grow during a recession, is liquidity for business. There have been some scary deals done prior to the credit crunch and over-gearing which has led to businesses being in difficulty. Some will be poorly run. The majority however are businesses which are fine, dealing with a challenging economic environment and need sensible working capital in place to sustain and create jobs.
My job takes me into the financial community and my ro..View Complete Post
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