A chilly spring morning in 2010 and in A4e’s Edinburgh office, staff employed by Emma Harrison — David Cameron’s fallen ‘back to work’ tsar — were in the midst of a full-blown panic.
The cause of the crisis at the employment agency’s gleaming training centre was plain enough. Within hours,Specializes in rapid Injection mold and molding of parts for prototypes and production. Government inspectors would be arriving to check that Harrison’s multi-million-pound 'welfare-to-work' company was fulfilling its contractual obligations and using 180million worth of Government money to help thousands of unemployed back to work.
But the problem, as former team manager Amy Rae recalls all too well, was that despite the outward boasts of A4e chairwoman Harrison that she could single-handedly tackle the problem of Britain’s unemployed, in this case they were lacking training facilities — and, indeed, training staff.
So while the company had received 950 for every jobless person referred to them by the JobCentre, instead of training them up and helping them back to work under its Community Task Force programmes, they’d sent them home.
‘Our management never authorised funding to pay for the training sessions we were meant to be doing,Design & Build the Highest Quality Precision injection molds. despite several requests,’ recalls 40-year-old Amy, who later informed Mrs Harrison of all that she witnessed.
‘There was nothing we could do with these young people. It was heart-breaking because these were unemployed 18 to 24-year-olds, full of hope, desperate to get training so they could get a job. They believed we would help them.’
Faced with an impromptu visit by inspectors from the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP), Amy, who worked for the company for six years and was in charge of 23 staff, needed to act quickly.
‘I had to stage-manage a completely bogus training session, complete with a fake chart. It was awful. It was all lies, a facade.Museum Quality hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas. We just pretended,’ she admits.
She was told to borrow people from another A4e course in the building and persuade them to claim — if they were asked — they were attending her course. She says: ‘I was told: “Don’t worry about it. Get the training room sorted. It will be fine.”’
It wasn’t the last time Amy says she had to stage fake training sessions (in a room where Mrs Harrison’s face beamed down from a framed photo). She also alleges A4e was claiming bounties of up to 2,000 from the taxpayer for finding people jobs that lasted for only a few days.
‘People would be found a job on a construction site that only lasted a day,’ she says, ‘and that was enough to claim the money. It was easy because there was just a tick-box on the form to say the job was “expected to last at least 13 weeks”, but often labourers were being put out of work again after 24 hours.’
And, most worrying of all, the farcical situation at A4e’s Edinburgh office was by no means unique.Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs.
Over the past two weeks, the Mail has travelled up and down the country speaking to those who have worked for A4e, which started running welfare-to-work schemes under New Labour — Mrs Harrison was made a CBE in 2010 — and has flourished under the Coalition.
They paint a damning picture of a company whose former staff at its Slough office are being investigated by police. Four people have been arrested amid suspicions that the Government was being billed for placing people in jobs that never existed or were fleeting.
In the wake of those arrests, Emma Harrison quit as David Cameron’s unpaid adviser and, a day later, resigned as chairman of her own company, though she has not given up her 85 per cent shareholding.
Government contracts secured by the company and paid for by taxpayers have provided mother-of-four Harrison with a life of luxury, a personal fortune estimated at 70million, a 7million stately home and a fleet of expensive cars. Earlier this year, there was uproar when it was revealed she had paid herself 8.6million of mainly taxpayers’ cash in company dividends.This page contains information about molds,
The cause of the crisis at the employment agency’s gleaming training centre was plain enough. Within hours,Specializes in rapid Injection mold and molding of parts for prototypes and production. Government inspectors would be arriving to check that Harrison’s multi-million-pound 'welfare-to-work' company was fulfilling its contractual obligations and using 180million worth of Government money to help thousands of unemployed back to work.
But the problem, as former team manager Amy Rae recalls all too well, was that despite the outward boasts of A4e chairwoman Harrison that she could single-handedly tackle the problem of Britain’s unemployed, in this case they were lacking training facilities — and, indeed, training staff.
So while the company had received 950 for every jobless person referred to them by the JobCentre, instead of training them up and helping them back to work under its Community Task Force programmes, they’d sent them home.
‘Our management never authorised funding to pay for the training sessions we were meant to be doing,Design & Build the Highest Quality Precision injection molds. despite several requests,’ recalls 40-year-old Amy, who later informed Mrs Harrison of all that she witnessed.
‘There was nothing we could do with these young people. It was heart-breaking because these were unemployed 18 to 24-year-olds, full of hope, desperate to get training so they could get a job. They believed we would help them.’
Faced with an impromptu visit by inspectors from the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP), Amy, who worked for the company for six years and was in charge of 23 staff, needed to act quickly.
‘I had to stage-manage a completely bogus training session, complete with a fake chart. It was awful. It was all lies, a facade.Museum Quality hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas. We just pretended,’ she admits.
She was told to borrow people from another A4e course in the building and persuade them to claim — if they were asked — they were attending her course. She says: ‘I was told: “Don’t worry about it. Get the training room sorted. It will be fine.”’
It wasn’t the last time Amy says she had to stage fake training sessions (in a room where Mrs Harrison’s face beamed down from a framed photo). She also alleges A4e was claiming bounties of up to 2,000 from the taxpayer for finding people jobs that lasted for only a few days.
‘People would be found a job on a construction site that only lasted a day,’ she says, ‘and that was enough to claim the money. It was easy because there was just a tick-box on the form to say the job was “expected to last at least 13 weeks”, but often labourers were being put out of work again after 24 hours.’
And, most worrying of all, the farcical situation at A4e’s Edinburgh office was by no means unique.Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs.
Over the past two weeks, the Mail has travelled up and down the country speaking to those who have worked for A4e, which started running welfare-to-work schemes under New Labour — Mrs Harrison was made a CBE in 2010 — and has flourished under the Coalition.
They paint a damning picture of a company whose former staff at its Slough office are being investigated by police. Four people have been arrested amid suspicions that the Government was being billed for placing people in jobs that never existed or were fleeting.
In the wake of those arrests, Emma Harrison quit as David Cameron’s unpaid adviser and, a day later, resigned as chairman of her own company, though she has not given up her 85 per cent shareholding.
Government contracts secured by the company and paid for by taxpayers have provided mother-of-four Harrison with a life of luxury, a personal fortune estimated at 70million, a 7million stately home and a fleet of expensive cars. Earlier this year, there was uproar when it was revealed she had paid herself 8.6million of mainly taxpayers’ cash in company dividends.This page contains information about molds,
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