Another 1 Bites the Dust...

[Grapplin]

Service for jobless in Devizes closes down

7:00am Sunday 19th August 2012

Vocation Quest, the Devizes organisation set up to get unemployed people back into work, has closed as a result
of the Government’s Work Programme.
Founder and chief executive Sue Jordan said that the organisation had had its day and was not in tune with the
Coalition’s ethos of ‘work or else’.
http://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/9880512.Service_for_jobless_in_Devizes_closes_down/

[Lazy Cow]

Hi Grapplin

Thanks for the information about Sue Jordan and Vocation Quest.   I do feel very sorry for Ms Jordan and for all the other owners of the small business subcontractors (eg the two ladies who were running Eco-Actif.)   My own feeling is that for any W2W business that is smaller than the Primes, it is time to get out of the W2W industry altogether and find something different to do with oneself. 

Grayling has made it clear that he doesn't give a damn if the small providers are forced out of business by the Work Programme scheme.  The Primes don't give a damn about it either - the Primes will treat the collapses of their subbies as an excuse to explain away the Primes' own failure to deliver on the Work Programme scheme, I expect.

LC

[Gissajob]

Hi LC
I'm not sure how sorry to feel for the proprietors/owners of these businesses/charities (the boundaries between the two seem blurred to me).  I can't help having a lingering suspicion that some have entered the  welfare to workfare industry in the hope of emulating Enemma H. and making a killing. 
I have no proof just a feeling that all these people aren't the benign philanthrops they would have us believe.

[Lazy Cow]

Hi Gissajob

Thanks for replying. 

I'm not convinced that the owners of the small subcontractors (Vocation Quest, Eco-Actif and Emplacement Solutions merely being three that i have heard about) expected any great wealth.  However, I do think they probably expected that the W2W industry would continue to provide them with a comfortable living, probably indefinitely.

Commercially, they have all shown themselves to be No Wopers as Afferbeck Lauder used to say.  It was entirely forseeable that the Payment By Results idea would not work for anyone except the government.  Nonetheless, the providers all leapt into the trap. 

Why?  Why didn't they foresee the inevitable? 

I don't know any of the providers well enough to be able to get to the bottom of why it is that they got their calculations so badly wrong.  I suppose that not knowing what makes these people tick inclines me to feel sorry for them.  Were they/are they all just hopelesly naive and gullible, one wonders? 

LC

[Gissajob]

Hi Judi
Difficult to ascertain their motives - some may well have been altruistic but I suspect most were in it for the cash.
One of the casualties of this whole WP debacle is the charitable sector.  The blurring of the lines between true charity, charities with well paid boards and senior employees, not for profit companies (which may well have very well paid employees) and commercial companies masquerading as "social purpose" companies has done nothing but harm.

I have given to charity BUT I will never do so again without first checking that they have absolutly no WP or Workfare involvement.

[Grapplin]

LC:

It was entirely forseeable that the Payment By Results idea would not work for anyone except the government.  Nonetheless, the providers all leapt into the trap.

I can't see any economic sense in the WP me self, in fact the more I look at it the more I think it was just a scam
from the start. (am I allowed to say that here? :-)

LC:

Why?  Why didn't they foresee the inevitable?

I think the anwers depend on whether you mean the big providers or the subs.
Don't forget that there's still ppl. who're convinced the reason there's 5.4 million on out of work benefits is because
they just don't want to work, or that they've chosen a benefits lifestyle.