Open debate with Sainsbury Centre & NIMHE
Dear Helen,
I am a lifelong MH service user - first referred to services and a language therapist aged 5 following being abused in a childrens home at age 3 - and I routinely employ another MH service user to drive me to and from part time illegal gardening jobs.
I say illegal as I dont get any benefits and I wont jump through hoops for anyone. I live a gypsy lifestyle , I knock on peoples doors to ask whether they want their grass cut or junk removed because I just want to get my rent paid but I have a background in economics and IT that I just cant cope with making money from.
My friend is on Prozac and he rarely manages to turn up on time but I continue to deepend on and employ him because he is my friend and I dont drive. My friend tells me that Prozac stops him worrying about anything. I accept this as prozac made me cry all the time , feel suicidal and sleep for most of the day.
I cant talk to my friend about time keeping because he feels picked on when I do and gets agressive.
Today he turned up two and a half hours late for a job.
I share everything I earn with him 50/50.
My other friends respect me for helping my friend Helen as he is their friend too. Some of them arrange jobs for us to do, others just get me the odd pint and say thanks for looking after ---------.
You just cut the wages to people who were essentially working at the Surrey & Borders Old Moat Garden Centre for a pittance. As someone who is the type of person your policies project at I now publicly challenge you, Dr Bob Groves and Jenny Secker to an open debate, a question and answers session on employment and training issues for ordinary MH service users.
I have worked in the Disability Employment & Training field and think my experience at least equals yours. You theorise. I have experience.
I wont claim a penny Helen so there will be absolutely no need for you to worry about my lack of productivity and profitability . I wont insult you by asking how productive and profitable you have been either. We could even have the conversation here - three learned academics against a mad man - why not?
We could have that debate or I could have it with your funders.
I think you owe the Old Moat Centre Garden Centre workers an apology Helen. People stopped working there as a result of your actions. You have made no effort to address this in your intelectual response, indeed it comes across as a letter that could have been written by a bureaucrat experimenting on people with disabilities as part of the Final Solution.
posted by simply human @ 11:40 pm
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I've spent a while ploughing through 92 pages of a Department of health document on the National Service Framework for Mental Health- 5 years on and other papers Helen mentions to try to find what is this 'internationally recognised evidence based practice'she has based the 'modernisation' on? Because in my readings of the last couple of months all I've seen is confused policies and practices right across the 'supported work'/ 'sheltered workshop'/ whatever you call it scene. Even the government itself admit there is a lot of exploitation going on :http://www.valuingpeople.gov.uk/EmploymentGuides.htm
Written by the government itself.
'You can work it out: Best practice in employment for people with a learning disability'
And this is a direct quote from this guide:
'As services seek to help people find more meaningful activities than sitting around in day centres,
employment is acknowledged as playing a crucial role in people's lives. But sucess in getting
people in to paid work remains woefully inadequate. Instead, services have created a world based
on work for which few people are paid. There is a growing variety of training, social enterprises,
work-related projects, work experience, workshops and volunteering schemes. There are people who to all intents and purposes are working, but who receive little or no payment.
This is illegal unless there is genuinely no obligation to attend and no obligation to do anything...
There are people who are described as volunteering-this conveniently gets around the issue of
employment contracts and payment. There are people who do work experience on an indefinite basis
and never get paid. These situations are exploitative.'
I don't think Helen and any of the other high salaried managers begins to understand the different an extra £3 a day or £15 a week can make to a person on benefits and a low income already. It isn't enough for a night out to the threatre or concert ticket or a meal out in a restaurant but maybe it'll pay for a take away instead of beans on toast one night. Maybe saved up it would buy a computer and internet connection and the disabled worker could come on the internet and make friends with us and all the other support groups around the WWW now. Maybe they just want to be able to buy their round at the pub Friday night. And supposing some people were relying on that £15 to pay their leccy meter? Supposing without the £15 they had to sit in the dark all week? Taking away £15 a week from people on the lowest incomes in society already and then saying you are complying more effectively with the DDA and NMW Acts is such a cheap shot towards those who are already disadvantaged and exploited.
Well we will see. I have a lot more dull papers to read through before replying to both Kinsey and Helen Lockett. I wouldn't mind if they agreed to have a debate with us but we might need an interpreter for the newspeak jargon language they write and presumably speak in.
I just need more time ( being a lowly person with mental health difficulities and not an expert like Helen) to summarise all the issues in my head. How many weeks is it now that our disabled workers have been without their £3 a day pay? Seems like ages doesn't it. Sorry I haven't done that thing about being able to write blogs on here myself yet. I am supponing up the bottle to try it out. Watch this space!
Have a good night.
Jill,
Dr Helen Lockett is well aware of the confusion around definitions of and payments for ' employment and training' yet note how she, like Mr Kinsey before her, cites ' modern practices without actually explaining what these are, who is practising them or how the logical distinctions that flow from them work in practice.
I also note that having people work to the ' permitted work rules ' plays no part in Helen's dogmatic take on what she thinks service users should be doing in terms of employment ,training and other activities.
Wonder why.
It seems to me that Dr Lockett's sole aim is to get people off benefits and into work in pursuit of the £7 billion that Lord Layard has advised the Government the economy is losing through people with MH issues being on benefits.
In other words, Dr Lockett is simply involved in targetting people.
That's great if service users want to and can cope with 9 to 5 jobs but many cant and its these people Helen and her chums are trampling over.
Helen Lockett has just disruptively shook up the Old Moat garden day centre because she realised that it was a potentially a very ' productive and profitable ' project being used by people who were probably not going to progress into mainstream employment so she fixed that and them and now she hopes that the Richmond Fellowship will be able to use the garden centre to propel people with MH issues into work on an industrial scale.
As for the 'internationally recognised evidence' I think Helen is referring to the international SHIFT conference where NIMHE managed to rope in a Chinese and an Albanian student ( where from I wonder ) and have the usual suspects pretend that their presence gave the meeting some kind of ' international' academic validity .
Like, the Chinese guy spoke on behalf of 1.5 billion people.
This 'international conference ' revolved around 'Stigma' and yet it is people like Dr Helen Lockett doing most of the stigmatising as we see from the treatment of those whom. by implcation , she saw as non productive and unprofitable at the Old Moat Garden Centre.
That international conference also had nothing to do with science or caring, it was the NIMHE equivalent of the Nuremburg Rally, a dodgy rabble rousing political event, only without any public involvment or interest and where each and every NIMHE candidate gor to be the Fuheur for 15 minutes.
MH service users were paid to speak and attend and I understand that Helen had to be forcibly restrained to prevent her bursting on stage to protest about them being paid without being productive or adding to NIMHE's profits.
Indeed we could shut down most of the voluntary and public sectors tomorrow if we took up Helen's claim that payments should always be related to productivity and profitability.
Indeed Surrey & Borders NHS Trust had problems balancing their budgets last year implying that perhaps it needs abolishing as well.
In fact, if Helen's ' If it aint productive nor profitable, Waste it! ' take is to be the benchmark NIMHE looks set for the chop as well as its neither productive nor profitable in the classical economic sense , its simply operating at a £20 million loss.
So yes, lets scrap NIMHE and then apply the same skewed economic rationale to the MH charity sector and academia.
Anyone know how much Mind made last year? Did it outperform Rethink ?
Perhaps we can transform the grant awarding bodies that fund charities and quackademics like Dr Lockett into venture capitalists as well to stop organisations like the great Gatsby Foundation wasting good money on non-productive types like her.
Funny how the the Lockettian view of the world excludes Dr Helen Lockett's own non-productive and unprofitable role within it. Perhaps we should replace Helen with something which has greater utility or exchange value.
A rocking horse perhaps or a beef burger...
I do think we have to look at the costs but I'll have to go into all that later. At the moment I'm still reading throguh the reports and here is an of example of what is called 'good practice' cited by the Dept of Health Document 'The National Service
Framework for Mental
Health – Five Years On
December 2004':
Positive practice
Social inclusion
South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust employs over a hundred people with
severe and enduring mental health problems on the same terms and conditions as other staff. It has
increased its employment rate for this group since 1995... Occupational therapists and employment specialists work within the clinical teams to enable more
people with severe mental health problems to access open employment and mainstream education.
Ongoing support is included in care plans, with a focus on individual choice. In 2003–04, the Trust supported 271 people into open paid employment.
COMMENT:
Now this example shows a trust that supported 271 people into open paid employment including 100 into it's own NHS jobs. How many people has Helen Lockett and Peter Kinsey's modernisation supported into paid employment? As far as we know the answer is NONE. The 179 people who work in the priority enterprises now have their status reduced to 'volunteers' in Helen Locketts letter and they have lost their already derisory £3 a day pay in the bargain.
I am not saying that everyone wants to go into work with proper contracts, pay, conditions and union rights but that it is discriminatory to devise a 'modernisation' which excludes increased opportunities for employment for the disabled people it is ment to be 'improving services' for.
Havn't had much time being busy with other things until after next Wednesday but I've searched on voluntary workers rights as Helen Lockett is now calling the disabled garden centre workers 'volunteers. To be honest there does not seem to be much protecting volunteer workers from exploitation. The most protection I can find is in Codes of Good Practice which say that the volunteers should not be made to do work that would otherwise be done by paid workers. They also say that volunteers should be reimbursed expenses for travel costs ,food and drink costs and materials like special clothes needed to do the volunteering. They also say volunteers should be insured and should have the right to join workplace unions.
The more I think about it the more I feel these pseudo workplaces are discriminatory towards the disabled in the sense that no equivalent organisations exist for non disabled people. Nowhere is there organisations set up as pseudo businesses just to keep non disabled people occupied in manual labour as volunteers. In fact non disabled people would scoff at the idea of working on production lines and in other manual labour businesses wihout proper pay and conditions. The majority of volunteer positions are for charities and good causes and only 13% are in commercial organisations. And the people who do volunteering in commercial organisations are usually in highly competitive industries like the media where people do volunteering in the hope to get more experience on their CVs to get a job later. But these manual labour positions in Priority enterprises are hardly likely to secure the disabled workers future employment in fact according to Kinsey in the last five years four former disabled workers have been employed officially as members of staff. That is four out of the total of 179 dissbled workers attending at any one time. Not a very good percentage chance of getting a real job from this volunteering then is there.
Part of the Disability Discrimination Act is that it is discriminatory to trat the disabled differently from the way non disabled people are treated and I do feel all these pseudo work style enterprises are definitely treating us differently.
On the status of Garden Centre 'Workers', the following is from Partenership People, an SABP newsletter . It was published prior to £3 payments being cut.
Fourteen people who use services and who work at the Old Moat Garden Centre at west Park Epsom have successfully completed the skills for Working Life ( Retail Level 3 ) qualification. The Old Moat Garden Centre provides work experience and training for clients with a learning difficulty or mental health needs.
I will send you a copy and you will see that the article refers to the same workers who had the £3 payments taken away from them.
It seems to me that Trust management and the Sainsbury Centre quackademics are retrospectively applying whichever status label best serves their current purpose.
Jill in case you missed the link, read this for insight into attitude towards users of services earmarked for externalisation.
One of the alternative options for local authorities is to externalise the management and operation of the service to an employee controlled not for profit organisation.
Key issues for the Local Authority
* Keeping the service operational
* Cost savings
* Political acceptability
* Reduced demand on central services
* Ownership
* Meeting Best Value criteria
* Long term control over quality of service delivery
* Staff consultation
* Transfer of undertakings
* Trade Unions
* Acceptability to the users.
Key issues for Staff
* Job security
* Employment conditions & pensions
* Training needs
* Commitment to service.
Potential Opportunities and Benefits
* for the Local Authority:
* Avoid spiral of cuts and long term decline of services to the community
* Financial savings though taxation
* Surpluses can be reinvested (ring fenced budgets)
* Council can retain assets
* Independent organisation can attract external funding and act as partner with authority in bidding
* Jobs are retained and kept local
* Ideology fits with council commitment to services, employee empowerment and customer focused service provision.
* for the Staff:
* Retaining jobs
* Empowerment and ownership
* Better training and development opportunities
* Faster and more flexible decision making
Necessary conditions
* Need for change (catalyst e.g. funding cuts, redundancies, reorganisation)
* LA members and lead officers commitment to finding alternative ways for service delivery
* Business viability of service as independent operation
* Staff and Trade Unions' commitment
* User acceptability
* Ability of the organisation and the people to change and to deliver
* Availability of advice
Process
* Committee agreement to investigate option
* Feasibility study
* Initial staff consultation
* Trade Union consultation
* Committee agreement in principle
* Detailed Proposal including Business Plan
* Staff and management skills analysis
* Comprehensive staff consultation
* Indicative balloting of staff
* Agreement with Trade Unions
* Detailed Committee agreement to go ahead
* Secret ballot of all staff
* Staff and management training programmes
* Legal structure in place
* Contractual arrangements in place
* Management of seamless transfer
Role of Advisors
The transfer team would use both internal and external advisors during the process. Main areas where advice would be required:
* Business development
* Legal issues, including suitable legal structure, contracts, transfer of undertakings
* Taxation & VAT
* Pensions
* Participative management models
* Staff and management training and development
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