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Sunday, September 03, 2006

Modernisation Without Clarity

Its becoming increasingly clear from Jill's research that there is a total lack of clarity regarding the status and lot of the Old Moat Garden Centre workers and every reason to expect that they are being exploited in a way a recent Government report complained about simply to keep the garden centre ticking over until its transferred to the Richmond Fellowship, a Mental Health Charity with, according to its website anyway, no clear stated interest in or experience of working with people with learning difficulties .

The Richmond Fellowship , whose slogan 'MakingRecoveryReality ' flags up a certain bias towards the more able and recoverable, has this to say about itself.

Every year Richmond Fellowship (RF) helps thousands of people to gain a new sense of purpose and fulfilment in lives that have often been devastated by mental health problems, sometimes associated with sexual abuse or drug and alcohol misuse.

RF's roots are in the therapeutic communities that sprang up after the two world wars, helping homecoming soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or shellshock as it was then known; early RF services adapted this model to enable young people with severe mental health problems to live outside hospital, in the community, following a structured recovery programme.

We have come a long way since the setting up of our first service and now have over 100 specialist facilities. These include 24 hour nursed bed units, community housing, workschemes, family units and outreach schemes, all of which are designed to restore an individual's sense of security and purpose.

On this website the people who use our services and the staff who make this work possible share with you their unique experiences.


This is what the Richmond Fellowship has to say about its employment and training services.


RFET runs a range of services providing rehabilitation, training, work experience and support into employment. Its clients are people with mental health problems and other disabilities who have been or are at risk of being excluded from the labour market as a result of poor mental health.

RFET offers three main models of service. These three models are:

Supported Work Experience

These services offer supported work experience through in-house work placements that provide a range of work skills, tailored to individual needs.

Support Into Employment

Formerly known as QEST, RFET’s Employment Support teams help people with mental health problems to find suitable training or employment and to gain any help that may be needed in the workplace. People can refer themselves or be referred by their social or healthcare worker. Clients are linked with an Employment Advisor who works in partnership with them to achieve their training and employment goals.

Into Work

Into Work provides an integrated service offering both employment advice and internal work placements and allows clients to receive a truly needs-led service. Where circumstances allow, Into Work is RFET’s preferred model of service delivery. All clients are allocated to an Employment Advisor who, along with the client, develops an action plan to help the client achieve their goals. Clients can access all or parts of the service. If appropriate to their current needs, clients may choose to do an internal work placement in a supported environment. These placements are provided in a modern setting that allows clients to develop skills relevant to the workplace. Clients can later move onto external work placements and/or employment.

Where appropriate clients may decide that they do not need an internal work placement and choose to go straight into an external work placement or undertake voluntary work or be supported directly into employment.

All clients have access to our in-house training programmes, which help clients to further develop their work skills and confidence. The integrated service model offers a service, which clients can enter at a point appropriate to their individual skills and ability and progress through to open employment.

RFET's three models of service provide:

* Work experience in the local community
* Work and employment in commercial settings for people needing long-term support
* Vocational rehabilitation and training
* Career guidance and support into open employment

Click here to see a listing of our services


Given the dishonesty of the Surrey & Borders Trust and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health throughout the so called 'Modernisation' process and the Richmond Fellowship's refusal to address public concern by clarifying its intentions , one senses that the future for the current Old Moat Garden Centre workers is anything but secure.Indeed we already know from Peter Kinsey that some service users stopped working at the garden centre after the £3 daily payments were cut and they were expected to work for nothing.It's also been almost 5 months since that happened so Dr Lockett's notion that the garden centre workers are still training or doing work experience as volunteers is nonsense she just doesnt want to acknowledge their work as productive or profitable.

posted by simply human @ 8:36 am   Listen to this article Listen to this article 5 comments

5 Comments:

At 2:06 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

We are moving on quickly. I was thinking of replying to one of your comments on the previous blog entries and now I see this whole new one here...
I cannot prove how productive the disabled workers are in the priority enterprises because Peter Kinsey neglected to give me the sales figures for any of the projects.
He made it clear that none of the enterprises make a profit although I'm sure Travel Matters must have been or they wouldn't have been able to turn it into a going concern as a limited company.
Mr Kinseys figures concerning the costs and subsidies to the projects are a little strange. He says the costs as a whole are £1.3 million. That works out as £7262.56 per disabled person over the whole 179 disabled workers attending. That is £139.66 costs per disabled worker per week. So in order for the disabled workers to have to slog away doing unskilled manual labour for nothing in priority enterprises £139.66 is being paid out on salaries of supervisors and managers and running costs. A real commercial business could not run with these kind of losses for long without going bankrupt but the NHS and social services have budgets to provide services for people with learning difficulties and mental health problems and they chose to pay for these projects which do not offer any real job prospects or good conditions of work.
Even after the 'modernisation' when the garden centres have been transfered to the voluntary sector (Mr Kinsey assures me this is in line with government policy) the costs have been reduced to
£500,000 or £4000 per disabled worker per year. This is still over £75 per disabled person per week in subsidies. The Old Moat itself costs £150,000 net of sales income.
From these figures we can see that however productive the disabled workers in the priority enterprises are and however good the sales figures generated by their hard work, their labour can never be profitable because of the high levels of running costs and subsidising the salaries of the supervisors and managers. But while the managers and supervisors salaries have stayed the same the disabled workers have been penalised by having their £3 a day wages taken away. This has ment a £139,620 saving a year in the running costs but it has not 'modernised' the projects to make them more commercially viable or likely to provide any kind of 'real' jobs with contracts of employment and wages for the disabled workers.
In no other area of life can I see any equivalent examples where non disabled people are subsidised to do manual labour for no wages.
The more I look at this issue the more discriminatory do I feel these work projects are towards disabled people. The 'modernisation' has not improved the exploitative and discriminatory nature of the work projects. It has not improved the chance of obtaining real jobs for those who want the opportunities and it has not improved the levels of care for the more vulnerable.

 
At 5:04 pm, Blogger simply human said...

Jill,

I didnt mean productive in a purely economic sense, Dr Lockett introduced that definition. A garden centre is a perfect environment to consider a much broader range of 'productivity and profitability' in terms of growing plants and people to help them achieve their full potential as well as selling price.

Not all beautiful flowers sell in the marketplace. That's the reality.

On subsidies, the Government used to subsidise employers to take on and train disabled people , now it subsidises the charity sector to pretend to provide quality training on the cheap and almost find people jobs.

This whole area is a mess.

 
At 5:48 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I get your point but if this is about disabled people achieving their potential by growing plants they could do this at a fraction of the economic cost given a few allotments or around NHS property gardens or in the gardens of day centres (which we know are now being closed down for economic reasons regardless of need). If people want training in horticulture then there are many courses run by local authorities and specialist colleges where trainees cannot be excluded because they are disabled. My objection on economic grounds is that the garden centre although set up to be a 'commercial' organisation ,and from the aerial picture we have it is a large industrial style operation, is being subsidised to the tune of £150000 and is still not paying the disabled workers anything for all the hard work they have to do.
Perhaps I have become too disillusioned with the whole 'supported work' sector but it just does not make sense to me to use subsidies to make disabled people have to engage in manual labour style jobs for no wages, no contracts of employment, no prospects and basically no rights.
Like you say the whole area is a mess.

 
At 8:40 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I woke up this morning with an idea about this campaign. So far we have been asking for the managers to reinstate the £3 a day payment they have taken away from the priority enterprises disabled workers. But I don't believe they will in case this goes against the minimum pay act. This is explained in the reply I had some time ago from the Low Pay Unit as follows:

'The Low Pay Commission has looked at the issue of therapeutic activity in its previous reports and is aware that there can be problems where people undertaking therapeutic activity are paid a small amount of money. The Department of Trade and Industry has prepared a detailed guidance note on this area entitled 'The National Minimum Wage and Therapeutic Work', which is available on its website at http://www.dti.gov.uk/employment/pay/national-minimum-wage/Further-Guidance/page21693.html

The guidance explains the intention behind the legislation, which was to protect workers by ensuring that it was not possible for certain categories of people to be paid at a rate less than the minimum wage. This does mean that it is difficult for organisations such as NHS Trusts to continue the practices they may have had prior to the minimum wage i.e. to pay a small amount of money to people undertaking therapeutic activities, as it could imply that these people are workers for minimum wage purposes, and therefore they must be paid the minimum wage.'

The thing is why can't SABPT employ the disabled workers according to Minimum Wage rules and proper contracts of employment in part time jobs for 3 hours a week each? This would give them back their £15 a week and they could be volunteers/trainees/undertaking work experience/undertaking therapeutic activities or whatever else the trust wants to call it for the rest of the time they want to spend at the projects. This would also give the disabled workers proper contracts of employment, conditions of work and it would not be going against benefits regs which say people can earn up to £20 per week before their claim is affected. Instead of trying to avoid employing the workers the trust should welcome the opportunity to employ everyone on this part time basis. There should also be opportunities for progression to full time positions if and when each disabled worker is confident enough to risk going off benefits and onto full time wages. The part time work the disabled workers are asked to do would not have to be limited to priority enterprises activities but could be spread out around the NHS trusts real departments as well.
The trust will probably ignore this suggestion but by December they will have to face up to the following Disability Equality Duty:

The Disability Equality Duty
From December 2006, there will be a new legal duty on all public sector organisations to promote equality of opportunity for disabled people.


Public sector organisations include:

libraries
hospitals
schools and colleges
National Health Service (NHS) trusts
police forces
central and local government
The Disability Equality Duty covers the full range of what public sector organisations do – including policy making and services that are delivered to the public.

People who work in the public sector will have to consider the impact of their work on disabled people, and take action to tackle disability inequality. This should mean that disabled people have better employment opportunities and do not come across discrimination when, for example, using a service. It will also help promote positive attitudes towards disabled people in everyday life.

To make sure this happens, public authorities must publish a ‘Disability Equality Scheme’ by 4 December 2006 - except primary schools in England (December 2007) and all schools in Wales (April 2007). The scheme must include:

a statement of how disabled people have been involved in developing the scheme
an action plan that includes practical ways in which improvements will be made
the arrangements in place for gathering information about how the public sector organisation has done in meeting its targets on disability equality

The way things are going we will probably still be campaigning in December and we will be the first to know if the Trust has not complied with it's Disability Equality Duty. They should make a start now by employing all the disabled workers part time for 3 hours a week each and then developing a good service that offers REAL JOBS NOT UNPAID SLAVE LABOUR.

 
At 12:56 pm, Blogger simply human said...

Jill,

Am dashing out but wanted to share that I misread the original post title - the big orange one up above - as ' Modernisation Without Charity rather than Clarity ' and thought, yes, in line with the points you are making there is a real need to stop the charity sector self-interestedly inserting itself between service users and the jobs they are able and want to do.

I've also posted elsewhere about the structural barriers to employment thrown up by NHS Trusts, which are largescale employers , creating hermetically sealed training and work experience ' ghettos' for service users or, at the other extreme, linking amd restricting user employment to user involvment roles.

I like the part time work solution , permitted work as well as there has to be greater flexibility that reflects people's circumstances and needs rather than the DWP and NIMHE's 5 year plan.

 

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