Letter from Jill to Karen Wooding of MCCH Ltd

MCCH Ltd

Dear Karen Wooding,

Thank you for your mail of October 25th below.

A short time before your mail I did find out from the Primary Care Trust that MCCH Ltd have been doing a consultation on the Old Moat garden centre and have not yet been awarded a contract to run the place. I understand that a report following your consultation is due in December and I have put in a Freedom of Information Act request for our campaign to see this report as soon as it becomes available.



I am glad to hear that MCCH Ltd have never been involved in a situation where service users become worse off financially as a result of any action you have taken. I hope that therefore your report will recommend the disabled workers at the garden centre receive at least 3 hours employed work paying at least the minimum wage or above each week. This would mean that none of them become financially worse off as a result of any new regime that is adopted at the centre. Less than 3 hours paid work a week and they would be better off continuing to receive their, already derisory, £3 a day payments..



As far as your ‘Paying a Real Wage’ guide is concerned it is the extensive use of volunteer labour that is advocated which I consider to be exploitative rather than a model of good practice as you claim. I think that volunteer labour in these work projects is itself a loophole which is used to avoid paying the minimum wage or above. For example in the guide the project Tuck by Truck is used as a model of good practice. In this project the workload is divided into jobs which pay the minimum wage and jobs which are done by volunteers.. Quoting from the report: ‘ The most significant change was to separate the tasks service users carried out into paid and volunteer jobs, so that working at the base preparing the snack trays, stock rotation, pricing etc would be volunteer work, whereas all aspects of delivering the trays to customers would be paid work.’

From this I see no valid reasons, other than avoiding paying the minimum wage or above, why the work producing snack trays, stock rotation and pricing should go unpaid?

It very much sounds like exploitation to expect this kind of work to be done by disabled people for free and I cannot imagine a situation where non disabled people would be expected to volunteer for such tasks. My thinking that this is exploitation is shared in a government guide which I found on the Valuing People website and keep quoting in this campaign. It reads as follows:



From 'You can work it out. Best practice in employment for people with a learning difficulty’:

"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 success in getting people in to paid work remains woefully inadequate. Instead, services have created a world based on work for which few people get paid. There is a growing variety of training, social enterprises, work-related projects, work experience 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 payments. These situations are exploitative."

This guide can be found at: www.valuingpeople.gov.uk



On another matter I do appreciate that the Paying a Real Wage guide does go a long way in explaining the rules concerning working and the impact this has on benefits. This has been an area of some confusion and I believe it would be helpful if MCCH Ltd published this information on the web for those who would find it useful. In this campaign the guide is the only document I have had to send for by snail mail and could not just read freely on the internet. Could you please tell me why MCCH Ltd has failed to put the information concerning benefit rules from the guide onto the web?



The useful information about benefits does not detract from the essential problem of exploiting disabled workers by making them work hard as unpaid volunteers. This seems to be a national problem and a recent report suggested disability is widely being used as an excuse not to pay at least the minimum wage or above.



As far as a meeting with MCCH ltd is concerned we are reluctant to do this in view of your refusal to have the meeting taped as we like to have all communications open and up for everyone to see on the campaign site. However there may be much more to discuss once we have seen a copy of your report on the garden centre in December. We would therefore like to leave your offer of a meeting open for the time being.



It has been the consensus of opinion among campaigners to leave the photos on our site up and the reasons for this you can see in the blog comments online.



Finally can I stress that at the camapign we seek to see that any changes at the Old Moat garden centre will be in the best possible interests of the disabled workers.





Yours Sincerely



Jill Goble

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