CAMPAIGNERS have warned that the sale of Remploy to private US welfare provider Maximus could lead to a “conflict of interest”.
The US company, which has subsidiaries all over the world, was named as the buyer of Remploy last week.
Maximus is already heavily involved in providing Government services.
The company has recently taken over from the much derided ATOS as the company used by the Government to run Work
Capability Assessments, which look into whether a person should receive any form of incapacity benefit.
The group Glasgow Against Maximus has pointed to recent allegations of widespread fraud and manipulation in Australia, where an ABC documentary claimed that Maximus subsidiary Max Employment was putting unemployed workers through pointless training courses to trigger Government grants.
Chairman of the group Sean Clerkin worries that with
Maximus now owning 70 per cent of Remploy, there needs to be full transparency from the company to make sure some similar practices do not happen in the UK.
Clerkin said: “We do worry that there’s a conflict of interest here. These investigations in Australia are of a real concern to us. With Maximus now running both the Work Capability Assessment and the Work Choice scheme and the Work Programme, we need to make sure that there’s transparency and accountability.
“We fear that the real danger is that they’re going to skew the assessments to force people back to work so that they go through Remploy. They then get money through the Government to help get people back to work.”
A spokesman for the DWP said: “There is no foundation to this allegation. Providers do not decide who participates in Government jobs programmes.
“A decision on whether someone is well enough to work is taken by DWP following a thorough assessment and after consideration of all the supporting medical evidence from the claimant’s GP or medical specialist.”
A spokesman for Maximus said that it was unfair to compare the company here with the company in Australia and added:
“Maximus successfully manages the Work Programme in four areas in the UK where we have achieved a total of 17,420 validated job outcomes.
“All Maximus UK businesses operate independently of each other and to the highest levels of professional integrity. Our work is audited by independent external auditors. Decisions relating to referrals to employment support programmes are taken by the Department for Work and Pensions. Maximus has no influence over such decisions. Participation in Work Choice is entirely voluntary.”
Maximus is expected to take over Remploy in April.
A spokesman for the DWP said that the company will be funded to deliver Work Choice “on basis of a service fee and outcome payments as with any other contracted Work Choice provider”.
The news of Maximus’s involvement in Remploy was announced last week with little fanfare. It was, the Government stressed, a partnership rather than a take-over. Maximus will have 70 per cent of the company, and employees within Remploy Employment Services have a collective 30 per cent stake in the partnership. The move means that, for the first time in Remploy’s history, it is free from Government control.
The “commercial process” was announced by the Minister for Employment last year. The DWP refused to reveal details of the Maximus deal, claiming that the information was commercially sensitive.
When asked by The National if the DWP looked into the allegations against Maximus, a DWP spokesman said: “Comprehensive due diligence and scrutiny was undertaken by all parties as part of the commercial process.”
Remploy was established 70 years ago to provide training and employment after the second world war for injured and disabled ex-servicemen and miners.
By 2011/12 the factories were employing 2,150 disabled people across 54 factories. The workers made everything from school furniture to parts for cars. The coalition Government ended subsidies to the factories in 2012, believing that other schemes such as Access to Work were a more efficient use of public funds.
Although there was political support for change, there was criticism over how the change was managed. The Government was accused of closing the factories at “breakneck speed” by Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liam Byrne.
“These factories are in constituencies where twice as many people as the national average are chasing every single job,” Byrne said.
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