Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The dark side of the Big Society

The A4e scandal is getting worse. Emma Harrison has quit as David Cameron’s back-to-work tsar, the police are still investigating a case discovered last year and there’s a suggestion their investigation is widening. This is, for David Cameron, the dark side of the Big Society. In my Daily Telegraph column today, I explain why.

‘The Big Society’ is a silly name for a good idea: that lots of companies, charities, etc will help provide government services. They are given freedom to innovate, to create — and the freedom to get things badly wrong. This is the freedom which A4e seems to have availed itself of. It grew like crazy, perhaps too fast. Its internal audit procedure found four staff who had been falsely claiming to get people back in work. It fessed up to the DWP, and presented the findings to the Thames Valley police.

It doesn’t really matter that the fraud was committed under the Labour years, under contracts signed by the Labour government, on a paper-based system which A4e itself warned was wide open to fraud.

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