That was a question a friend asked me recently. And then a rather rude anonymous commenter said more or less the same thing. The answer is, I don't know because it's all gone very quiet. There were two recent ads for jobs with A4e in the prison education service in the south of England. They're using the agency Randstad to advertise these jobs, which means, unusually for A4e, that the salaries are given. But that's about it. Nothing more has been heard about the Slough fraud case. Over the course of a year, from February 2012 to February this year, a total of 11 people from the Slough A4e office have been arrested over allegations of fraud that were apparently brought to light by A4e itself. The legal process in this country can grind very slowly, but this is getting a bit silly. No more financial information is available; accounts and returns are only published once a year. The last lot showed the company in deep trouble. And A4e is definitely not courting publicity at the moment.
There are contracts out there. G4S have just got the contract to run two support centres for rape and sex attack victims in the West Midlands. But most of the action is in areas of activity where A4e doesn't have a track record, and the pickings are slim.
There's a lot riding on the Work Programme for the company. Unless they have started making a reasonable profit they're really in trouble. We'll have some indication of this next month.
