The Saturday before Christmas I spotted a
BBC website article about the government instructing Jobcentre staff in Salisbury and Gloucester to give out vouchers for food parcels in a pilot project that would expand across England, Wales and Scotland this Spring. The vouchers could be redeemed against food parcels from the Trussell Trust...
... The Trussell Trust describes itself as “a Christian charity that does not affiliate itself with any political party”. It is controlled by Tory Party Councillor and Mayor of Worthing, Neil Atkins and director Chris Mould, who splits his time between the Trussell Trust and the Shaftesbury Partnership. According to its website the Shaftesbury Partnership is a “social business” and a “practice of professionals committed to large scale 21st Century social reform.”...
...The Shaftesbury Partnership’s aim is to “
design our solutions so that they are both scalable and have sustainable business models, maximising the potential for social transformation”...
...One of the charities set up by Shaftesbury’s
Nat Wei and Patrick Shine is “
Challenge Network”, whose chief executive and co-founder
Craig Morley has worked for mining company Rio Tinto and Pampers-to-Pringles consumer-goods giant Proctor & Gamble. The Challenge Network
got the lion’s share of David Cameron’s Tory Party Big Society Policy of National Citizens Service, to send English Children to camps this summer
at a cost of £1,182 per child.
Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson also sent funds — a £100,000 grant — the Challenge Network’s way.
Like three of the Shaftesbury Partnership key people, two of the Challenge Network’s co-founders are McKinsey men.
My head was now swimming with Tory party chums.
I took myself back to the simple announcement of job centre staff giving out food vouchers. I wrote to my MP, Brian Donohoe the next day, and asked him to write to the minister in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions to find out more about this voucher for food parcels pilot scheme.
In February the minister, Steve Webb, wrote back. “These vouchers were only intended for those refused crisis loans or waiting on a benefit payment to be made,” he said...
...While researching crisis loans I stumbled across a coalition
government consultation paper issued in February 2011 stating the government’s intention to abolish the social fund, and instead give the money, un-ring-fenced, to English Councils who could refer people to community schemes (citing the Trussell Trust Food Parcel Service) rather than giving people crisis loans.
I had come a full circle. Hadn’t the minister told me that only those refused crisis loans would be given vouchers for food parcels? And here was the government proposing to abolish the social fund. . .in which case wouldn’t everyone who currently qualifies for a crisis loan get just a voucher for a food parcel in future? How many people would this affect?
In March I wrote again asking my MP to ask Steve Webb how many crisis loans were given out in England in 2010/2011. The minister’s stated in reply, dated 26th of March, that “2,697,000” were given out.
...
Those shoddy news reports [from BBC and Channel 4] provoked me to go back to the Trussell Trust and Shaftesbury Partnership websites, where I spotted that the Shaftesbury partnership was going to start opening schools by setting up their
“New Schools Fund” (NSF).
The team working on the project is — Mark Goodchild, Catherine Steven and Mita Bhattacharyya — is, we’re told, “working on a part time pro bono basis and is looking to secure funding for the start of 2011 to finalise the concept and launch the pilot which would see two new schools created to open in September 2012, before rolling out further funds to support the creation of tens of thousands of new high quality school places across the country."
Is the government really funding the Tory Party's friends the Shaftesbury Partnership to open schools using their "free schools" policy and our taxes?...
...Already the private company Shaftesbury Partnership’s directors control a charity the government recommends councils should send millions of people to for food parcels, set up a “charity” to run summer camps for schoolchildren and is now embarking on setting up and controlling free schools by enticing parents into creating demand for the schools that the Shaftesbury Partnership will control.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkin...ts-tory-party-chums-and-food-parcels-for-poor
