A4E: David Blunkett MP replies

Action for Employment (A4E) is a private company that, as the interviewer in the video above points out, has received £300 million of Government training contracts and controls 25% of the long-term unemployment budget for the Department for Work and Pensions. Yesterday Declan’s A4E Camden employment officer, Lola Worth, refused him his right to have his "view" typed into his "Journey Plan" and then tampered and altered what she asked him to sign – Worth is exceptionally abusive, in fact Declan says she is singularly the most abusive person he has ever come across in an office (a "pseudo-bully"), and she has a lengthy track record of breaching Declan’s contract, so neither he nor I can say that we were at all surprised with this latest skulduggery. Of the 12 breaches cited here, Worth is directly or indirectly responsible for no less than 8 (Emma Harrison CBE is the founder and Chairman of A4E, and has had every single breach brought to her attention at the time of infraction):

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The next time A4E hands one of us an outrageous Journey Plan without the right of reply, it is going, unsigned, straight into a bag to be produced in court. Last week John Howell QC (sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge) refused Declan permission to apply for a judicial review because in his opinion A4E are not subject to the provisions of the Jobseeker's Act 1995 (his reasons can be read here). However, Declan has renewed his application in order to raise an important point of principle or practice, namely that he is being provided with no remedy under welfare law for discriminatory practice by A4E (see here). The List Office now has to arrange a date for the renewal hearing. Suffice to say that Declan’s case for discrimination against A4E is going through the roof!


Secret Millionaire Emma Harrison goes to Dagenham, one of Britain's poorest areas and home to Europe's largest council estate. A steel worker's daughter, 43 year old Harrison is Britain's richest female entrepreneur.

Interception of emails: Home Office minister advises Declan to find himself a solicitor

Home office minister Lynne Featherstone

In February Declan received his third letter from our MP, Lynne Featherstone, a minister in the Home Office, regarding the interception of our emails. Initially she said she would try to prompt a response into why we are encountering these problems (see blog of 20 June 2010 Interception of communications: Our MP responds). Almost a year later, she is recommending that Declan finds himself a solicitor. What she appears to be saying, however, is that the Home Secretary hasn't issued a warrant and that the on-going interception and manipulation of our email - this week we received undelivered emails in our spam box! - is unauthorised and unlawful:

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This is particularly concerning because last Saturday I uploaded a statement to our website for President Obama and members of Congress about forest funding and we are seeking the endorsement of scientists and economists from around the world. In light of our on-going difficulties with email, we believe that our only chance of success is to aim for the endorsement of 30 or 40 leading experts in the field of climate change, and to get through to as many as we can by email with use of the phone. Declan's petition to the United Nations regarding therapeutic cloning has been signed by no less than 28 Nobel Laureates as well as hundreds of other distinguished scholars, but it took years and the manipulation of email got so bad that last April Declan had to shelve it (see blog of 20 January, A4E refuse me a Journey Plan, which contains an open letter from a distinguished American professor who last April was "truly appalled by the unlawful violation of the Heaveys' basic right to send and receive email without interference").

Another reason why we can't send personalised emails in their hundreds is because there is a high probability we would lose our website. In 2008, we lost our original site due to a Spamcop report that was drawn up the day after the Home Office denied that a warrant had been issued to intercept our communications (see blog of 14 March 2008 SpamCop reports Declan as a spammer). Only last month, I titled a blog Website brought down as we are about to publish our first book excerpt from a Nobel Prize winner, so somebody is trigger happy!