SHE was the dynamic woman with the clever ideas to get many of the North’s job-shy back to work – until she was forced to quit, last week, mired in scandal.

Now Emma Harrison’s departure from A4E, the firm she founded and led flamboyantly, and from her role as David Cameron’s “family champion”, has rocked the Government’s welfare-to-work plans.

Certainly, the headlines – an £8.6m dividend from the taxpayer, huge sums trousered from renting out her stately home to her government- funded company and the fraud allegations – are terrible. But the real headache is that there is little evidence that the likes of A4E are achieving their central mission which is to get large numbers of people off benefits and into employment.

Yorkshire is one of five areas where A4E is a prime contractor for the private-sector Work Programme, which has replaced all state-run job schemes.

Giant multi-national firms have been attracted by a radical new payment-by-results system, offering rewards of up to £14,000 per claimant returning to work. Hence, in the North-East, one of the prime contractors is G4S – the former Group 4 Securicor – which also runs prisons, immigration removal centres and will guard the 2012 Olympic Games.

Only private firms have the resources and the know-how to provide the hands-on, tailored advice and support that can make the long-term jobless attractive to employers… or so ministers insisted. Now the Emma Harrison controversy has undermined that entire philosophy, as further unsavoury allegations about A4E’s methods have come to light.

Some jobless people have complained of simply being “herded into a computer room and told to search for jobs”, rather than receiving the expert help promised. Others speak of interviews never materialising, or of being ordered to accept jobs or see their benefits slashed, without being informed of the pay, hours or conditions – only to learn, later, of their poverty wages.

Meanwhile, the Government’s bullish forecasts that 40 per cent of claimants will be found jobs are crumbling. The National Audit Office predicted the figure would be 26 per cent and early returns are as low as 14 per cent.

Now, the economic slump has continued longer than expected and A4E is quick to counter that it has put tens of thousands of satisfied people into work, many of whom write letters of thanks. But the key point must be this. These welfare-to-work firms must be spectacularly better than the state if their bosses are going to enjoy lives of unimaginable luxury, at our expense.

To say the very least, they are failing to show they are better, which means the suspicions of excess profits and private-sector waste will only grow – with free schools and academies likely to be next.

COMPLAINTS about bus services are growing since dramatic reductions in funding to both local councils and private bus operators. Now a Conservative minister appears to agree that passengers are getting a raw deal. Alerted, in a wide-ranging letter, to problems in County Durham – where a £322,000 cut has left many villages with no services – Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith passed the issue on to a colleague.

But he wrote: “The matter of poor public transport in Sedgefield and County Durham is a matter for the Department for Transport...”