Government
initiatives for the third sector are often a bit like candyfloss;
they seem like a nice idea at the time but turn out rather
messy and are ultimately unsatisfying. While the last few
years have seen a raft of various initiatives with various
levels of efficacy – which this magazine looked at last
month – it now seems as if some definitive progress
(or at least positive intention) is being made on the government’s
commitment to increase the role of – and improve the
deal for – the third sector in the delivery of public
services.
This was made evident at last month’s Three Sector
Summit: Solutions for User-led Services; a conference
put on by the Future Services Network (the coalition between
Acevo, the CBI and the National Consumer Council whose mission
is “putting the consumer at the heart of public service
reform”). The conference featured some political heavy
hitters, with no less than five government ministers on call,
including the Prime Minister himself, who all demonstrated
commitment to “breaking down barriers” and allowing
a “level playing field” in public services delivery.
Tony Blair was insistent that reform of public service delivery
was a government priority and that that included increasing
the level of creativity and innovation in that delivery. “And
the truth is some of those organisations that are doing the
most ground-breaking work, most innovative work, are to be
found in the voluntary sector today,” he said.
“And the reason why I wanted to come along [to the summit]
was to say this is for us a priority. The reason we have
a Minister with the very specific and special responsibility
[ for the third sector, Ed Miliband] is because we consider
it a priority, and we want to, in a sense, up our game across
the whole of this area and do it in a very decisive way over
the time to come.”
Though Blair’s speech was pretty fluffy overall, it
is true that moving third sector responsibilities from the
Home Office to the Cabinet Office, and creating a new cabinet
position to look after it, is a step in the right direction.
However, it is a definitive plan of action, which actually
addresses and solves the problems faced by public service
providers, that is needed if all the talk is actually to become
reality.
Along those lines, it was hoped that the Third Sector Public
Service Delivery Action Plan (or the Cross-Government Action
Plan as it was originally mooted) would be introduced at the
summit. This is the plan which has been hyped as being able
to deliver a ‘step change’ in public service delivery.
Unfortunately, the recent cabinet reshuffle meant that the
original ministers involved in the plan, which was supposed
to be launched in the spring, are no longer dealing with the
project and we’ll now have to wait until autumn for
its introduction.
While there is no official statement of exactly what this
plan will entail, we do have a pretty good idea about what
it will provide, and some hopes for what it should provide
as well. At its core should be the four points that Acevo’s
chief executive Stephen Bubb reiterated at the CFDG annual
conference at the end of May. These were length of contracts;
contract risk being passed on to the third sector; the level
of bureaucracy in contracts and reporting; and pricing and
full cost recovery (not to mention actually being paid on
time).
There is, of course, already the Treasury’s summary
guidance for funders and purchasers which addresses most of
these issues, but this was the focus of recent research from
the NCVO which demonstrated the guidance was not being followed.
In the survey of service providers, 55 per cent of respondents
had not had funding negotiated and agreed promptly for this
financial year, and 41 per cent who have had their funding
agreed have not been paid on time. And, as one of the biggest
causes of uncertainty, 46 per cent had not had their funding
agreed for a period longer than one year – all of this
being pretty much the opposite of what the guidance recommends.
Fortunately, the action plan is intended to go well beyond
just providing further guidance. As Nick Aldridge, director
of strategy at Acevo, points out: “The government has
done a lot of that [producing guidance] and the evidence is
that it hasn’t made a huge amount of difference.”
Instead, says Aldridge, the plan is meant to actually deliver
on a couple of key areas.
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The plan
First is to define what the particular areas are where the
government wants to see the third sector taking on a bigger
role. Aldridge says a major contributor to the lack of progress
is that proposals have always been too vague. “The
sector has said ‘we should have a bigger role’
and the government has said ‘we agree’, but
no one has particularly done a lot of work to define when,
where and what the sector might do, so it’s just been
business as usual for most of the departments,” he
says. He also points out that the government seems to have
responded well to Acevo’s Communities in Control report,
published by the Social Market Foundation last year, and
the action plan is going to further some of the points it
made, particularly in establishing programmes of delivery.
The second point of the plan is to consider commissioning
and procurement strategy and practices, which was a major
bone of contention for delegates at the Three Sector Summit.
The general feeling is that commissioners are often middle
managers who ‘fell into the job’ with no real
expertise or training. With luck, the action plan will lead
to change and improvement in this area. Aldridge points
out that the new Compact Commissioner is going to be tasked
with reviewing the progress on this, and is meant to be
extremely critical in public of those funders and departments
who are failing to deliver – naming and shaming so
to speak. Aldridge adds: “In my view, there should
be a review built into the action plan to see if progress
has been made, for example, after a one or two year period.”
All of this sounds superb, with a fairer deal delivered
all round, true inter-sector partnerships, and a new era
of best practice, but there have been promises by government
in the past which failed to deliver; April’s missed
deadline on implementing the principles of full cost recovery
immediately comes to mind.
Pete Moorey, parliamentary and media manager at the NCVO,
says that steps need to be taken to put existing initiatives
into practice: “While new announcements on positive
things are good,” he says, “we have to see action
on things that have already been announced over the past
few years. Clearly there is some frustration in the sector,
particularly among our smaller and local members, about
implementation, their experiences of trying to deliver services
and their relationship with the statutory sector.”
This sentiment is verified by Robin Currie, chief executive
of Liverpool based social care provider PSS. He argues that
the majority of problems, particularly at the local level,
have resulted from the breakdown in joint planning and partnership
with local authorities and PCTs. He believes there is now
a much greater purchaser / provider split, and things are
made much worse by the fact that the procurement process
is dominated by tendering.
“At central government level we get the kind of rhetoric
we heard [at the Summit] about public services being very
important, raised expectations of standards, partnership,
things of this kind,” he says. “But the reality
is that at a local level the pressures on the people who
are doing the commissioning are about efficiency savings,
not about partnership or full cost recovery or longer-term
contracts – the way they do that is by going out to
tender and the major determinant is price. Even more worrying
are the latest developments around e-auctions.”
These, he says, are a relatively new development, now used
for bidding on suppliers of stationery, for example, where
bids are visible and a Dutch auction takes place, driving
the delivery cost further and further down. “We’ve
had one local authority that has said it is intending to
use the e-auction for providing care services [which highlights]
the emphasis being more and more on this race to the bottom
and reducing standards. I think this is really concerning.”
This would also be a major step backwards in the new climate
the government says it is trying to foster.
We will have to wait for the autumn to see exactly what
the action plan contains, and considerably longer to see
any discernable effects of its implementation. But if it
does not account for Currie’s idea of the “race
to the bottom”, and take full account of local level
relationships, then the fear is that it will simply be so
much candyfloss.
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