- February 19, 2024
In August 2018, the Home Office awarded grants to eleven Local Authorities (LAs) across England to deliver Trusted Relationships projects between 2018 and March 2022. As Implementation Partner for this programme, ATQ provided support to the projects. We therefore saw first-hand how the projects encountered and overcame their respective implementation challenges. Our report presents ATQ’s observations and the headlines are:
- Length and stability of funding is critical. Any support programme aimed at vulnerable people with complex needs will only work if it is designed and funded on a long-term basis – at least three years and preferably longer, as was the case here. This allows time for programmes to ramp up, overcome teething issues and avoid inefficient and ineffective spending as projects struggle to spend money in a limited timeframe. More importantly, it gives front line teams the time and space to establish working relationships with both the vulnerable young people that the programme is designed to serve, and the networks of statutory and non-statutory delivery partners that are part of any support service.
- Flexibility of project design is key. As this programme has shown, there may be common principles underpinning programmes aimed at complex issues but a range of different approaches is possible, and projects should (as these do) reflect local needs and organisational structures, especially if we want to understand better what works best by testing alternatives. A strength of this programme has been that it has allowed for such difference.
- Services and interventions need to be co-designed with those they aim to support, within obvious limits. Vulnerable young people need agency rather than top-down solutions to what others perceive as their needs. Services also need to sit both inside and outside statutory services – inside so that they can facilitate joined-up responses; outside so that they can successfully engage with those who have learned to distrust the system. It became very clear from direct involvement of young people with our shared learning events and other visits with officials that young people can be and are very articulate about their needs and how support can best be provided.
- Cross-cutting issues require joined-up solutions. This programme has shown how services targeted at a complex problem that do not fit neatly into public service silos can be the ‘glue’ that binds services together across areas that habitually have a different focus – especially those that treat people as victims needing support and those that treat them as offenders needing sanction and rehabilitation. Based on our four-year involvement, ATQ would contend that Trusted Relationships has provided this ‘glue’ for an average of around £250,000 per project per year.
- Understanding why people behave as they do is as important as what they do. The projects have shown the particular value of trauma-informed practice, and understanding how adverse experiences may shape the way people behave, and their willingness to respond to intervention. In our opinion, this is particularly important in CSE and CCE, where exploitation itself may lead to significant trauma.
- November 12, 2014
An article in the Guardian today (12th November 2014) caught my eye – margaret-hodge-southwark-health-social-care It was about Margaret Hodge MP, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and whose sometimes theatrical excoriation of both public and private sector managers has attracted much comment.
Now she is taking on the challenge of overseeing the implementation of changes in public services herself. She has started in the role of chair of the London Borough of Southwark’s “early action committee”. Its purpose is to re-organise services so as to intervene earlier and prevent social issues escalating and becoming more expensive to deal with later on.
As we know well from our social investment work and have commented on before, everyone agrees that this is the sensible approach to social inclusion problems but it has always proven very difficult to deliver – not least because in tightened times, budgets get drawn entirely into statutory provision leaving little or nothing spare for preventive work.
The article is pretty balanced and Mrs Hodge does of course, as the Guardian observes, have direct experience as a former leader of Islington Council – albeit nearly 30 years ago. So like the Guardian, I will watch with interest what lessons she learns from trying to lead a change herself rather than, along with her fellow PAC members, telling others what they think should have been done with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight.
- November 6, 2013
One of the challenges for turning ideas into actions is sourcing the funding and financing of innovative programmes designed to test new ways of doing things. Edward Hickman FRSA argues that this challenge is most acute in the sphere of public services.
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2013/11/05/social-investment-public-services-reform
- March 23, 2013
In this week’s budget statement, the Chancellor announced no change of direction for his deficit reduction strategy.
Analysis by respected commentators such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has pointed out the implications of further reductions in spending, particularly by those Departments of State which have not been ring-fenced to 2015 i.e. all those except health, education and international development.
According to the FT article covering this story: “On current plans, departmental spending is set to drop by 2018 to the lowest level since 2002-03 in real terms and to the lowest as a proportion of national income since at least 1998, resulting in a radical reshaping of the state.”
How radical is this reshaping going to be?
It can be argued that, to date, reforms of public services designed to drive out savings have been in the ‘salami slice’ category. In other words, the easiest areas of non-statutory expenditures have been cut back, staff numbers have been allowed to fall through natural wastage without replacements and such like.
Widespread reshaping of service delivery models and more radical reforms have not been evident. However, the ability of public service delivery organisations to muddle along with more salami slicing, in the hope that the public funding taps will be turned on again soon, must be diminishing.
With such a long period of austerity ahead, some more imaginative responses will have to emerge. There are some pointers as to the direction of travel.
Another article following the budget, this time in the Guardian, discusses plans to de-duplicate public service activities – extending the findings of the Total Place initiatives piloted under the previous Government and Whole Place Community Budgets trialled by this Government. The service areas highlighted are: families with complex needs; health and social care for adults; economic growth, work and skills; reducing re-offending and domestic abuse; and early years.
In another part of the Guardian was a different article discussing how mutual models could be more widely applied in the delivery of local government services, providing an alternative model to either in-house or outsourced to private sector providers.
Finally, if the Government’s acceptance of almost all of Lord Heseltine’s ‘No Stone Unturned’ recommendations leads to any genuine devolution of budgets and decision making authority away from Whitehall’s control, then there will undoubtedly be scope for very different thinking to emerge.
Perhaps it is only when faced with the kind of long term austerity picture which we now have that public service reforms gain genuine traction rather than lip service.
- November 14, 2012
Listening to two of the authors of the joint Fiscal Fallout report – Ian Mulheirn and Ben Lucas – at the RSA prompted a couple of observations.
The format of the event is deliberately kept to one hour and, to my perception, around 55 of the 60 minutes available were taken up with an admirable and entirely familiar analysis of the problems facing any Government trying to implement reforms whatever the fiscal climate. Some examples being:
- too much centralisation in the UK without enough local or city region decision input let alone autonomy;
- inability to overcome long held silo mentalities and cultures in addressing complex social problems;
- poor commissioning skills and accountability structures that hinder any innovation;
- no service design skills anywhere in Whitehall and few in local government;
The list is longer and the challenge appears so overwhelming that any solutions proffered in the 5 minutes when they were discussed effectively defaulted to arguing for wholesale change with an “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you” at their heart.
Despite these observations on the presentation session, I recommend reading the report as it at least tries to set the challenges in a framework that breaks it into more accessible chunks – what the report calls “Pillars of a Social Productivity Spending Review” (how think-tanky is that?)
One of the themes within the Pillars is to “Commission for Social and Economic Value”. This theme is of great interest to me and my colleagues, particularly the use of public sector commissioning to foster greater public service innovation. We have written on this topic before
To my mind, commissioning practices designed to allow for service innovation is one area that actually can be addressed as a point solution within the overall challenge. It doesn’t need every other part of the answer to be in place first – just some imagination and vision.