Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
THURSDAY 7 JUNE 2007
LORD ADEBOWALE
AND MS
JOYCE MOSELEY
Q1 Chairman: Let me extend
a very warm welcome to our witnesses this morning. We are delighted
to welcome Lord Victor Adebowale, who is the Chief Executive of
Turning Point, and Joyce Moseley, who is the Chief Executive of
Rainer. As you know, the Committee is doing an inquiry into commissioning
involving the third sector. Both your organisations are particularly
interesting to us because you are such big players in terms of
commissioned services and therefore we would like to explore some
of the issues around this inquiry with you if we may. We are also
very grateful to you for the memoranda which you both submitted.[1]
Do either or both of you want to say anything by way of introduction?
Lord Adebowale: Not really. You
have our submission from Turning Point. I am at your disposal,
as they say.
Ms Moseley: The same; no, and
thank you for inviting us.
Q2 Chairman: Can we dig away
a bit at some of the underlying issues here? Everyone is very
keen to see the third sector generally play a greater role in
services to the Government. What we would like to know from you
as people who have been doing this for some time on rather a large
scale is, what is it you think you bring to it that makes it worthwhile
to be interested in developing third sector provision?
Lord Adebowale: There are a number
of things. I cannot speak for the whole sector but my own organisation
sees its role as bringing the following things. First, we are
able to bring together different funding streams to create sometimes
bespoke services that meet the needs of individuals and their
communities. I am thinking of cases where people have both substance
misuse and mental health challenges or learning disability and
mental health challenges or where there are particular communities
that have been under-served by public services. Where there is
a need for, for want of a better term, a bespoke response my organisation
is able to pull together funding from a number of different sources
in the interests of the individual and the community in a way
that I am not saying the public sector is unable to do but finds
it more difficult to do. I think that is one of our strengths.
I also think that there is evidence from my own organisation that
we are able to get at some of those communities that the public
sector has struggled to interface with, to get into services with
or to engage with. There are some debates about value for money,
I guess, when we bid for contracts. It is in a competitive environment
often with both private and public sector organisations and if
we win the contract it is on the basis that we have put forward
a better value proposition, usually not just in money terms but
also in terms of people. Those are the three things that I would
highlight.
Q3 Chairman: The Committee
last year went to New York and saw extraordinary things happening
in Harlem, and when I read your memorandum and you talked about
doing joined-up services for whole neighbourhoods it took me back
to thinking about what we saw there. I cannot remember the person's
name who was the driving force in that but he or she was an extraordinary
person. What was amazing was that they were not just operating
in terms of particular services; they were doing the whole joined-up
thing, the whole life experience for people living in that community,
and I wondered if you were offering that.
Lord Adebowale: In some cases.
Certainly Turning Point's Connected Care proposition, where we
have designed a way of bringing health and social care commissioning
together and where we have got a way of designing the use of services
and engaging with communities in a way that gets them to design
and specify the types of services that they will use and often
they can get jobs in as well, is an example of that kind of bespoke
service response that Turning Point is able to do. We are very
much driven by the inverse care law which states that those people
who need social care most tend to get it least.
Ms Moseley: Adding on to what
Victor said on the bringing together of funding streams and service
provision, I would evidence that by our care leaving services
where we provide social work and personal care to young people.
What we also do is manage the housing provision for those 16-plus
young people. We will also be bringing in specialist education
provision to give them intensive input. We can bring in funding
streams from Europe, for instance, which the local authority would
find difficult to access. We have a £2.1 million contract
with Surrey to run their care leaving services and over a year
we have brought £1.2 million of other services into that
to give a really complete and whole service to those care leavers,
something the local authority I think would find difficult to
do. We also work very much in partnership with them and they are
very grateful for that.
Q4 Chairman: Is the argument
though that what we need is a sort of mixed economy of provision
in which the state will do some things and the private sector
will do some things and the third sector will do some things,
or is the claim that the third sector does things better than
either the state or the private sector and therefore needs to
be given a special place?
Ms Moseley: Sometimes we do, sometimes
we do not. I do not think any sector has the monopoly on good
practice. My background is in the public sector as a director
of social services and I know there is huge passion in some public
services but I also know there are some very poor services in
the public sector, and I would say the same for the third sector.
We need to look at which organisation can deliver services in
the best way for those individual people. We deal with young people,
young adults in the 10-25 age group. Many of them, because of
the difficulties they are getting into, see authority figures
in whatever state as something they want to avoid. We can get
over that a bit and that is very helpful to those young people
and to the local public services.
Q5 Chairman: I am trying to
push you on this. It is quite fundamental to the argument. We
had a seminar here a week or two ago with third sector people
and to a man and woman they were wanting to argue that there was
something extra that you get from the third sector. In fact, someone
said that the whole point about it is that it is not the state,
the idea being that it is better than the state. It is quite an
important thing to get your head round, whether you think that,
in a sense, anybody can provide services, horses for courses,
or whether the argument really is that there is something so distinctive
and better about the third sector that would make you want to
insert it wherever you possibly could.
Lord Adebowale: My response is
quite simple. It is not either/or; it is and/and. Most people
that we provide services to, those 140,000-odd people, those that
I talk to, and I have spoken to a lot, do not really spend a lot
of time worrying about whether we are a public service, a private
service or a third sector service. What they are worried about
is the service, full stop, and generally that is the direction
that people out there are going in. I would not sit here and say
that the third sector should receive some special plea for public
services. What I would say is that if you look at social care
there is some evidence, looking back through the Commission for
Social Care Inspection reports, that in some areas the third sector
provides better services, better care. We can provide better care
in a way that is driven by not-for-profit; if you look at our
accounts you can see where the money is going. There are no shareholders,
no distribution of dividends, so you could argue in some circumstances
that yes, there are better services and there is some evidence
for better chunks of services being provided by the third sector,
but to say that the third sector is better than the public sector,
or indeed better than the private sector, is a statement I would
not support if any sector said it. It does not make sense.
Ms Moseley: I would certainly
add that I do not think we have any inherent right to say that.
However, again, if you look at bail and remand services for young
offenders, which my charity developed before it was a statutory
responsibility and then went on to deliver some services when
it did become a statutory service, and we wrote the good practice
guide for the Youth Justice Board and so helped the public sector
to take on that responsibility but then many of the services that
the voluntary sector was running were taken in-house when special
grants came to an end, there is clear evidence that those services
no longer performed as well. There is something about the fact
that you are running a specific service on a contract that gives
you a real focus and that focus can then dissipate a bit when
it is taken back into the more general youth offending team, which
is what happened in that service, and that can be demonstrated.
I think there is something about the fact that we deliver what
is on the tin. If you have got a good contract in a well-commissioned
service we have a real focus on it.
Q6 Chairman: I am sure colleagues
will want to ask you about particular examples so that we can
see some of those in action. You talked about not having an inherent
right to be treated differently but, in terms of the commissioning
process and the contracts, when I read your submissions, particularly
Rainer's, there was a kind of irksome sense in terms of the regulation,
the bureaucracy, "If only they would deal with us in a more
straightforward and simple way life would be so much easier".
What I want to know is whether you think this amounts to a claim
on the part of the third sector to be treated differently in commissioning
and contracting terms.
Ms Moseley: I just think it is
about improving commissioning. I think the phrase that the public
sector does not know how to buy and a lot of the voluntary sector
does not know how to sell is something to hold on to. I think
we gave some examples of that. I think we ought to be regulated.
I think we ought to be selected for quality. If we are spending
public money that is what should happen, but when you have to
provide three box files of your policies to someone for a contract
which is worth about £50,000 a year when you have been working
with that authority for 10 years that is when it becomes irksome
and that is just over-regulated, over-zealous contracting people,
particularly within local authorities, who do not see beyond their
very narrow responsibilities.
Q7 Chairman: But that does
not apply just to the third sector. It could apply to a private
contractor or anybody else.
Ms Moseley: Absolutely, yes.
Lord Adebowale: The point I would
make on this is that in terms of the services to the public better
value could be got out of the third sector by simply applying
some of the thinking that applies to the private sector—longer
term contracts, for instance. There are many cases where third
sector organisations do not enjoy the same level of long term
contracting that the private sector takes for granted. Full cost
recovery: again, it is assumed without question in some cases
that the private sector will make a profit. Nobody questions it,
it is never clawed back, it is just that that is the way it is,
but in some third sector negotiations it is assumed that we will
be subsidised by fund-raised income or that somehow we do not
need to cover the costs of providing a service. I think that mitigates
against good services to the public rather than being a special
case. I would agree with Joyce. The private sector also complain
of the over-burdensome procurement process, some of it led by
European law, that requires massive amounts of time and effort
to be spent on what are known as PQQs, pre-qualification questionnaires
that are just ridiculous. In fact, the contract bid is often three
pages and the PQQ is four boxes. It just does not seem to be accurate.
I think there is a huge debate to be had about commissioning.
It is the skill of the age in the sense that everybody is concerned
about value for money, everybody is concerned about ensuring that
we reach the people that need services most. That is about commissioning.
That is not an issue for the third sector. Again, if you look
at some of the work that KPMG have done, if you look at the work
of the Public Service Reform Group, all of them, including the
Audit Commission, would be looking at commissioning as one of
the issues that we need to pay attention to.
Q8 Mr Walker: Lord Adebowale,
one of my concerns is that large organisations like yourselves,
when you are contracting or bidding for contracts, crowd out small,
established, local charities. In my constituency of Broxbourne
we are served by a very good local drugs charity called Chrysalis,
which is staffed by outstanding people, not in my constituency
but in the constituency of my colleague, Mark Prisk, Hertford
and Stortford, but they are having their contract terminated by
the County Council in September and I understand that you are
one of the organisations bidding for this more global contract
across half of Hertfordshire, and if I have got that wrong I apologise.
How do you answer that concern, because it is a genuine concern,
that you are almost corporate in your outlook, that you have a
cross-United Kingdom presence, that you are just knocking out
small charities who can retain that essence of a charity but do
not have lobbyists, do not have marketers; they purely focus on
delivering a local service?
Lord Adebowale: I think it is
a really interesting question. We work with a whole range of small
organisations. I would just say that there is a market place within
the charity sector, as you well know, as there is in the private
sector, in which both large and small operate, and in a market
place first of all I would not assume that small charities are
any better or any worse than large charities. There are excellent
small charities, there are some not very good ones, and vice versa.
Hertsreach is an example where we work with a whole range of small
charities to pull together a county-wide substance misuse service,
which I think Chrysalis is part of, so I think we are working
with Chrysalis as a small charity. We also were part of the Government's
Change Up programme where we put a significant amount of our own
resource and time into working with a whole range of small charities,
not on the front-line service delivery but on the back room stuff,
the human resource services, the finance services, the things
that they find difficult to finance and provide for because they
just have not got the resources. Sadly, the funding for the Change
Up programme was withdrawn but we have continued to retain a relationship
with those charities. Similarly, we work with Kikit in Birmingham,
which is a very small drugs charity specifically focused on a
particular part of the community and we work with BRO-SIS, which
is another small charity that works with people with HIV and drugs
challenges in the east African community. We have a number of
examples. It is not something that we need to boast about. It
is something that we do because it is not about being big; it
is about being good. We will work with anyone really who is interested
in the values of our service. I just think it is interesting that
there is an assumption that in order to have large charities or
social enterprises, which is what Turning Point is, the small
ones must die. Actually, some of the fastest growing social enterprises,
third sector organisations, are very small and will probably be
bigger than Turning Point in five or six years and want to be
bigger than Turning Point in five or six years, and good luck
to them.
Q9 Mr Walker: So when you
are bidding for a contract do you look at what already exists
in the way of provision and do you then in your bidding incorporate
how you would work with those existing providers, because some
of them, obviously, you will want to work with and some of them
you might take the view are not doing a good enough job and you
would not want to work with?
Lord Adebowale: The short answer
to your question is, absolutely. In fact, we would not have got
most of the contracts that we have won if we had not evidenced
that we understood what was happening locally, that we had developed
partnerships or relationships with small local charities and that
we were working alongside them. But they have a choice too and
some small charities choose not to talk to us or get engaged with
us, and that is a choice they make. What we do not do is force
the issue either way. I cannot think of a service that we provide
currently in any of our sectors where we are not doing so alongside
local groups and small local groups at that.
Ms Moseley: I can add to that
some examples where we were bidding for services in Wessex with
the Wessex Youth Offending Team, which, as you all know, covers
Hampshire, Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight and one other, I think.
We knew, because we had already been working in that area, that
there was a very good service within Portsmouth, which probably
was not big enough to take on the full contract. It was something
that the Wessex police and the Wessex YOT wanted for efficiency,
for consistency across their whole area, so we discussed that
with the commissioners and said we were very willing to work with
them and the commissioners acted as a broker, if you like, saying
yes, that was what they wanted as long as we could come to agreements
about providing a consistent and similar service across the whole
area, which is what we did and that has gone on to us working
with that organisation on other service deliveries. Again, it
goes back to what Victor said about the skills of commissioners.
If they see themselves as people who are responsible for their
community and for making the best of the resources in that community
you can then get into a better dialogue with them on those sorts
of partnering arrangements. Often they do not see themselves like
that. They see it as a very narrow contracting process rather
than a commissioning process, if I can make that distinction.
Lord Adebowale: Earlier you asked
what were the benefits, the value-added bit of the third sector,
and I think Joyce has just adequately described one of those benefits.
In a market where resources are tight, which is often the case
in delivery of social-care-type services, competition that is
not managed by an intelligent commissioner wastes those resources.
One of the benefits of the third sector, I would argue, is that
we have a value which is about retaining those services, so the
kinds of deals and the kind of work that both Joyce and myself
have described retain resources in the sector and in those services.
If those services close that resource is generally gone for ever;
it is not going to be rekindled, so that is one of the things
we are able to do where in other sectors it is a case of, "You
are too small and you cannot compete; tough, you are out of business".
It is slightly more sophisticated, I think, in the third sector.
Ms Moseley: Whether it is contentious
or not, I think the commissioning people locally do have to make
some hard decisions sometimes about which local small groups are
good.
Q10 Mr Walker: Very briefly,
because this is probably quite a long answer to a short question,
how do you structure your relationship between yourselves and
small charities to ensure that small charities retain their fleetness
of foot and local focus?
Lord Adebowale: I am not quite
sure I understand the question.
Q11 Mr Walker: You are a major
UK player. You win a contract, there are small local providers
that you are going to work with. How do you ensure that in working
with those charities you protect their uniqueness, in a sense?
Lord Adebowale: First of all,
there are a number of rules. The first is that we do not dictate
to them how they define themselves. They define what it is that
they offer and how they offer it. Often the relationship is with
the local service manager, ie, the Turning Point service manager
will already know who they are because they live locally, they
work locally, they understand the local area and will already
have been in dialogue about how we can work together and what
the services are, but it is different in different areas. Not
far from here we have a service in Brixton, ACAPS, which works
with a lot of young people, probably a few thousand in the course
of a year, who are known as NEETs—I think it is a rather
unfortunate phrase—not in education, not in employment,
not in training. We are working with those young people getting
them into training that will give them work in our sector, and
in order to do that we have to work with a range of other small
local charities that might have engaged with the same young people.
What we are not interested in is taking over those services. Nine
times out of 10, in fact, in 100 % of the cases, those services
want to work with Turning Point because they want to offer a service
for those young people that means that the young people are not
going from pillar to post having to tell their story twice, which
is, as Joyce will tell you, one of the reasons why young people
drop out of services altogether. We look at pooling resources,
back office services, so that we are not all spending the money
on the same things, a lot of the things that I am sure you would
consider to be good business practice, without ever getting into
a debate about takeovers or changing. It does not get there because
the dialogue is focused on the needs of the client and the community,
but there are some small local charities, and I respect it entirely,
which take the view that it is bad and do not want to talk to
us. I think that is fine if that is what they want to do. It is
a free country.
Ms Moseley: Just on that point,
sometimes we have gone into fairly formal subcontracting arrangements
with a small charity because that was what they wanted. At other
times it is very much on trust and some of our money just goes
over to them, with some audit trails, of course. I think there
was an assumption there about small being always fleet of foot
and community based, and I suppose I would want to say I think
we are too. I would say that a part of making us very community
based is the number of volunteers we use as an integral part of
our services, who are always taken from the local community, and
that may be something we will pick up on later.
Lord Adebowale: The formal answer
to your question is that there is also quite a lot of subcontracting.
We subcontract services as well, so it is not straightforward
"large is good".
Q12 Julie Morgan: I wonder
if you could tell us what percentage of your income is voluntary
income and how you raise it and how that has changed over the
years.
Ms Moseley: It is quite small
and always has been since our origins in 1788 when it was all
voluntary income. At the moment it is 4 % and rising, we hope.
That is funds raised from donor corporates and trusts, that sort
of fund-raising. We also have some income which is derived from
reasonably low investments that we have and the income from those
investments is used directly for the charity. We have a small
fund-raising team which our trustees have invested in from our
reserves in order to try and increase the percentage that is fund-raised,
and we see it very much as adding value, so not subsidising the
contracted services we have but adding value to the public services
we deliver. It is very hard; sometimes young offenders are quite
difficult to raise money for.
Q13 Julie Morgan: What methods
do you use to raise money?
Ms Moseley: We have tried and
investigated various methods. We have a fairly small donor base
to whom we send out appeals and newsletters to encourage them
to know more about us. We have tried knocking on doors with a
basket of charities, as it is called, using an agency. That was
fairly successful. We have tried face-to-face, better known as
"chugging". That did not work for us because we do not
have a very high profile. Unless you have a high public profile
getting money directly from the public is extremely difficult,
so we go a lot to trusts and foundations for money where we are
putting in bids for grants, and they are often very specific grants;
it is not free money in that sense. We also work with some corporates.
For instance, Artemis Investment Management work very closely
with us on our Lambeth youth inclusion programme and have become
very involved. A group of young people from Lambeth are going
with staff from Artemis this weekend to climb mountains in Scotland,
for instance. They have taken a very personal interest in the
charity.
Q14 Julie Morgan: Does the
fact that the voluntary income is so small and you are so dependent
on statutory income affect you as a voluntary body? Does that
affect the way you work?
Ms Moseley: I do not think so.
What I am finding is that bidding for voluntary money from trusts
and corporates, for instance, is as detailed and tricky sometimes
as putting in a bid for a public service. You have to show the
same evidence, you have to show the same business-like abilities
to spend that money. The corporates and trusts want to know that
they are going to be able to rely on that money being spent well,
so there is a coming together of the way we operate. If I can
go under the question in terms of our abilities to, say, campaign
or lobby for the young people we work with, I do not think it
makes any difference whatsoever. We have always been a charity
that has used the evidence from our services very directly from
our young people in a quiet way. We do not shout loudly about
our campaigns. The fact that we work in 150 communities, we have
that many contracts, if not more, means that we are not reliant
on any one provider of money in any way. We have just done some
research around the housing of care leavers. We run some very
big care leaving services where we hold the statutory account
for the social workers in our teams, but that has not stopped
us sending our research to every director of children's services
and the Government saying, "You are not doing well enough
in terms of the way you house your care leavers and we have the
evidence to show that", so I do not think so.
Q15 Julie Morgan: And you
do criticise your funders?
Ms Moseley: Absolutely.
Q16 Julie Morgan: Good for
you. Do you feel it inhibits you in any way?
Ms Moseley: No. What is more constructive,
if you are taking an individual contract that you might have for
a service, is the dialogue and the discussion you have as part
of the monitoring of that contract. If it is a constructive relationship
rather than a ticking-box type monitoring arrangement you can
say, "Look: because of something that is happening in your
authority you are not getting the best out of us or from your
young people, so together can we change that?" In that sense
that sort of lobbying is much more constructive at a local level.
Q17 Julie Morgan: Do you have
any examples where contracts have been ended or lost because of
your criticism of funders?
Ms Moseley: No.
Q18 Julie Morgan: Can I ask
the same of you, Lord Adebowale?
Lord Adebowale: Turning Point
is a not-for-profit social enterprise. We are a business. We do
not have any shareholders, we do not distribute a dividend at
the end of the year. About 95 % of our income is contract income
with statutory services. We operate in 250 different locations
around the country. We have hundreds and hundreds of contracts,
well over 400, I would say. We do raise money from trusts. In
fact, we had over a million pounds from Comic Relief. We have
had some large grants to do specific work in areas that we are
campaigning on. Does it stop us from campaigning? Hell, no. Let
me give you some examples of the campaigns that we have run. At
this moment we are running a campaign on blood-borne viruses in
needle exchanges and the need for the Government to radically
review its advice and practice on needle exchange. We have called
for safe injecting rooms for injecting drug users. The report
is called The Sharp End.[2]
I am happy to send you all a copy; in fact, we almost certainly
will send you all a copy. We campaign very loudly. We think it
is important for our service users, who tell us their stories
and who want us to make sure that their plight is heard in order
that services can be changed across the piece. We work with them
very closely. We have a campaign running at the moment on the
children of alcohol-misusing parents. One in 11 of our children
in this country will be going home tonight to a parent that will
be misusing alcohol. I and my colleagues think that is scandalous
and we think it is not just about education, and we said that
yesterday when the Government announced its alcohol strategy.
We said, "It is fine to educate. What we need is treatment",
which is still a postcode lottery. We ran a very effective campaign
on learning disabilities and the fact that too many people with
learning disabilities are in long-stay institutions rather than
in the community as members of that community. That effectively
got the Government's focus, its resources and attention on meeting
a target to close long-stay institutions which we have been working
on with them. I could go on and on. We are very clear about the
fact that this is a democracy and the fact that we receive funding
from any sources does not prevent us from speaking out on behalf
of our clients. In response to the question have we ever been
threatened locally, it would be fair to say that there are some
local commissioners who are nervous about campaigning. In my personal
experience it has never stopped us from campaigning locally. There
are some very clear rules that we apply to campaigning. One is
that we never campaign on anything for which we have not got a
positive solution, so it is not just about saying, "This
is wrong. You are nasty". It is about, "Look at how
we could do this better, look at how we could get better value
for people and better value for money". We always campaign
on things that we know about and that our service users engage
with and ask us and want us to be involved in, and not just our
service users but also our front-line staff. Thirdly, while we
do campaign loudly nationally, as Joyce has pointed out, we also
campaign quietly and effectively locally. I have never in my career
withdrawn a campaign that we thought was valid and valuable on
the basis of a threat by a minister, MP, councillor or anyone
else for that matter, and we would not.
Q19 Julie Morgan: Do you have
any doubts about being so dependent on statutory funding?
Lord Adebowale: No, and I will
tell you why. It is an interesting question because I certainly
know that some of the writers that have a critique of this particular
model tend not to have the same critique of private sector organisations,
or indeed public sector organisations, that have effectively a
monopoly relationship where they have one supplier or one provider
of their funding and it is never questioned. I do not see why
it should be questioned in our case and the evidence is that it
has not stopped us from campaigning and campaigning very effectively
and very loudly. We have not got a problem with it at all.
1 Ev 106, 112 Back
2
Turning Point, At the Sharp End, 2007 Back
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