Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 219)
TUESDAY 10 JULY 2007
MR MARTIN
NAREY, MR
PHILIP CULLUM
AND MS
ALISON HOPKINS
Q200 Chairman: Difficult groups.
Ms Hopkins: That is one way of
describing it.
Q201 Chairman: Is that your
conclusion, that the third sector is particularly good at dealing
with difficult groups?
Mr Cullum: Where it is quite targeted
and focused where there may be particular needs. Part of what
we also picked up was cases where it is not about just the narrow
provision of one service but where people's life circumstances
lead into lots of other needs. One of the things that people said
in some of the areas was "They dealt with me as a more rounded
person and they provided things that I was not really expecting"
which partly speaks to something about innovation but also about
the understanding of the broader spectrum of need rather than
just saying we rather mechanistically provide one particular service.
Q202 Chairman: I am not sure
how the notion of "nicheness" fits with this holistic
view because, by definition, niche is niche; holistic requires
operation across the piece.
Mr Cullum: Niche groups is the
point, so it is trying to see what the needs of particular groups
of people are. Part of the rhetoric around the third sector is
an understanding of users and the ability to get close to them.
One of the things that we found was that actually that rhetoric
in some instances can be rather overblown, particularly when it
is being provided to quite a general population like social housing,
but where it does stand up, it would seem from our research, is
where there are groups of people who have quite particular circumstances.
In that case that kind of focus on who are the users and what
do they really need comes out more strongly.
Q203 Chairman: Can I bring
Martin Narey in on this same point, partly to ask what your response
is to research of this kind which is suggesting a more complicated
picture of user experience across the sectors, bearing in mind
that you say in your evidence that, "Evidence from Barnardo's
work shows that services provided by the third sector are popular
with both service users and with commissioners."[1]
In a way you are making the claim and the people having done the
research say actually this is all rather more complicated.
Mr Narey: The first thing I would
say, Dr Wright, is I do not agree with the niche point, there
is no reason why the voluntary sector cannot work in very wide-ranging
services and in a whole range of activities, but I do not make
any claim about the services provided, certainly by Barnardo's,
being naturally better than those provided by the public sector
or the private sector. We are popular with users. I spend a lot
of time visiting our 400 projects around the UK and I am fairly
consistently told by users that they like coming to us because
we are Barnardo's or, more to the point, because we are not social
services. That is generally pretty unfair on social services,
it is a little bit about packaging. I do not make the claim that
our services are necessarily better, but it seems to be undoubtedly
the case that users do like them and we might just have an advantage
in getting access to hard-to-reach people. For example, one of
the services of which I am most proud in Middlesbrough in the
North East supports young girls and young men, getting them off
the streets where they are subject to abuse and prostitution.
A number of the young people there say consistently that they
would not come to the service if it was not the name of a voluntary
sector provider above the door. Whether or not that reflects fairly
on the statutory services, I think it probably does not.
Q204 Chairman: Leave aside
the word niche; the proposition that it is some of the more difficult
territory, it is some of the harder to reach groups, some of the
more challenging areas, would you subscribe to the idea that broadly
that is the territory where the third sector can be most useful?
Mr Narey: It can be and at Barnardo's
we pride ourselves on working with some very hard to reach groups.
We educate children in schools who have been multiply excluded
from many schools and we try to hang on to young people and stay
with them, so we can do that but I do not think that is a structural
issue. My view is that there is nothing that the voluntary sector
can do that the public sector or private sector cannot do just
as well. There is nothing special about us, what is important
is that organisations are well-managed, and I would say that competition
is what drives improvements in services. A lot of people in my
sector think there is something important about being in the voluntary
sector, as if we have a monopoly of compassion, and it is most
unfair, we do not. If we are not well-run, if we do not run our
services well—and we have some excellent services and some
which need improvement—we will not give good service to
the users.
Q205 Chairman: It is well-made
services irrespective of who provides them as long as there is
a contestable environment; that is your feeling on it.
Mr Narey: Yes.
Q206 Chairman: Could I just
ask as a matter of information, because we shall talk to you in
a minute about the business of commissioning, from Barnardo's
point of view in terms of the contracts that you bid for roughly
how many do you get of the ones that you bid for?
Mr Narey: We get work in two sorts
of ways. We still get quite a lot of work where commissioners
simply ask us if we would like to do the work, so obviously we
get all of those. When we are in competition with other voluntary
sector organisations we win about one in three.
Q207 Chairman: I have not
quite worked out, and I am sure it is because I do not understand
enough, as to why in some cases you can be asked directly to do
things and why in other cases it has to be contestable. If you
are a great believer in contestability why would you want to be
in a situation where you are simply given the service as it were?
Mr Narey: Because we respond to
requests from local authorities, for example, and there is much
less evidence of contestability in Scotland where we operate where
we still get a lot of our work on the basis that we have always
provided that service or we are providing a service in an adjacent
town and we are asked to repeat it. In England and Wales the tendency
is much more now for competition, there is very little work that
we get and certainly no new work that we get other than through
competition with other voluntary sector providers.
Q208 Chairman: In your evidence
you mention the North East where there are three authorities for
which you would like to do work but you are prevented from doing
so. In paragraph 6 in your evidence you say: "In the North
East, three local authorities have recently stated to us that
their preference would be to commission parenting services from
us, but that in some cases commissioning and procurement rules
inhibit them in doing so."[2]
I just wondered quite what you meant by that.
Mr Narey: The Government for many
years has been speaking in very encouraging terms about more work
being put out for competition and more work being made available
to the public sector. Our experience is that there are a number
of problems with commissioning and its use is very patchy. Indeed
one of the challenges which organisations like us face in the
next couple of years is coping with the amount of work which is
going back in-house, Children's Fund work, for example, is being
absorbed back into local authorities. Some local authorities are
much better than others at putting out work to competition; others
for all sorts of reasons prefer to keep the work in-house. My
view, as you would expect, is not that we are owed any work, we
should not expect any work, but we would welcome more consistently
to be given the opportunity to demonstrate what we can provide
at a given price and to be compared exactly evenly—not to
everybody—with local authority in-house provision and that
by other organisations including the private sector.
Q209 Chairman: In this particular
case do you happen to know what is it about the commissioning
and procurement rules which inhibit you?
Mr Narey: I do not know the details
of this particular case. My understanding is that those who are
responsible for the work have said they would very much have liked
us to have a chance of providing it but the local authorities
have decided that the work is going to stay in-house and be directly
delivered. Some local authorities are much less in favour of putting
work out to competition than others.
Chairman: Let me bring some colleagues
in and we will explore these issues further.
Q210 Mr Walker: Mr Narey,
you came from the Home Office, prisons. This is perhaps slightly
off the subject under review today but how do you think, for example,
the charitable sector could help with prisons, ie the management
of prisons or perhaps the reintegration of prisoners into society?
I am sure charities are already working within the prison system,
but where is there scope to extend that level of engagement with
the charitable sector?
Mr Narey: The voluntary sector
already does a great deal, both in prisons and with offenders
in the community. I spent virtually all of the considerable investment
I got from Jack Straw in 1998 to 2000 for drug treatment on the
voluntary sector because I believed then and I believe now that
they would do a good job. There are lots of small pockets of work
which are being contracted out and where the voluntary sector
has made a valuable contribution, but what has happened is that
since the creation of NOMS[3],
which I was partially responsible for, there has not been a much
greater step, as I had expected and hoped, to a much wider use
of the voluntary and the private sector in delivering services.
Contestability, which was very much at the heart of the creation
of NOMS, has made very slow progress indeed. I should say straightaway
that this is not a bid for Barnardo's, we have no wish to run
prisons, but the voluntary sector and the private sector could
play a much greater role in very large scale contracts. I believe
the contribution of the private sector to improving the public
sector in terms of managing prisons has been enormous and I would
like to see a much greater use of competition and much greater
opportunities for the private and the voluntary sector for much
larger scale contracts.
Q211 Mr Walker: I have nothing
against prisons themselves; in fact if we need more prisons let
us build more prisons. What offends me is the idea that we have
revolving door prisons; we get prisoners who go in, they serve
a sentence and they keep coming back, recidivistic criminals.
Where should the charitable sector be engaging with the prison
service to ensure that when people are in prison they actually
receive the support they need, the training they need, the services
they need to go back into society and be productive members of
the community. You said you had some ideas on how this should
work but they were not actioned or taken forward; could you be
specific in some areas where you think work needs to be done and
should be done?
Mr Narey: A great deal more could
be done to rehabilitate prisoners while in custody and to prepare
them more adequately for their release so they will be reintegrated
into society. Simply putting out work with current levels of over-population
to the private or voluntary sector will not change the very poor
reconviction rates; the fact is that rehabilitative activity has
to be spread amongst far too many prisoners at the moment. One
of the reasons why it has been difficult to progress NOMS and
one of the reasons why I left the Home Office was that I despaired
of getting a stable sentencing policy, which is absolutely necessary.
If you are going to manage offenders effectively, make sure that
they are released in a more considered manner and are supported
in the community. You have to have a system which is not working
every single day at breaking point.
Q212 Mr Walker: When prisoners
are released from prison back into the community you are suggesting—I
hope I am not putting words into your mouth—that it is done
on a rather ad hoc basis and that there are not enough integrated
support networks to help in those critical few months after their
release from prison. That would strike me as an area that is ideally
suited for the charitable sector to reach out to those people
and help them readjust to civilian life.
Mr Narey: My view is that we send
too many people to prison. I believe there are some people in
prison who probably need to stay there longer and the changes
this government made a few years ago in introducing more indeterminate
sentences should be praised, but the vast majority of the people
we send to prison stay for three or four weeks and they get virtually
no rehabilitative activity in that time. We would not send someone
to hospital, watch them get no medical treatment whatsoever and
expect them to get better, but that is what we expect of prisons.
Although there are some improvements at the margins and some individuals
do do well in prison—and I retain an old-fashioned view
that custody could be made to work, it could be an enriching,
rehabilitative educational experience—it cannot possibly
be that it is such an experience when prisons are working at breaking
point and when their energies are being consumed at coping with
the day to day problems of managing too many prisoners.
Q213 Mr Walker: What interventions
could Barnardo's be making—or perhaps you are already making
them—with young people before they get to the stage where
they face incarceration? You probably have a number of initiatives
in place but I am sure there is a great deal more you would like
to be doing. In a couple of minutes could you just canter through
those areas?
Mr Narey: If we are talking about
avoiding people going into custody, despite the issue being complicated
it is fairly straightforward. In order to stop people offending
you need to do two things: make them employable and get them somewhere
to live, so the sorts of things we do in our residential schools
where we do make people who have been otherwise on the scrapheap
employable are very important. Our 25 different schemes around
the country which support children leaving care, help them to
get accommodation, give them advice on getting into jobs, all
those have a significant effect on stopping sometimes the inevitable
drip of very vulnerable people, particularly children who have
been in care, into custody. Our record in this country on the
outcomes for children in care remains pretty woeful. I am very
optimistic about the new White Paper published just before the
change of Prime Minister, it will make a real difference, but
my goodness we serve children in care very badly at the moment.
I met many of them when I was working on that.
Q214 Jenny Willott: I want
to ask some questions around the risks associated with commissioning,
particularly the risk to the third sector. From the research that
was done by the NCC did you look at all at mission creep, either
through organisations working with flexibility—flexibility
and adaptability enough to be able to serve all the needs, as
we were talking about earlier, the holistic needs of an individual—and
balancing that with mission creep where work starts developing
outside of your initial remit. What have you done to look at how
that is balanced and how you make sure you do not do the latter?
Mr Cullum: We did not look at
the extent to which organisations try to create a new opportunity
for themselves, if that is what you mean.
Q215 Jenny Willott: Is it
forced on them by the terms of what is available for them through
money? Are they being pushed into creeping outside of their initial
aim because that is where the money is?
Mr Cullum: One of the questions
that comes out of our research is does the government use the
third sector in the right way and does the commissioning process
actually narrow what the third sector has to offer. It is about
insight into people and what their needs are. If there is at times
more creativity from the third sector, is the commissioning done
in a very mechanistic technocratic way that just requires very
narrow delivery, which could almost be done by anybody, and then
it is just a question of is it the quality of the management and
the people who happen to be providing a particular service. The
way the government does it, it may be missing the opportunity
in a sense.
Mr Narey: If I may add to that,
I do not think there is any question of the voluntary sector being
forced to do anything. One of the great privileges of working
in the voluntary sector in my view is that we can choose what
to do. We look at lots of tender documents from local authorities
and some of them we decide not to apply for because we do not
want to do it, so it is not a question of being forced into things.
I cannot tell you how many times I would have liked to have told
successive Home Secretaries I would like someone else to run Feltham
or Brixton but I could not; it is a great privilege of the voluntary
sector that we can choose. I do not think there is any question
of voluntary sector organisations being forced into doing work
which they perhaps will not think is effective or which expands
their mission beyond their competence because it is up to us whether
or not we express an interest in doing the work.
Mr Cullum: We have certainly come
across, in other contexts, third sector organisations who have
been taken advantage of by government in the sense that government
has relied on the organisations' commitment to their mission to
essentially underpay them for the services, so it is basically
working on the basis that the government will get away with paying
what they can because the organisation is so committed to its
mission that it will not withdraw. If third sector delivery is
sustainable then clearly there has got to be some kind of going
rate for it, else it does not really do anything either for the
sustainability of the organisations or in the end for the services
that are being provided to consumers.
Q216 Jenny Willott: Picking
up on something that you said earlier, Mr Cullum, you were talking
about design versus delivery. Should the third sector be involved
more in the design of policy and then to some extent does it really
matter who then delivers it, or is it in the delivery that they
have a lot to offer?
Mr Cullum: I am sure they have
lots to offer at all stages. I suppose the thing we would most
point out is rather than being about the third sector, it is more
about consumers' involvement in shaping policy, so more involvement
in the commissioning process so that there is more user-led commissioning
where people who the services are intended for play a part in
deciding what is tendered for and then at the end in assessing
whether or not they have been delivered. Those are both points
which are in the third sector action plan and I guess the question
is that clearly we are not at that stage, and lots of organisations
who commission do not involve consumers either in assessing or
in the shaping stage at the beginning, and how is that going to
be put into practice.
Q217 Jenny Willott: Do charities
have to find new problems to tackle as older ones go away and
disappear, for example running orphanages. Do they have to find
new problems just to stay in business?
Mr Narey: That is certainly not
the case with Barnardo's; although we do not run orphanages any
more we work with the same sort of children who would otherwise
have been in orphanages, it is just that we put a lot of work
into getting them fostered and adopted. While we have 3.8 million
children living in poverty in the fifth richest economy in the
world I do not think we need to invent any problems at all; that
is the overwhelming challenge of all our work with children, that
so many of them live in poverty. One in three children in the
UK; 70% of Bangladeshi children live in poverty; it is overwhelming.
Q218 Jenny Willott: What about
organisations, for example like Shelter, which have changed a
lot of the work that they do and have adapted to much more campaigning
around poor housing, whereas it used to be focused almost entirely
on homelessness?
Mr Narey: I do not feel competent
to speak on that.
Ms Hopkins: I would not interpret
that as finding new problems; I would see that more as an organisation
that has evolved into working with different groups and perhaps
meeting different needs. I suppose this is one of the things that
I was alluding to at the beginning, that there is such a diversity
and richness within it that it is almost impossible to generalise
because at one end you do have the large charities like Barnardo's
with a very clear purpose, organisations like Shelter that perhaps
have evolved but are still doing a really good job, it is not
an invented task that they have got. There are still other organisations
working at that sort of coalface area where maybe Shelter started
off at, and one of the strengths and the beauties of the sector
is that there is often the bubbling up at those points of need
with the very small, local organisations that are working very,
very closely with the people who need those services and then
they can grow and evolve into other things. I do not think there
is any suggestion that they are creating needs, but there is a
response to need and those needs may change over time.
Q219 Jenny Willott: Can I
also ask about the ability of an organisation to be independent
when they are receiving a large amount of their money from a government
source? I know, Mr Narey, you have written various things that
say it does not affect an organisation's ability to be independent
and to criticise the funder in any way; is that the case for all
organisations or is that when you are a large enough organisation
to be able to have enough contracts to cushion the blow if you
lose one or two because you have annoyed somebody? Does that same
thing apply to much smaller organisations where they might be
much more reliant on funding from one source; do they still have
that independence to be critical?
Mr Narey: Some organisations may
fear that they might be penalised in public sector contracting
by speaking out. I have rather more faith in the public sector
and in the integrity of the public sector to believe that that
will be so. As a public sector commissioner you have fairly limited
ability to change a decision, a contract. When on one occasion
I did not give a contract for a private prison to the lowest bidder
I had quite a hard time in front of the Public Accounts Committee
because that had to be disclosed, so there is relatively limited
scope to give contracts from the public sector to other than the
bidder who is meeting all the requirements of the tender and at
the lowest possible price. Generally this has become a bit of
a myth about speaking out and there are all sorts of examples
of organisations which take public money and have consistently
spoken out against government policy. Certainly in the last few
months we at Barnardo's have spoken out vociferously about the
treatment of asylum seeker children with HIV, about children in
care. Very recently we turned the Home Office around about their
plans to introduce a Megan's Law; I do not believe doing that
will significantly affect our ability to gain contracts either
from the public sector or the local authorities.
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