Examination of Witnesses (Questions 366
- 379)
THURSDAY 17 JANUARY 2008
MR SELWYN
IMAGE CBE, MR
ALEX WHINNOM
AND DR
SYLVIA SHAM
Q366 Chairman: Let me welcome
our witnesses this morning. Thank you for coming. We are delighted
to have Sylvia Sham from the Wai Yin Chinese Women Society; Alex
Whinnom from the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisations;
and Selwyn Image from the Emmaus UK Foundation, who I think was
awarded a CBE in the recent honour's list. We congratulate you
on that.
Mr Image: Thank you.
Q367 Chairman: The Committee
has interests in the honours system as well, so the bits come
together. As you may know, we have been doing an inquiry for some
time looking at the role of the voluntary sector in the delivery
of public services. This is the very final session and we wanted
to hear, right at the end, from organisations which are at the
front line, delivering services, or not doing so if that is what
they choose to do. We have mainly a Manchester focus for that—and
we are very pleased to have it. We are going to follow that with
some of the peak representative organisations of the sector, who
are going to tell us what they think overall. It is your chance
to tell us from the front line. It is really for you to tell us
what you think we need to know rather than for us tell you what
we think is important. Knowing what we are about, do any of you
want to say anything by way of introduction?
Mr Image: I am happy to take my
turn, because if you want to know what we do then it is quite
important in the context of the issues which we would welcome
you addressing.
Q368 Chairman: It might be
useful to start with you, Selwyn. As I understand it, looking
at information about your organisation, you have taken the view
that contracting with the state to deliver public services is
not for you.
Mr Image: Sometimes it is, sometimes
it is not. It depends very much on the skill and expertise, both
of the negotiators within the state and the local understanding
of what it is that we are trying to deliver. We have, for example,
in terms of supporting people, both positive and negative experience
with local government officials and the issue, in a way, comes
down to one of their recognising what it is we are trying to deliver
and allowing us to get on with it rather than imposing what we,
probably incorrectly, describe sometimes as a "tick-box mentality"
to the issues involved. Do people understand what the communities
do?
Q369 Chairman: I think we
probably do, because we have some background information about
that.
Mr Image: We major very considerably
on the recovery of self-respect, because that enables people who
have been recipients, if you will, of public monies to become
givers as opposed to receivers. We wholly subscribe to the objectives,
in that we consider it is trying to operate along the same lines,
turning, if you will, receivers into givers. But where we have
problems very often is that the "companions", as we
call them—the people who work in our communities—and
the idea that they should be "rehabilitated" within
a set period of time might be wholly inappropriate to their ability
to contribute. Sometimes we have come across and have had to refuse
supporting people/money because people believe that the accountability,
in their terms, of the public funds that they distribute means
that nobody should stay in a community, working in a community,
for more than a given amount of time, sometimes which is wholly
inappropriate to the individual concerned, because there are people
who have been so mentally damaged or damaged by life and experience
who, though they are able to perform the role of useful citizens
within a community, would be hopeless if they were set back into
the community without the protection and the carapace that Emmaus
can give them.
Q370 Chairman: Reading what
your director Tim Page says about all this, he says, "We
do not need to tie ourselves to public service delivery contracts
because we do not need revenue funding."[1]
Then he goes on to say: "It threatens our independence and
puts us in a position that could distort our priorities."
The reason I explore this with you is that, if this is what Emmaus
is saying—and I can understand why they say it: they do
not want all the baggage that comes with contracting because it
may cut across how you want to operate—I wonder how other
voluntary organisations respond to that proposition and why they
would be interested in getting involved in the contracting process.
Does Emmaus not have a good point here? Could I perhaps turn to
either of our other witnesses.
Mr Whinnom: I think the view Emmaus
has taken is shared by quite substantial numbers of voluntary
organisations. It is partly the twisting of what your real work
is to try to fit a set of criteria. One of the big issues, I think,
is around what gets commissioned from the voluntary sector in
the first place, because if it is just a case of a different group
of organisations delivering the same services there is very little
value in commissioning it out. If you can get in at the commissioning
stage and influence what gets commissioned and do things which
are not being done at the moment, and which perhaps an organisation
like Emmaus has identified a clear need for and can do, then you
are on to something. I think where you have imaginative commissioners,
we have seen examples of projects that work well—and I am
sure Sylvia will talk more about that. There are an awful lot
of organisations which might like to take on public sector contracts
but would not want to take on the contracts that are on offer.
Q371 Chairman: Would that
point not be met if the voluntary sector was simply involved in
the design process, in the commissioning process, without being
involved in the delivery process?
Mr Whinnom: It would be partially
met but there are quite a lot of problems with that attitude as
well. One is that getting involved in that is quite time consuming
and takes up organisations' efforts and they are not resourced
to do that, so in many cases the good information that exists
at the grassroots, front-line level is not getting through to
the people who need to hear it because no-one there has the resource
to deliver it and the commissioners are not going out and actively
asking either. That is one issue. A second problem there is that,
whilst you might think that advice is all very well, the trend
towards contracts, as opposed to grant funding, and the increasing
squeeze on public sector funding generally means that where local
authorities or PCTs[2]
review their funding to the voluntary sector they are often reducing
the kind of flexible support that they used to give in favour
of contracts and commissioning, and the organisations which can
bid for the contracts are not the same organisations which would
have perhaps received a small grant and done front-line work.
We are getting very quickly into the deeper philosophical issues
but one of the primary issues I wanted to raise with you is that
there is not a single third sector. The voluntary sector, as we
would call it, in Greater Manchester, is overwhelmingly made up
of relatively very small organisations, mostly unstaffed organisations,
I estimate at least two-thirds[3]
of the 11,000-odd groups in Greater Manchester are not big enough
to register with the Charity Commission. Those organisations are
the ones which are doing the fantastic work at grassroots level
that the Government is so keen to see delivered more effectively,
and yet those are the organisations which really could never consider
a contract. The ones which are getting the contract are perhaps
the larger/medium to larger sized organisations, some of which
are very local and can do a really, really good job, but we are
also seeing good quality local organisations bounced out of contracts
by organisations coming from outside the field, either new social
enterprises or so-called social enterprises that are really private-sector
driven or by branches of large national charities that are sort
of moving in on our patch and are out-competing because they can
make the efficiencies and that kind of thing.
Q372 Chairman: Is that a bad
thing?
Mr Whinnom: I think it is a bad
thing if it kills your local voluntary activity or stifles it.
Q373 Mr Prentice: How big
do you have to be to register with the Charity Commission?
Mr Whinnom: I am afraid I cannot
answer that.
Mr Prentice: It is just that you say
two-thirds are not big enough to register.
Q374 Chairman: We will do
the homework on that. Perhaps I could turn to Sylvia. You are
described as a medium-sized organisation and you are a heavy deliverer
of services. Why do you not come and tell us what Emmaus tells
us about the loss of priorities, the threat to independence and
all the rest of it?
Dr Sham: I think it all depends
on the individual organisation's mission and what they aim for.
Because we are a medium organisation we are not born to be success.
We struggled at the beginning, 20 years ago, but as an organisation
we look ahead at what is going on at the national level and local
level to learn along what is going on. It is not about "grab
the money and deliver things". The reason we had 60% from
commissioning and 40% from grant and trust is because we can see
the balance of it as an organisation. I cannot generalise for
everybody. I cannot represent everybody. I can share with you
what our organisation has gone through, from nothing, from only
having £10,000 in our bank, and then today it is £1.2
million. It is a learning curve and, also, I think leadership
is very important. Also, it depends—the Government has changed
the policy—on what they leave to the voluntary organisation
to deliver. We try to understand why there are different—like
in the Greater Manchester Council—regimes of support, infrastructure
of support. I cannot feel one formula to fit to everybody. That
is what my opinion is. We believe, "Okay, the Learning Skills
Council and Jobcentre Plus, now they are starting working with
the voluntary organisations like us." Just as an example,
last year we delivered about five projects which crossed over
Greater Manchester with another BME (Black and Minority Ethnic)
group. This is the first time as an organisation we take the calculated
risk of working across the Greater Manchester. One reason, we
believe, is that to working by the Chinese organisation ourself
is not very good for the Chinese community themselves, because
we are helping them and working with them to progressing to see
the real world. By working with another ethnic minority group
from another partnership, we got a lot of experience from another
ethnic minority group and their organisation, and we learn from
that, and then we put our tender—I call it "tendering"
or "commissioning"—more strongly, not only from
one ethnic group. We put the tender together for the Learning
and Skills Council to get the funding to deliver for about 2,000,
as you call them, "hard to reach groups", to get them
from no English to the level of English which is very simple:
to go the bank to say, "I want to open an account" or
to go to the post office to have a stamp—the simple things
they want to learn—and then to progress them into work.
A lot of the terminology and all the jargon is very hard for people
from the BME group to understand. What does it mean "IB—Incapacity
Benefit"? For the Chinese community they have no idea what
the entitlement is to get that. Also, by working with another
organisation and getting contract, we have got, also, to the learning
curve. It is a difficult task. We got all the quality, all the
health and safety, and all the management information. We did
go through the difficult times but, after that, we had a competent
next time with the level of commissioning work we can deliver.
And I tell you the good news in here: I got the audit from the
Learning Skills Council yesterday to tell me, "Sylvia, I
was supposed to come here for two days. Now, only for four hours.
All your paperwork, all your achievement target achieved."
Of course, we got the funding, but we got through it, we passed
it, with no recommendation at all. That has given us as an organisation—not
only us, the people working with us—the confidence. So it
is a chicken and egg. It is right and wrong.
Q375 Chairman: Selwyn, did
you want to respond?
Mr Image: Yes, I did. I just wanted
to join with Sylvia and Alex on the point that you might have
misunderstood from the article. We are not obsessed by independence;
we are much more interested in teamwork with local authorities
than what we would consider is sometimes inappropriate management.
I wanted to be quite clear about that. We do a number of things—and
I have given a list of them, should you wish to have them—but
we are involved in a number of cooperative ventures. We can do
a lot, for example, with newly released prisoners. We have a residential
detox unit in one of our communities. It will not accept any money,
largely because, and in terms of the way that drug detoxing is
managed, there are time periods associated, there are rehab times
associated. When we have people working in the community, we believe
we are better able to judge, for example. We still work in co-operation
for the medication with the local people, and we accept their
referrals, but in terms of time we prefer not to be paid than
not to be able to deliver the service. In terms of saving to the
state, I made a couple of inquiries yesterday and I calculate
that the detox unit that we have in our Cambridge community saves
the state £600,000 a year in addition to the £600,000
that the Cambridge University Team found that we save the state
annually on return on investment. That gets back to the ultimate
point I want to make, that if there was a new attitude, if you
will, in capital grant funding, where you regarded yourself as
venture capitalists and looked at the return on investment that
you could sometimes get from co-operational ventures like ours,
you might find that the risk could be factored in and is worth
a lighter touch in terms of management, where people are not always
as skilled.
Q376 Chairman: But if the
state is getting the service without a contract, then it is even
better for it, is it not?
Mr Image: We also have a contract,
for example, in our Bristol community, where we have entered into
a contract with the PCT on homeless healthcare delivery. So it
is possible.
Chairman: I am going to hand over to
colleagues now.
Q377 Jenny Willott: I would
like to come back to something Alex said. You said the process
of commissioning and so on is damaging the smaller organisations
or it makes it much harder, potentially, for smaller organisations
to survive. If there were more consortia building, if there were
more subcontracting, would that get around that problem?
Mr Whinnom: It can partially get
around it. One of the things we have been trying to do as an organisation
is to try to develop good models for that that could work. I have
a couple of examples of that. We have a learning consortium in
Greater Manchester with around 28 voluntary learning providers
in it, including some very small ones which are reaching very
hard to reach groups, with the view that that learning consortium
has passed all the Learning and Skills Councils' requirements
to be of the same status as the further education college. In
theory, the idea was that it would be able then to bid for contracts
on a par with them. Unfortunately, the last lot of contracts that
just came out before Christmas were all on such a large scale
that we could not bid for any of them. There is one about delivering
grants to third sector organisations which obviously we are bidding
for, but all the normal mainstream learning contracts, despite
the fact that this is a relatively large group of providers and
we could easily handle a contract worth £1 million between
us, we could not touch any of the contracts that were on offer.
That is one example. Again, we will get into it at sub-contracting
level but, of course, by then a slice has been taken off, and
what we are required to do may be dictated by the primary contractor
so you cannot deliver the service that perhaps the members of
the consortium would have liked to deliver.
Q378 Jenny Willott: Are they
all private providers that have the contract?
Mr Whinnom: We do not know yet.
The tenders are going in now. We had a similar situation with
the Jobcentre Plus contract—of which you are probably aware.
Again, there was no chance. For something like our learning consortium—which
is sub-regional level, it is not tiny—it was still too big
for us to go for. Another model we worked on with the Greater
Manchester Probation Service, who were interested in finding ways
of supporting funders from ethnic minority groups to get back
into the community or for people who were on probation to be supported.
We did two relatively short pieces of work that they paid for
to identify voluntary groups within the right communities that
would be prepared to take this work on, and we actually found
a large number of them. I think we ended up with something about
40 or so which were not only willing to do it but had the capacity
to do it and would have been happy to accept spot contracts to
support individuals. But the Probation Service was then hamstrung
by the national rules on offender management and so on, and the
requirement that they would have to let out large-scale contracts,
and we are waiting to see what happens and whether that will be
better or more flexible. We are trying to do that. The other model
that can work and does sometimes work is the one that Sylvia was
briefly describing, where perhaps two or three relatively large
(in our terms) voluntary organisations club together and bid for
a tender. But, again, the tenders still have to be relatively
small for even that to work, so, yes, it does help but it is not
the whole answer. The vast majority of local front-line groups
could never be in a position to bid independently for tenders
and contracts. They would need either a consortium or a host organisation
or a new partner which had the administrative capacity and the
ability to write the bid in the right way and all that kind of
thing.
Q379 Jenny Willott: As well
as making the contracts smaller, is there something that the Government
should be doing to support the development of consortia or to
support the subcontracting process in trying to improve the number
of organisations which get involved?
Mr Whinnom: I think there is probably
quite a lot that could be done in terms of making contracts smaller;
reducing the administrative burden; trying to create a bit more
consistency over what is required, for example, with pre-qualification
questionnaires. There are 10 coming out for the 10 districts of
Greater Manchester to deliver city strategy work on learning and
skills, and the questions on all of them, so far, have been different.
Incidentally, the requirements also are very difficult to meet.
We filled in one for one of our local authorities a couple of
weeks ago where they required £10 million worth of public
liability insurance to qualify. I was given another example, second-hand,
from one of our local organisations which was tendering for work
with a different local authority, where they were required to
supply, up front, at PQQ[4]
stage, all the CRB[5]
checks of all their trustees, staff and volunteers, which obviously
they refused to do on ideological grounds but which, in any case,
was impractical and too expensive. The complication of the administration,
bureaucracy and the lack of consistency is an issue. The size
of the contracts is an issue. The short notice—the timescales
you have in which to fill these things in—is, frankly, ridiculous.
We had notice of the Learning and Skills Councils' contracts before
Christmas and they all had to be in by the end of January. For
organisations like ours or Sylvia's, which are relatively large,
that is a struggle—very, very difficult. But for smaller
organisations, you might as well completely forget it—it
is hopeless.
1 Third Sector Magazine, 22 August 2007 Back
2
Primary Care Trusts Back
3
Note from witness: "Re registration with the Charities
Commission, it looks as if the threshold is £5,000, and it
looks as if a fairer estimate of the proportion of the Greater
Manchester sector obliged to register is about half rather than
two thirds." Back
4
Pre-qualification questionnaire Back
5
Criminal Records Bureau Back
|
