Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 399)
THURSDAY 17 JANUARY 2008
MR SELWYN
IMAGE CBE, MR
ALEX WHINNOM
AND DR
SYLVIA SHAM
Q380 Jenny Willott: One of
the things Sylvia said earlier on was that the rules keep changing
and the process keeps changing when you are bidding for money.
What are the main changes that have taken place? Are they all
for the worse or are some of them improvements?
Dr Sham: I think it all depends.
Somehow they change it all the time. The contract may be for 12
months and some will be for two years. They are changing. When
you finish 12 months, you do not know what is going on after that.
All your investment—you train your staff, you build up the
capacity of your organisation—after the 12 months, that
is finished. If you go through another contract and go through
another PQQ questionnaire and then go through the tender, they
are changing. Also, sometimes, like Alex said, there is the insurance.
To the medium or small organisation, for £10 million insurance
it costs us about £5,000. £5,000 to us is quite a lot
of money to get the insurance.
Q381 Jenny Willott: You have
been talking about some of the examples of work that has been
going on, so the stuff that you have been doing with other BME
organisations and some of the work on drug rehabilitation that
you have been doing. Is there any evidence that the good lessons
that are learned from those sorts of projects are being fed back
into the commissioning process? Is there any mechanism so that
the commissioners can learn from what works, so that in the future
that is taken into account when they are looking at commissioning
services?
Mr Whinnom: There is the potential
for that to happen, particularly through organisations like ours,
the local infrastructure agencies that are working with the front-line
groups, so that we have an idea of what they may doing, and also
have the strategic connection with the commissioners. Because
our job is to be there and talk to them, obviously. We are funded
to do that. There is the ChangeUp initiative which has allowed
the development of consortium infrastructure organisations. You
know about that, presumably, so I do not need to explain that
one.
Q382 Chairman: No.
Mr Whinnom: In Greater Manchester—and
I know it is not the same everywhere in the country—that
has been hugely beneficial because the communications systems
within the infrastructure itself have been greatly developed and
we are now in a position to work very well with public sector
bodies and provide them with very good information should they
choose to ask us. The sad thing is that it often depends on individuals.
Again, there are very good people working within a particular
authority, you make a good relationship with them, and then of
course they move on or they get moved on and you have to start
again. That is difficult for us and I think difficult for them
as well.
Q383 Jenny Willott: Is it
dependent upon the voluntary sector being proactive rather than
there being a proper mechanism?
Mr Whinnom: Absolutely.
Q384 Jenny Willott: It seems
to me that if they are commissioning public services and there
are ways that seem to be working better and that the evidence
shows are very effective, there should be a mechanism for that
to be fed into the design and the commissioning of the services.
What could be done differently to make sure that that did happen
without the need for the voluntary sector to be proactive and
the statutory side to be responsive? Could it be built in better?
Mr Whinnom: There is the obligation
side, I suppose, and there is an enabling side. The Government
has so far fought shy, for example, of making the Compact a mandatory
requirement, but some of the principles that are enshrined in
the Compact would, if they were universally applied, solve some
of the problems—but they are not universally applied by
any means. On a practical level, it may be about putting resource
into the relationship, as opposed to into direct delivery of service,
because the building of relationships can be more important than
investing in a particular contract. There are lots of good practice
examples you could quote. Sylvia has quoted some.
Mr Image: Could I support that
point. I have written down "horses for courses" because
we have had a fairly recent instance in Kent with one of our communities
where we had built a relationship with the local government team
on supporting money funding. They came in, it was team work, they
gave us advice, we amended. A new team comes in and says, "Your
job is to conform to standards"—which we considered
inappropriate. "Nobody is going to stay in this community,"
they said, "for more than three years and ideally two, and
then they have to be out. Otherwise: no money." In a sense,
it was because we had built up an understanding. Our previous
chair who had negotiated this was a senior local government official
himself, so, presumably, he had a way into the culture, but he
was able to bring people on board and people wanted to come on
board and to co-operate in the success rather than the arbitrary
application of measures by which they perhaps felt they either
needed to protect themselves or would be judged or which public
money needed to have applied.
Q385 Jenny Willott: Relationships
were purely on a personal basis rather than an institutional basis.
Mr Image: Yes and no, because
officials came in and did their official work and evaluated, but,
I suppose, yes, if there was an element of goodwill or understanding
of what the ultimate objective was then it worked better. For
instance, the Emmaus movement would not exist in this country
were it not for a senior local government official in South Cambridgeshire
who, when he first saw our application, delegated the question
of planning permission for the site and for the purpose that we
were presenting to one of his officers. The officer told him that
he was going to recommend against planning permission being given
to construct an Emmaus community, on the grounds that it would
be a blot on the landscape, there would be piles of rotting metal
and tinkers, and the whole thing was very suspicious. The director
said to him, "If you don't mind, I'm going to take this portfolio
off you because I wish to present to the planning committee myself
because I believe there is a positive way of interpreting regulations
as well as a negative or controlling way." As it happened,
we got planning permission to start the first community—which
has led to 14 others—by eight votes to seven. His interaction
was critical and, quite frankly, the movement would not be here
if it was not for this official. It is not just a question of
hacking at the officials here. Like everything where human interaction
is involved, I do not believe that one could prescribe good practice
but if there is the right attitude then things fly.
Jenny Willott: Thank you.
Q386 Julie Morgan: I want
to ask for information really, Alex. You said two-thirds of voluntary
groups have no staff.
Mr Whinnom: They are not large
enough to register with the Charities Commission.
Q387 Julie Morgan: Yes, and
you said that most of them did not have any staff.
Mr Whinnom: We are not sure exactly
of the figures but I would estimate that probably about half are
unstaffed, and a lot of the rest have perhaps just one member
of staff or two members of staff, so they are relatively very
small groups.
Q388 Julie Morgan: Are those
what you would call the front-line services?
Mr Whinnom: Yes, as opposed to
us who are there to support them doing what they do.
Q389 Julie Morgan: Do many
of those two-thirds get involved in any of the work in which you
are involved?
Mr Whinnom: Yes, they do. A lot
of those sorts of groups are prepared to get involved in policy
networks and initiatives. They are prepared, for example, if we
organise it, to talk directly to the Health Service or Probation
Service or whatever, or to their local authority for JSP and stuff
like that. It is not that people are not interested. We have been
doing work for quite a long time, for instance, with the Passenger
Transport Authority over how they need to do things differently
to ensure that everyone is able to use public transport and it
is suitable for their needs. A lot of very small groups have been
involved in feeding information in.
Q390 Julie Morgan: Could you
tell us what sort of groups those are?
Mr Whinnom: For example, a local
group that perhaps deals with young people with mental health
problems. There is a project quite near to us where they have,
I think, three members of staff. They support young people who
have mental health problems through a drop-in centre, to enable
them to get the confidence to go out and to register with the
Jobcentre and things like that, and they have particular transport
needs. There is another voluntary group up in Rochdale which supports
Asian women who do not seem to want to use the bus at all and
they were able to tell the PTA[6]
why they do not use the bus and the barriers to that. There is
an awful lot of community-based action where you have perhaps
a small group of people who are doing something very specific
with a particular group and often they are not necessarily engaging
or interacting with the public sector at all. There is no reason
why they would unless they have a relationship through a grant
or a contract. I think that is quite important, because if you
have a reason to have a relationship, then you have a dialogue
and you have engagement. The relationship with the local infrastructure
organisations like Councils for Voluntary Service (CVS) is also
very important. Obviously they reach more of those groups than
we do directly because we are operating over the 10 authorities
and we work with them and through them. A local CVS, for instance—Wigan
is a very good example. Wigan is a very rural part of Greater
Manchester. Most of the sector in Wigan would fall within that
category of having fewer than five people employed, and many of
them, perhaps half of them, have no staff at all. Many of them
have absolutely no relationship with the local authority and no
reason to have one. The local authority in Wigan at the moment
is very interested in trying to develop that relationship, because
they want not just to be able to commission work from them but
to be able to get information from them so that they can improve
what they do generally.
Q391 Julie Morgan: To me it
seems vital that there is contact made with those groups and they
are drawn into this process in some way that informs the whole
process of giving contracts. Do you have any examples, Sylvia?
Dr Sham: From my personal experience
of working with my organisation, at the beginning I knew nothing
about community work. I come from university as a sole Wai Yin.
I am passionate about it and, because I passionately believe it,
so a lot of the kind of infrastructure—they have got fancy
words "infrastructure" and "capacity building"—at
the beginning, even though I have a PhD, I did not understand
what they mean: "infrastructure" and "capacity
building". But I went along to learn what it is about, and
people like Alex's organisation, our local support organisation,
for the local authority they had some kind of special commissioning
work or some kind of policy which wanted to engage the local organisations.
People like us, it developed to involve engagement. If you just
sit in your office, you have the passion and you have the vision
but you do not know what is going on and it is difficult. I have
been everywhere—everybody knows me in Manchester, I think—to
listen, to know what is going on, and I learned that. When someone
says, "Oh, what does `capacity building' mean?" I understand
that now, at least. It is knowing how to say it in English. The
coin is two-faced: you need to know what is going on in your side,
as a community, and, also, you need to know about what is going
on outside your community. Then, as a very basic to deliver a
service, if you know both you have a very good channel to use
and that will be why some organisation can do better than another
organisation.
Q392 Julie Morgan: It must
be difficult to do both.
Dr Sham: Yes, very hard work.
I work nearly 40 hours a day! Some people do not want it, because
they have family commitment, they have all that. It is very difficult
if somebody from ... I am sorry to say, but I want to say people
from BME group. They have real passion about their own community,
they know their community, what they want, but, sometimes, because
the level of their understanding and the level of their education
... I am quite fortunate, I have got the qualification, so I have
an understanding, a little bit, about what is going on. Some local
BME groups cannot understand it. Even though Alex organised some
kind of consultation about the Compact, to that it is: "What
does the Compact mean, for God's sake." They have no idea.
It took a long time to understand it. It is a long way to go,
but one day we can achieve it. If you are not doing it, you never
know whether you can do it or can not do it.
Mr Image: Could I offer a reflection
on much of what Alex and Sylvia have been saying? With another
hat on, I had quite a lot to do with the Cambridgeshire Community
Foundation. It seemed to me that the county community foundations
are a very appropriate link—and I imagine you know more
about them than I need to say—in terms of links with the
really small organisations, and directing funding and enabling
the small, community-based, unpaid volunteer workers to do something.
Certainly in Cambridgeshire and, I suspect, in most counties—there
are about 52 of these organisations—that is the way, very
often, that public money is very effectively channelled through
to small organisations. I just wanted to share that thought with
you.
Q393 Julie Morgan: I would
like to ask one further question about length of contracts. Sylvia,
you have referred to this already. What is the average length
of time that a contract lasts? What do you think it should be?
Dr Sham: Are you talking about
the contract from the Learning and Skills Council, the DWP? This
all depends.
Q394 Julie Morgan: What is
the variety?
Dr Sham: One year or three years.
Q395 Julie Morgan: What do
you think it should be ideally?
Dr Sham: Ideally it is three years.
From the point of my experience, if everything is transparent,
if your organisation can deliver, why let you go through another
tender and commission? If you have a good, proper monitoring system
already in place in the top level from the Learning and Skills
Council and Jobcentre Plus, why they let you another tender? That
organisation suffers to do everything again, to go through the
tender/commission again. If an organisation can prove that it
can deliver, why not continue to support that? But it will not
exist. Now there are too many contract tenders coming. One year
or three year and you are starting again. If you cannot get it
because you have not had a team of the management that are very
good to write the bid. It is not like the private sector, where
they can employ a group of four people, just sat there all week
to write the tender. I cannot do it. I have no money to employ
that special consultant to do it, so I lose the tender. All my
investment for the staff, training them, all this capacity, what
that means is that I put it in the middle of the ocean and I start
again. That is from my local level experience.
Q396 Julie Morgan: You think
a lot of money and effort could be saved if you did not have to
re-tender.
Dr Sham: Yes, with the proper
monitoring system that makes sure that organisation did deliver,
if they deliver, why do they not continue? Why do they need to
go through it again?
Chairman: We will have to move on because
we have a second half of the session. I have to keep it moving,
if I can, but you were saying some very interesting things.
Q397 Mr Walker: Are you concerned
about the nationalisation of charities as they derive more and
more of their money from the state, be it central government or
local government? We have seen a procession of monstrous great
charities. They have come here to talk to us. They have vast,
multimillion pound turnovers, of which 90% plus comes from the
state. In my view, it is very hard to describe them as voluntary
organisations or charities. My concern is that they are squeezing
people like you out.
Mr Image: Certainly, I would come
very strongly from the point of view that we are a social enterprise.
We expect accountability and we expect, ideally, to come to self-sufficiency
in our particular area. What you say has a particular resonance
with me. I had some experience in an earlier incarnation with
a major children's charity. It was very interesting, to me anyway,
that children's charities in this country, or church-based ones,
were particularly set up to provide a better standard of workhouse
or care and adoption and the state took both of those functions
and the charities kept on functioning. Essentially, they are now
lobby groups, with huge funds in huge areas and, yes, I think
there are some very large questions that should be asked about
the function of charity and the efficiency of charity.
Q398 Mr Walker: It used to
be that charitable law said the primary function of charities
could not be to act as lobby organisations, but I think the law
has been changed so that charities can have a primary function
of lobbying as long as they are doing something else in the charitable
arena. Are you concerned by that?
Mr Image: I have tried to focus,
myself, on Emmaus because I believe that we have a particular
form of social enterprise that can revitalise charity, in a sense.
I would like to step back to something I said about efficiency.
I think one has to be careful with words like "efficiency"
in relation to charity, because if somebody is not paid for work
and does it with passion and does it effectively and delivers
in parts that the state cannot and maybe should not reach then
we have to be very guarded in the efficiency measures that we
apply to them. Yes, I think that charities can very often attract
employees who may be motivated more by heart than head, and sometimes,
coming from a business background myself, that would be of concern
at the professional level in terms of delivery, but it is a complex
question that I do not think has easy answers. I know where you
are coming from but, in a sense, where I am coming from is trying
to get social enterprise into what we have previously called charity
because I think that if you can turn receivers into givers then
everybody benefits.
Q399 Mr Walker: I feel local
charity is a part of the local social fabric and we should encourage
that. We should encourage people to invest in their communities
locally and identify with their communities, the welfare of their
communities and the welfare of the people within those communities.
I do think that these large corporate-style charities pose a threat.
They are not all bad; they do some very good work, but they do
pose a threat. I would be interested to hear what Sylvia and Alex
think about that.
Dr Sham: I can use one recent
example. I am not quite sure that the Committee know about the
community development worker for the mental health. They are called
CDWs. For all the United Kingdom they have 500 CDW, that kind
of contract, from the PCT. At the beginning, in Manchester, they
put a tender in and the senior management thought, "Oh, my
God, there is no chance we can get it." I am not disputing
the professionalism, but if the large organisations, like Mind
and all these from the mental health, the big organisations, go
in for tender, we will lose it. But we think about, "We've
got a track record. We can deliver our work, we try it, we go
for it, we put our case on." So we are using our experience
to deliver Learning Skills Council and Jobcentre in a kind of
partnership, to prove to them that we can deliver that kind of
contract, and then we did it. We got it. But the small organisations
like ours, we have some kind of worry that the large national
organisations come up to Manchester to deliver the local service.
Then we proved it, as a local. What you say is really right: local
people, local communities delivering local things, is more valid
than people who come from London, from everywhere. They are national
organisations. Maybe they do not know what the local situation
is. It is not about the skill, the professionalism. I respect
them as a national organisation but we think we do the best to
deliver the BME community mental health development worker. So
we organised it. We had put our tender in, we had to have faith,
and then we go for it. That is the example.
Mr Whinnom: I agree with what
Selwyn and Sylvia are saying. I think the mistake, again, is to
think that the big national charities, with million pound/multimillion
pound turnovers, are the same thing in any way as the small, local
charities like Sylvia's or like Emmaus. The philosophy around
commissioning public sector services from the third sector, all
the rhetoric, is about the added value you get from what seems
to me to be a description of the small, local charities, and yet
the systems, as they stand, really favour the larger organisations.
Again, I would not knock the big national charities. They are
mixed. Some of them, we would see as a tremendous threat to our
local sector; others are potential collaborators and do a good
job in their own way. They are not all the same but, collectively,
they are potentially a threat. If they take all these local contracts
and we are then left with very little money on the table either
for grants or contracts for locally-rooted organisations, that
is something that worries me.
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