Examination of Witnesses (Questions 312
- 319)
TUESDAY 20 FEBRUARY 2007
MR ANDREW
GIRVAN, MR
JOE CONNOLLY,
MS FRANCES
TRAN, MR
JOHN WALLACE
AND MR
IAN DOBSON
Q312 Chairman:
Could I welcome our second group of witnesses, representing NCH
Scotland and the Dundee Families Project. Can you please introduce
yourselves?
Mr Girvan: Good morning, Chairman,
Members of the Committee. My name is Andrew Girvan, Director of
Children's Services in NCH Scotland. Joe Connolly is our Deputy
Director in NCH Scotland. Fran Tran, on my right-hand side, is
the Assistant Director, and is one of the line managers for the
Dundee Families Project. On my left is John Wallace who is the
Project Manager in the Dundee Families Project. At the end of
the table Ian Dobson has joined us today from Dundee City Council
housing. Ian is the Homeless Services Manager there.
Q313 Chairman:
Before we ask our detailed questions, would you like to say anything
by way of opening remarks?
Mr Girvan: I was going to suggest,
Chairman, if I start by saying a few remarks about NCH generally
and then I will ask Joe Connolly to tell you something about our
role as the managing agent in Scotland for the Breaking the Cycle
Scottish Executive initiative and then we will be happy to take
questions. Chairman, and Committee, I am delighted to be here
today. For myself, this is only the second time I have been in
this fine chamber. The last time was in November of last year
when I was delighted to be here to attend a civic reception celebrating
the tenth anniversary of the Dundee Families Project. What was
particularly significant for me that day was the chance to meet
a number of the families who have been helped over the ten years
and who were very keen to come along and say in their own words
what the benefits had been for them from the project, and no doubt
we will get a chance to expand on that later in the morning. By
way of brief background information, NCH is a UK-based charity
and NCH Scotland is the Scottish wing of the charity. In the UK
we have over 500 projects and services delivering services to
over 170,000 vulnerable children and young people, while in Scotland
we work with 28 local authorities, 65 projects and deliver services
to over 7,000 vulnerable children and young people. That is very
much the focus of our work at that end of the spectrum. Our written
evidence focused on a number of general issues around poverty
in Scotland but as well as addressing some of the specific questions
set by the Scottish Affairs Committee we drew on the extensive
experience of working with some of the most vulnerable young people
in Scotland. I think some Members of the Committee may already
have a copy of the FactFile document which we have produced
and I know recently some reference was made to the UNICEF document.
When we were asked in the media to comment about it we were able
to reference the fact that this is a 2006-07 edition which not
only builds on the picture that UNICEF presented in terms of issues
for children and young people in the UK but we were able to give
it a Scottish dimension and convey that some of these facts and
figures are even more up-to-date and help us trace the trend lines
in relation to some of the key issues relating to both poverty
and exclusion as well as a number of other issues. I think one
of the major aspects we focused on within FactFile and
our work was the notion of material deprivation and we are aware
there are still over 240,000 children affected by material and
relative poverty in Scotland. We recognise the figures, which
hopefully we will have a chance to expand on today, that 80% of
parents with a disabled child are unemployed and disabled children
are twice as likely to be in poverty as non-disabled children.
Another aspect of poverty that we would like to focus on is the
fact that people living on low incomes experience poverty of opportunity
and part of what NCH does is try to encourage every child to achieve
their maximum potential. That is an area of focus and an area
that we have some background information on. What we are clear
about is that Scotland is a land of opportunity based on educational
attainment providing a bright future for many of our children
but there is also another Scotland where social difficulties are
created and poverty of opportunity that is robbing individuals
and communities of any sense of optimism. There is very much what
we recognise as almost an underclass of children who still go
on to fail in today's society and that has to be a matter of concern
for all of us. I will stop there and ask Joe Connolly to say a
few words about the role of managing agent.
Mr Connolly: Based on the kind
of experience we have had, and I was involved in the development
with Ian going back to the development of the Dundee Families
Project, we worked up a model which was very much needs led about
tackling the issues but addressing the needs of families as well.
That further developed into Aberdeen. In tandem almost with the
UK Respect agenda where this type of service in various shapes
and forms adapted to local needs is being rolled out across England
and Wales, the Scottish Executive introduced a pilot scheme called
Breaking the Cycle. It was piloted in three areas in Scotland:
Falkirk, South Lanarkshire, and Perth & Kinross. You need
a mixture of rural as well as urban areas in terms of addressing
some of the issues faced by the council and by families. We tendered
for the service and recognising the expertise that we have been
developing over the years we were successful in becoming the managing
agent so we have responsibility to manage that initiative working
very closely with the Scottish Executive. It is worth about £2
million in terms of the commitment to the service over a two year
period. Built into that is the monitoring and evaluation. It is
not just about providing the service, it is important that we
learn lessons and we are able to evidence the outcomes that have
been achieved over that period and then learn the lessons of any
mistakes we have made. That is hot off the press. That is picking
up that the projects are being staffed to work with families.
We will be happy to provide you with ongoing information with
regard to the progress of that initiative.
Q314 Chairman:
I am very happy to say that all the Committee Members recognise
and value the work of NCH and the Dundee Families Project. Can
you tell us very briefly about the work of NCH and the Dundee
Families Project?
Mr Girvan: If I start generally
in terms of NCH in Scotland and say a bit about the work we cover.
It covers a variety of areas just now. We recently had a review
in NCH UK which revisited our values, mission and purpose. In
that review there was a decision to focus particularly on working
with the most vulnerable children and young people. Our sense
in Scotland is that is very much how our work has developed over
the last 50 years. We celebrated 50 years of delivering services
in Scotland in 2005-06. The key areas for us are family support
and intensive family support. We also deliver services for looked-after
accommodated young people. We work very much at the heavy end,
as you might describe it. We have a project in Ayrshire called
ISSC, which is Intensive Structured Supervised Care, which is
a residential unit that aims at keeping young people out of secure
accommodation. We provide services to the Western Isles in terms
of a residential unit up there, foster care services, and in Moray
in the Highlands we have residential care based up there. We deliver
services across Scotland to children with disabilities, particularly
in terms of residential respite units and outreach services. Also,
a major part of our work in Scotland is working with youth offending,
youth crime and criminal justice services. We play one of the
lead roles, I think, in developing those services in Scotland.
That covers the main areas. One area we are particularly concerned
about and interested in is developing services around what is
described as the NEET agenda, young people with no education,
employing or training. We have pilot projects starting in Glasgow
and Inverclyde and we would be happy to expand on those as we
go through today's session if appropriate. We recognise, and I
think it is recognised in Scotland given we have the third worst
figures and statistics in terms of that area for the whole of
Europe, I think given there are estimated to be 35,000 young people
who can be described in that way, that this is an area for priority
service development and priority attention. In terms of Dundee
Families Project, John is the Project Manager so he is best able
to describe the work of the specific project. I would just say
in advance of that that in terms of NCH UK-wide we have Gill Strachan,
the previous project manager, who has been seconded to the Home
Office and is working in the Respect Unit there, so we have strong
links with Ian Brady, the Deputy Director there, and Ian, who
was up in this building when we were celebrating the tenth anniversary,
was saying how much Dundee Families had influenced policy in terms
of the Respect agenda and the announcement of the development
of services in England. We have about 20 services there of a similar
nature and in Scotland we also have the Aberdeen Families Project
now and also the Perth and Kinross Project that Joe Connolly described.
A lot of these developments have emanated from the work of Dundee
Families.
Mr Wallace: Dundee Families Project
arose out of a realisation on the part of Dundee City Council
that evicting families who were creating problems in their neighbourhood
was simply moving that problem around the town and inflicting
more misery on other neighbourhoods, so they and NCH developed
this innovative approach. The Project works with families who
have been experiencing difficulties, difficulties which translate
into problem behaviour within their neighbourhoods. The Project
takes the view that behaviour is symptomatic of something else
that is going wrong within the family, that there are underlying
difficulties the family is not coping with, and our role is to
try and help the family address those issues. Those issues might
be that there is drug or alcohol dependency, it may be that there
is a learning disability, it may be there are health issues, it
may be simply that parents have had no appropriate experience
of being parented themselves, they have no model to hang their
own parenting on, or it could be a life event, such as a bereavement
of a spouse or an extended family member that has knocked the
family off track. Our role is to try and get families back on
track. We take a holistic view of that. Following a comprehensive
assessment of the family's needs we put together a support plan,
one that is not just about what we will do with the family but
will also incorporate other agencies. We have a co-ordinating
role. Once we arrive at the point where we can say, "These
are what we think are the issues for the family, this is how we
can help but here is how others can help", it may be there
will be existing agencies who want to continue to support the
family or it may be there are other services required that we
need to bring in to support the family. We take a very central
role in that, in holding not just ourselves accountable for the
work that we do but other people, other agencies, for the work
that they do with the families as well, because it is very much
a joint approach that we take.
Q315 Mr Davidson:
I remember the furore when this scheme was first being set up.
If it has been so successful over a 10 year period why has it
not been replicated elsewhere?
Mr Wallace: Probably because it
is quite expensive. The project budget is somewhere just over
£350,000 this year and that is a big outlay.
Q316 Mr Davidson:
So other authorities have come to the view that it is not value
for money?
Mr Wallace: I do not think they
have come to the view that it is not value for money.
Mr Connolly: If I could come in
on this point. Basically it has been one of the success stories
within NCH internally. We would probably respond in a similar
way to yourself, why has it not been replicated more quickly in
Scotland if the focus is there? It has been replicated within
NCH across English local authorities. It was five years ago that
Glasgow University produced the research but it takes a while
for a project to be up and running and become established to be
able to evidence outcomes. Glasgow University did the first piece
of research that said this was potentially going to save councils
£117,000 a year with certain families where you are preventing
children coming into care, you are reducing the risk of eviction
and all the costs to do with homelessness. That was evidence by
Glasgow University and Malcolm Hill led on that. There has been
similar more recent research at Hallam University which has identified
six projects in England, five of which are run by NCH, which are
types of projects built on the Dundee Families model. What they
produced was a report last year in November to say there is an
85% success rate working with these families. There is a bit where
research takes a while to catch up, for that message to be spread
and people to realise there is a positive model and there are
positive outcomes for others to catch on to. I think the fact
that the Scottish Executive came to NCH and made us aware of the
tender and the fact that they wanted to develop Breaking the Cycle
to build similar models for tackling families with antisocial
behaviour problems meant somebody was aware of the work we were
doing. Down South I think the fact that Gill had been seconded
to the Home Office and Ian Brady was saying this influenced very
much the thinking around the pilots and the monies being distributed
now for 40 pilot projects across the UK NCH, based on the experience
in the last several years of developing these types of projects,
is in a good position to use that experience and bring it to bear.
I think it has travelled reasonably well and the potential is
there for it to go even further in the coming years.
Ms Tran: Can I just add to that
in relation to Dundee City Council. They used their housing support
monies that other local authorities have not done and they have
channelled those housing support monies into different areas,
so because that money was set and set for a number of years Dundee
Families Project has built up in relation to that, so it has been
difficult to go into other local authorities and discuss developing
these kinds of projects through that money because that money
is already committed and obviously a council would have to find
it from another source or through the Executive themselves. That
is where the Executive has come up with this £2.5 million
to look at trying to develop it but not on the exact same model,
not talking about core unit provision with the three new projects
but about outreach and dispersed services and perhaps eventually
we may be able to look at funding made available.
Q317 Mr Davidson:
This is a classic difficulty. Are you saying that changes can
only be introduced when there is new money and that you can never
bend the spend, as it were, and people can never reprioritise
their spending?
Ms Tran: I am not saying that
but certainly local authorities are saying that to us at the moment
and we have had those kinds of discussions with a number of local
authorities. We have obviously discussed the benefits of Dundee
Families Project in terms of using Housing Support money but we
have not been able to actually look at that with any other authority
apart from Aberdeen who did re-look at where their money was spent
and put a tender out and we were successful in getting that tender.
Mr Girvan: If I could add with
a supplementary to that. I have spent 27 years working in local
authority children services in Scotland and I am aware of the
difficulty of bending the spend. Very often you need money to
be levered in at times to allow you to go through a period of
transition where you phase out existing services and start up
new ones. The idea that there should be a period to allow that
happen is the idea of the Breaking the Cycle pilot project in
Scotland to give some authorities some extra money to facilitate
that happening.
Q318 Mr Walker:
John, we spoke yesterday briefly about the cost to society of
antisocial behaviour and dysfunctional families and I am very
wary of the phrase "invest to save", but bearing in
mind the cost to society of putting a child in care, the cost
to society in emotional wellbeing and welfare where you have problem
children and problem families in a community, I would be willing
to use in this context "invest to save" because given
that you help something in the region of 23-25 families a year
and you have an 80% success rate, although the headline figure
of £330,000 may seem fairly high, when set against the upstream
costs that you will be saving the taxpayer it represents value
for money.
Mr Wallace: Yes, it does. The
Glasgow University research arrived at a figure in terms of savings
to Dundee City Council. It is a project that costs £350,000
a year to run and the figure that the Glasgow University research
came up with was in excess of £400,000 that was saved, so
there was a net saving to the local authority on that calculation
of £117,000 a year. That was done in 2001. We did a more
anecdotal piece of research in-house last year and we looked at
every family that we had worked with over the year. There were
33 families. Our caseload is around about 20-25 at a time. Our
annual caseload is somewhere between 30 and 35 families. Over
the course of 2004-05 we worked with 33 families, 126 individuals.
We based our calculations on our knowledge of each individual
in the families and we projected the worst case scenario and said
how many of the 33 families, had we not been there for them, would
have been evicted, or would very likely have been evicted, how
many of those adults would have been served ASBOs and how many
of those children would have been at serious risk of being looked
after by local authority services. The figures were far higher
than the £117,000. On an absolute worst case scenario the
saving was somewhere in the region of £400,000. That did
not even take account of social work time, housing officer time,
police time, the cost of graffiti, vandalism, and it did not look
at the human cost and the impact on the lives of children.
Q319 Mr Walker:
You said worst case scenario, can I just clarify that for the
record. Are you saying in a conservative scenario it is £400,000
but it could have been a great deal higher than that?
Mr Wallace: It could have been,
yes.
|
