Memorandum from Family Mosaic (SPP 05)
We are a large provider of Supporting People
services working across London and Essex, we currently provide
services to 3,500 service users and receive Supporting People
Grant of £11.8 million per annum.
SUMMARY
Impact of the Supporting People Programme
There have been significant improvements in
both the level and quality of housing related support services
since the introduction of Supporting People. Some of the positives
along with some negatives are summarised below, each are explained
in greater detail in the main text of this report:
Substantial increase in the ability of service
users to influence and shape their support service;
Increases in personalised services tailored to
individual needs;
Preventative support helping to meet the aims
of sustainable communities;
Increased service user consultation around Strategy
and Service delivery;
Increased quality standards introduced through
the Quality Assessment Framework;
Significant reduction in institutionalised support;
Increased Social Inclusion;
Lack of consistency across Local Authorities
in the use of the QAF increasing bureaucracy and inefficiency;
Lack of consistency in tendering procedures across
Local Authorities;
Driving down of costs, a positive and negative;
Lack of consistency in inflationary awards across
Local Authorities.
REMOVAL OF
THE RING-FENCE
There are, as expected, real concerns over the
impact the removal of the ring-fence will have amongst providers,
particularly for non statutory client groups, but this does offer
challenges as well as opportunities and these are discussed further
in the main text.
Supporting People services are preventative
in nature (saving money in the long term) and enable greater access
to people who do not receive any statutory services. It enables
local needs to be decided by the communities themselves.
MAIN FINDINGS
Service User Involvement
The Supporting People programme has seen real
improvements in the way in which service users are consulted not
only over their own support but also over the Strategy and direction
of services. The Strategy is clear on service user involvement
and Administering Authorities have consistently pushed this with
providers. The validation inspections carried out over the past
few years have looked in depth at how service users are consulted
and this has helped to push up standards within the sector.
In our own provision, service users are fully
involved in agreeing their individual support plans, when and
how they want their support to be delivered and what outcomes
they want to achieve. This has moved the provision of support
from supporting people to achieve things we think they should,
delivered in a way that suits us to provision that puts the service
user at the centre of their support and meets their own individual
needs.
Service Users are now consistently involved
in shaping the strategy for our services; we have formal consultation
on both our Supported Housing Strategy and annual Operational
Plans. With clear evidence to show how we have changed what we
do because of what our service users have told us.
Annual independent satisfaction surveys are
carried out and action plans agreed where areas need improving,
this is fedback to service users so that they can see how things
have changed because of what they have said. Last year we had
feedback on our services from over 1,500 service users.
The SP Strategy and QAF have forced providers
to look innovatively at how they involve service users who are
hard to engage, including those with communication difficulties.
We have produced, in conjunction with service users, pictorial
libraries and carried out consultation with the use of visual
aids, we have had to look at making consultation more informal
linking with social events and making it an integral part of everyone's
job descriptions.
We can honestly say that our services are better
and more responsive because of the service user's involvement.
BUILDING SUSTAINABLE
COMMUNITIES
The impact that the Supporting People programme
has had on sustainable communities should not be underestimated,
and is an element that must be protected when the ring fence is
removed. For the first time preventative work has been increased
through this funding stream.
The introduction of large generic floating support
services, which can support anyone who needs it within a community,
has had a massive effect. The majority of service users referred
into floating support including through self referral are people
who do not receive services from any other agencies; they previously
would not have been picked up by statutory agencies and literally
had no support. A high percentage were at risk of homelessness
through debt and/or through Anti Social behaviour. The floating
support programmes have significantly reduced homelessness amongst
this group, have reduced anti social behaviour in areas and helped
people build the skills needed to be good neighbours.
The move away from institutionalised care for
people, in particular those with a learning disability, has also
been a huge success of the programme. Housing related support
works with people in a completely different way to care, there
are significant numbers of people previously living in institutional
type settings who are now living independently with support in
the community. We alone have seen over 150 people with learning
disabilities benefit from this approach. There are so many examples
of how this has worked, one that demonstrates the impact is a
young man with severe autism, who had lived in a local authority
hostel for many years, his father was adamant that his son would
not be able to manage living in a flat, he would not access the
local community as he wouldn't use any form of transport and lived
a very institutional life. He now lives in his own flat with support;
he accesses the community, goes out in the car, is fully integrated
into his local community, attends college and has friends. His
father is now a very strong spokesman for the value of supported
housing, and regularly speaks to other relatives with similar
concerns.
INCREASED QUALITY
STANDARDS
The specification of a minimum standard in the
QAF we believe has significantly increased the standard of support
across the sector. It has encourage providers to set targets to
improve on their standards achieved, and created a healthy competition
as providers strive to achieve A graded standards of support.
It is imperative that the importance of support
standards is not lost as the SP Grant moves to LA Grant.
INCREASING EFFICIENCY
AND REDUCING
BUREAUCRACY
Unfortunately this is an area that we do not
believe the government has achieved, there are significant issues
with the collecting and reporting on data for SP, there are still
inconsistencies in the information that different Local Authorities
require, and we have experienced authorities asking for additional
information for different contracts. This puts an administration
burden on providers and diverts money away from front line support.
In addition, there is a lack of consistency
around the QAF validation process, not all authorities have adopted
the new QAF in its entirety which means that providers working
across different Local Authority areas have to work to different
standards, produce different evidence etc. this is not an efficient
use of providers time and again leads to increased central costs.
The inconsistency in tendering of services has
also had an impact on providers; there is not a standard Pre Qualification
Questionnaire amongst Local Authorities, different procurement
methods, and an almost constant tendering and re tendering of
services. Again for providers working across Local Authorities
this has put a huge burden on their resources, increases the bureaucracy
of support provision and diverts funds from the front line.
The impact of nil and below RPI increases since
2003 has led to real inconsistency in the cost and viability
of services. We accept that in the first few years post SP there
was room in most budgets for efficiency savings; however, this
cannot be sustained year on year. We now have the position where
identical services in neighbouring boroughs receive different
levels of grant income; we cannot pay staff different salaries
so we have some schemes/services that are not financially viable
as stand alone services. This puts providers at risk, and has
seen the collapse of more than one provider over the past few
years.
Similarly, there is growing concern that tendering
is driving down prices too much, in that the quality of support
being delivered for low cost needs to be questioned.
LOSS OF
THE RING
FENCE
The main concern amongst providers is that Local
Authorities will use this funding stream for statutory services
eg Health and Social Care, particularly because of the historic
overspends in many LA budgets for this provision. It is difficult
to argue against the move of funding if purely looking at critical
needs, however, the impact of shifting funding from largely preventative
work to those who authorities have a duty of care to would, we
believe, lead to increased costs to Society as a whole in the
breakdown in communities, increased homelessness, and people moving
into critical need when it could have been prevented.
The government need to raise the profile of
this work, there are still many agencies involved in local strategic
partnerships who don't know about the work of the supporting people
programme. There is limited input into LSP's by either housing
or support providers and this needs to be rectified if these services
are to be protected.
It is still not clear how the government will
assess the impact of the removal of the ring fence, local authorities
have different methods of deciding priorities for funding and
the pilots were too short, with the majority of funding tied up
in contracts to see in reality what will happen. How decisions
will be made to terminate contracts etc. is not known and whether
or not an appeal mechanism will be in place to raise the issue.
The government need to consider how they will know when funding
is being moved out of housing related support services into other
areas, and what they will do if services are consistently cut.
Along with challenges there are many opportunities
to maximise the impact of this funding on different client groups,
providers should be considering ways in which mixed funding would
benefit their services eg in learning disability services there
is much confusion of what element of the support is housing related,
what is social care etc. the service user doesn't care, and jointly
commissioned services work much more fluidly for the service user.
There is the opportunity to bring together funding streams to
enable holistic approaches to support in teenage parent schemes,
where staff do need to be providing not just housing related support
but parenting skills and childcare, this has been problematic
in the past with fixed criteria for the use of SP. Getting Health
and Housing working more closely together again could have significant
benefits in preventative work.
There has been an increase over the last few
years of joint commissioning of services between different agencies,
of specific funding for projects being made available eg PCT funding
for health and wellbeing projects within our young people services
and learning disability services which have a positive impact
on the overall support provided. If this can be encouraged through
the removal of the ring fence then this will lead to greater opportunities
for providers to provide more holistic services.
OVERALL
The Supporting People programme has been welcomed,
it has enabled housing related support services to be delivered
to people previously unsupported, it contributes significantly
in helping to build sustainable communities and has led to savings
in statutory agencies, who would have picked up problems without
this preventative work. The loss of the ring fence could be a
disaster or it could be a golden opportunity to join up the way
we provide care and support to vulnerable adults, the government
needs to ensure that it is the latter.
May 2009
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