The Supporting People Programme - Communities and Local Government Committee Contents


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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