Community Budgets

Written evidence from from Tendring District Council (CB 01)

This submission to the Inquiry is complimentary to that made by the District Council Network to which Tendring District Council contributed. It should be noted that the approach to Community Budgets was a whole partnership approach rather than being led by a single partner. The work on Community Budgets has demonstrated a far more rounded approach to public services with partners being open to challenges to their respective sovereignty and changes to the way services are delivered.

When the concept of Community Budgets was first announced by the Government, Tendring was very keen to work with our partners and Essex County Council to be a part of the pilot demonstrating how public services can be delivered differently. The changes to public funding and the need to look at how services are delivered, was viewed by Tendring as an opportunity for it to be a catalyst to change the ethos of public sector. We recognise that historically much of public services spend has been reactive; however, if we can change that approach to being more proactive, we can both reduce costs to us and partners, whilst having a better outcome for residents and businesses in the area. We, therefore, worked closely with Essex County and partners to develop the submission for Community Budgets and took a seat on the Community Budgets Board. Tendring’s Chief Executive was also part of the team which went to Whitehall and presented the submission to senior civil servants and we were very pleased to hear that the Essex bid had been successful and that we were the only two tier area to be a pilot. Then the work really started!

Tendring District Council has direct experience of the operation of Community Budgets. It has led a pilot to re-engineer services for Families with Complex Needs; seeking improved outcomes, expediently delivered and offering cashable savings to the public purse. The approach has been a partnership across all key strategic and voluntary sector partners.

The early outcomes from the Tendring approach have been adopted pan Essex in the Family Solutions Teams – the Essex response to the national Troubled Families Programme.

This submission builds upon that from the District Council Network submission to which Tendring District Council contributed. This submission is divided into two parts; the lessons learnt from the Tendring Families with Complex Needs Pilot, and the wider community budget programme to which the District Council has been fully engaged. This submission addresses a number of the 9 key questions to which evidence is sought.

Families with Complex Needs

Tendring DC adopted an innovative and challenging approach where a family support worker acted as a family champion (not an individual) and marshalled the statutory agencies around the delivery of a family action plan. The approach was developed from focus groups with families to ensure the multiagency teams worked around the needs of the family and not the internally focused processes within partner agencies. Attached is a diagrammatic representation of the reduced interventions to families, which have both saved costs and improved the outcomes for families.

Key successes from the project,

· Bringing all statutory partners with an interest in the families together – working as one virtual team. Partners include Social Care, Police, Health, Probation, JobCentre Plus as well as the voluntary sector.

· Family Support Liaison Workers are best delivered by a third sector provider and not statutory organisation The Tendring pilot used, Barnardo’s, to deliver this function. Without doubt this has been pivotal to the success of the project.

· Having a clear and transparent commitment from families which in some cases is incentivised – for example rolling monthly free passes to the Council’s leisure facilities in return for delivering aspects of the family plan such as improved school attendance.

· Information sharing between partners posed a significant problem. Informed consent forms were developed and signed by each family member authorising the sharing of information.

· Data sharing was a key challenge to ensure the true success of the approach for families. After much discussion, a new information sharing agreement had to be developed between partners. This was a long and painstaking process and a key outcome from the work is a request that national guidance is developed to improve the ability to, and confidence of partners, to share information.

· Mapping interventions / contacts with services prior to the commencement of the new approach to demonstrate the reduction in demand for statuary services (although initially there was a peak in activity as organisations worked together for the first time in a proactive rather than reactive manner). Attaching a cost to service provision is demonstrating an overall saving to the public purse and particular savings to specific areas of service delivery such as police intervention.

· Using independent evaluation to identify the softer outcomes. The Tendring prototype has commissioned Anglia Ruskin University to identify family resilience as a result of the new approach.

On-going challenges include;

· Enhancing information sharing capacity between partners – not just the statutory sector but also the third sector / volunteers who provide continued support to the family once the six month period of intensive support is removed.

· Developing sustainable community based support services – it is the aim of the Tendring project to pilot the Community Connector approach. Sustainable outcomes from effective and focused joint working from statutory partners can be significantly enhanced by putting in place community based support programmes.

· Realising cashable savings from the budgets of partners which can be reinvested in working with more families – the virtuous circle.

Overall it has been clear that the concept of Community Budget s has provided the mechanism to bring partners together with the joint aim of resolving the issues that lead families into chaos. It became apparent through family journey mapping that there was considerable duplication in the system; effort was reactive and not focused on sustainable outcomes.

Wider Community Budget Programme in Essex

Tendring District Council, as with other district councils in Essex, has worked closely with all our partners. The Chief Executive of Tendring was sponsor for both the Family Solutions approach and also developing an underpinning Strengthening Communities approach.

In order for the Community Budgets approach to be sustainable and successful, we recognised that communities need to work differently and be more proactive. Essex has a diverse range of communities, with significant health inequality and socio-economic diversity and differing levels of citizen engagement and activity. The response to these issues therefore cannot be a one-size-fits-all, but needs to appropriately reflect the strengths and needs in different localities. However, the current wide-ranging approach to community activity and public sector support has meant that the best opportunities and possibilities are not always realised or sustained.

The Strengthening Communities workstream is working to design a ‘framework’ approach for the county, to create and support the enabling conditions for stronger, more resilient communities, while allowing for flexible design and implementation in line with local contexts and needs, through:

• building a better understanding of community capacity, skills and assets - using these to build independent strength before drawing on external resources

• creating connections between individuals and across communities - supporting people to own and solve their own problems

• stimulating individual and reciprocal activity – tapping into and supporting the huge potential of Essex residents to make a significant impact

• devolving commissioning and grant-funding, and building capacity at a local level – to encourage and enable sustainable community-led activity and support a different relationship between public, private, voluntary and community sectors.

While the longer term expectation for the programme is a reduction in demand for public sector services, together with improved targeting and efficiencies in current funding arrangements, initial investment will be required - to establish community connectors; improve brokerage and support for voluntary and community activity; and to create an endowment fund. Details of these costs and associated benefits are currently being analysed, to be developed and presented.

Relationships have improved in the effort to develop the wider Essex Community Budget pilot. In part this has been brought about by the inclusive approach adopted in the pilot; especially through the Community Budget Board which gave an equal sounding board for all partners to develop the approach.

For continued progress in an area which has almost unanimous support across all partners, it is pivotal that all partners need to be prepared to embrace new ways of working and look at sovereignty to break down those organisational boundaries that inhibit a focus on the service user / community.

Perhaps the biggest challenge will be to realign budgets – this has not been tackled to date and perhaps is the final hurdle that may only be truly addressed through the redesign of service delivery structures across partners.

April 2013