- February 19, 2024
In August 2018, the Home Office awarded grants to eleven Local Authorities (LAs) across England to deliver Trusted Relationships projects between 2018 and March 2022. As Implementation Partner for this programme, ATQ provided support to the projects. We therefore saw first-hand how the projects encountered and overcame their respective implementation challenges. Our report presents ATQ’s observations and the headlines are:
- Length and stability of funding is critical. Any support programme aimed at vulnerable people with complex needs will only work if it is designed and funded on a long-term basis – at least three years and preferably longer, as was the case here. This allows time for programmes to ramp up, overcome teething issues and avoid inefficient and ineffective spending as projects struggle to spend money in a limited timeframe. More importantly, it gives front line teams the time and space to establish working relationships with both the vulnerable young people that the programme is designed to serve, and the networks of statutory and non-statutory delivery partners that are part of any support service.
- Flexibility of project design is key. As this programme has shown, there may be common principles underpinning programmes aimed at complex issues but a range of different approaches is possible, and projects should (as these do) reflect local needs and organisational structures, especially if we want to understand better what works best by testing alternatives. A strength of this programme has been that it has allowed for such difference.
- Services and interventions need to be co-designed with those they aim to support, within obvious limits. Vulnerable young people need agency rather than top-down solutions to what others perceive as their needs. Services also need to sit both inside and outside statutory services – inside so that they can facilitate joined-up responses; outside so that they can successfully engage with those who have learned to distrust the system. It became very clear from direct involvement of young people with our shared learning events and other visits with officials that young people can be and are very articulate about their needs and how support can best be provided.
- Cross-cutting issues require joined-up solutions. This programme has shown how services targeted at a complex problem that do not fit neatly into public service silos can be the ‘glue’ that binds services together across areas that habitually have a different focus – especially those that treat people as victims needing support and those that treat them as offenders needing sanction and rehabilitation. Based on our four-year involvement, ATQ would contend that Trusted Relationships has provided this ‘glue’ for an average of around £250,000 per project per year.
- Understanding why people behave as they do is as important as what they do. The projects have shown the particular value of trauma-informed practice, and understanding how adverse experiences may shape the way people behave, and their willingness to respond to intervention. In our opinion, this is particularly important in CSE and CCE, where exploitation itself may lead to significant trauma.
- October 10, 2022
Big Society Capital has just published new research by ATQ into the value of social outcomes contracts and social impact bonds in the UK. Commissioned by BSC as part of their Outcomes for All report, and based on detailed analysis of 76 contracts implemented since 2010, the research found that outcomes to date had generated benefits worth more than £1.4 billion.
Commenting on the launch of the report, Neil Stanworth of ATQ said: “We were delighted to be asked to undertake this work for Big Society Capital. We have been estimating the value created by social interventions for many years, and think it really important that commissioners and policy makers understand just how much public value can be created if poor outcomes such as homelessness or long-term unemployment can be averted. We hope that our work will contribute to a wider debate on this”
Neil has written a blog on this work which can be found here.
ATQ also co-authored another major report released this week, which summarises findings over the last 3 years from the evaluation of the Commissioning Better Outcomes Fund. ATQ has been partnering Ecorys UK in conducting this evaluation since 2014.
For further information on either of these reports, please contact Neil at neil@atqconsultants.co.uk
- October 8, 2022
ATQ Directors have been major contributors to two important recent reports on outcomes-based commissioning and SIBs.
The first was commissioned by the Centre for SIBs within the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and looks at the challenges and benefits of commissioning social impact bonds and the potential for replicating and scaling this type of contract. The report presents practical tips for commissioners to facilitate an easier commissioning process and provides recommendations to government to further the replication and scaling of SIBs in the UK. It was co-authored by ATQ Director Neil Stanworth along with colleagues from Ecorys UK and can be downloaded here. Neil has also written this blog summarising the report’s findings with Rachel Wooldridge from Ecorys.
The other report was a major update on the evaluation of the Commissioning Better Outcomes Fund which ATQ have been supporting, again alongside Ecorys, since 2014. This report draws on a range of other work done as part of the evaluation, including in-depth reviews of specific projects and stand-alone surveys of key stakeholders. It includes major contributions from both Neil and fellow ATQ Director Edward Hickman, and can be downloaded here. Another blog by Neil about this report can also be found on the GO Lab website here
- October 6, 2022
Neil, Stanworth, one of ATQ’s Directors, has been appointed a Fellow of Practice at the Government Outcomes Lab (GO Lab) from January 2018.
Fellows of Practice work with GO Lab to provide support and advice to commissioners and others and help GO Lab develop its role as a global leader in the research and practice of commissioning for outcomes. It is an honorary position offered to those who have recognised expertise in the field of outcome based commissioning and have a commitment to supporting the work of the Lab.
Neil commented: ‘I am delighted to be joining the Fellows of Practice network which gives me the chance to share the expertise that my ATQ colleagues and I have built up across more than 20 projects related to outcomes – based commissioning and social impact bonds.’
- October 4, 2022
ATQ is pleased to have been appointed as an approved provider under the Big Potential Advanced Fund. Already an approved provider under the Breakthrough Fund (see below), we are now able to support ventures through the £10m Advanced Fund which provides larger grants of between £50,000 and £150,000 to support VCSEs that have better developed plans to raise social investment or pursue major contract opportunities. Further details are on our dedicated Big Potential page here.
ATQ is also delighted to have been re-appointed as a provider under the Impact Readiness Fund. The IRF was piloted last year, and ATQ successfully provided support through the Fund to both a cohort of three ventures and a stand-alone venture. The Fund has now re-opened for applications until January 2016.
- October 3, 2022
ATQ is pleased to have been appointed as an approved provider under both the Big Potential Breakthrough and Impact Readiness Funds. These provide grants to help voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations (VSCEs) buy in specialist technical support for investment and impact readiness.
The £10m Big Potential Fund is aimed at eligible VCSEs to improve their sustainability, capacity and scale and help them deliver greater social impact for communities across England. VCSEs can apply for grants between £20,000 and £75,000 in total to undertake investment readiness work with an approved provider such as ATQ.
The Impact Readiness Fund (IRF) is a new pilot fund through which grants between £15,000 and £150,000 will be available to help ventures build infrastructure and skills required to manage their performance, increase their social impact, and attract social investment / win contracts, again working with approved providers.
If you are interested in the Big Potential Fund please visit our dedicated Big Potential page or contact one of our team. If interested in the IRF please contact one of our team as soon as possible as applications to the Fund close on 16th January 2015.
- December 2, 2019
The current general election campaign has brought commitments from both main parties to increase levels of public spending to historically high levels – dramatically in Labour’s case.
How does Government ensure that any new monies for front-line public services are spent effectively and not wasted?
With the introduction of additional money, there are two possible ways ahead. It is either a great opportunity for public services to invest in change and improve service outcomes or it can simply release the pressure and allow change to be put back into the ‘too difficult’ tray.
Necessity should be the mother of invention
In other spheres of activity, necessity is the mother of invention which drives innovation and changes in the way things get done.
In the public services arena, necessity doesn’t drive change in the same way. This is because the spending taps have either not been turned off for that long or, as currently after 10 years of austerity, have arguably been turned off for too long. Let me explain.
Public service managers act rationally. Historically, spending cuts have been temporary within the usual five-year election cycle. This means that the default response is salami slicing – implementing small incremental cost savings, avoiding making any potentially significant changes in the way things are done and reverting to ‘normal’ when spending taps are turned on again.
The period from 2010 to 2015 can be characterised in this way, with most managers hoping/expecting that the next government would relax austerity. Unfortunately for all of us, public finance conditions didn’t improve and austerity budgeting has continued up to now (late 2019).
So what effect did this have? On the ground, front line public services have consistently reduced scope to meet only acute or statutory needs e.g. qualification for social care support, and change comes about largely through closure of provision and services e.g. Sure Start, youth centres, elderly care day centres, libraries etc.
At the risk of oversimplification, after five years of salami slicing there was not enough capacity left to plan, consult on and implement significant services transformation. High staff turnover in times of low morale is another factor. There have, of course, been some changes such as joining up between local authority teams in for example children’s services. There has also been some innovative use of outcomes-based commissioning – something with which I have personally been involved.
However, these have been small scale. The overall picture is one of services that are hunkered down coping with day to day demands with only limited commissioning and back office support to help introduce any changes.
So what should we do now the taps are about to be turned on again? I have previously advocated three ideas for introducing change across the public services landscape.
Use an overarching theme – presumption of prevention – to drive change
For all public-sector organisations, I would argue for a presumption towards prevention as a sensible overarching hook or theme. Every organisation should be encouraged to ask:
“what would we spend this budget on if the aim was to prevent the problem arising or getting worse?”
One of the positive consequences of looking at a social challenge from a preventative basis is that it forces organisations to look at outcomes and work out how to collaborate with other spending bodies to find ways of combining resources differently to now. Equally importantly, it should be cheaper – but only if we can break the ‘safety first’ mindset of waiting until action is mandatory, and almost always much more expensive.
Explicitly invest in services R&D
If the answer in the private sector is R&D, why not the public sector too? One remedy could be to set an explicit Government services R&D budget allocation. If say 1% of Departmental expenditure were top-sliced and allocated to R&D, this would be around £3bn per annum aimed at improving public service innovation and productivity gains.
This would require a complete rethink of the way we test and implement change. Instead of scrutiny of policy initiatives after implementation with 20:20 hindsight, by the Public Accounts Committee, National Audit Office et al, we would be asking these or potentially different organisations to review an experimental spend and deciding whether to implement at scale.
Extend Individualisation and co-design
Essentially give service users a voice in designing the services they receive. Give them ownership of the budget and how it is spent. The ideas of personalisation and choice have been around for over 10 years now but they have not gone anywhere near far enough, with control of budgets remaining largely with government bodies.
With some imagination, this principle could and should be more widely encouraged and extended to areas such as employability and skills (especially re-training), management of long-term health conditions, and parental support.
Conclusion
If 2020 onwards is going to be a great opportunity for public services to invest in change and improve service outcomes then, whatever colour the new Government, it needs to set the change agenda from the centre and quite possibly reinforce it with legislation.
- August 5, 2019
Since he became Prime Minister Johnson’s chief advisor there has been much attention on the musings of Dominic Cummings. In one of his long and detailed blogs criticising Whitehall, he observes that:
“Whitehall …….is parochial about its own past. One of the most useful questions one can ask is not only ‘who has already solved this problem?’ but ‘have we already tried to do X and failed?’ In the DfE there is no system to answer this question reliably. Unless you get lucky with an old-timer, you cannot know and because they abolished their own library you can’t even go and study it.”
There is perhaps much to disagree with in Mr Cummings’ musings, but this strikes a chord. I have written before about the impact of lost institutional memory in the context of public sector productivity performance, and a couple of recent ‘lived experiences’ have prompted me to think further about this particular bugbear of mine.
It is perhaps a function of being 50-something years old that I am often by far the oldest person in the room – that old timer that Cummings writes about – and consequently have nearly always come across challenges that others appear to be encountering for the first time.
But it turns out it is not just a function of age – it’s a question of having any kind of institutional memory.
Lived experience #1:
At a recent meeting of around 30 commissioners and providers of children and young people’s (CYP) services, there was a presentation by a government policy lead which outlined what the policy team had found out over the preceding two years about effective CYP interventions. After around half-an-hour of discussion it emerged from the 30 or so professionals in the room that this two years of policy research and development had done little more than identify as best practice what everyone involved in youth work used to practice.
But as this kind of discretionary public expenditure had been cut back since 2008, much of this knowledge had been dissipated: there was no ‘institutional memory’ of youth work best practice and the policy team had to find it out all for themselves again. In fairness, the policy team were from a different Department of State to the one that led on youth work policy (and different again to the one that reduced local government spending on youth work) – but the effect of silos on cross-government learning is a whole other topic.
Lived experience #2:
Senior staff turnover at an organisation I have worked with for over five years means that I am one of only two members of the project team left with some ‘institutional memory’ of the detailed reasons why previous decisions were taken. In fact, and not unusually, both of us operate in external roles to the organisation and are the only ones providing any form of continuity.
What to do about it?
There is a huge amount of energy wasted when organisations find themselves having to invest time and resources re-learning lessons from before. Loss of institutional memory has to be a drag on productivity and innovation.
In my view, one of the keys is to ensure that there is a succession plan so that when staff move on from teams (usually through public sector promotion or role change), there is a successor who knows what’s what in that team or area of the organisation.
I call this my succession obsession and work with all my clients to ensure that they have identified individuals to develop and bring along as a way of ensuring at least some continuity.
Another good practice is to ensure that decisions are fully documented as projects and programmes progress. This is especially for when things go wrong as well as when they go right. Post implementation reviews are also an essential part of good project management and delivery but are often overlooked or done in only a cursory fashion – often because project teams have already moved on to the next challenge.
Finally, maybe part of the answer is to incentivise staff to stay in post longer and reduce some of the incentives to move so regularly in order to advance their careers. Would it be possible only to allow a staff move when they can apply what they have learnt elsewhere? In other words, when they start to become useful institutional memory themselves.
- February 9, 2015
I have been struck by an article in Civil Society news today (9th February 2015) about the NPC manifesto, A Vision for Change. There are two recommendations that rang a chord with me.
The first is that Trustees should be encouraged to focus more on how the charity pursues its mission and delivers beneficial outcomes rather than just on its survival. In our work over the last twelve months with more than a dozen charities and social enterprises, my colleagues and I have been surprised how often Trustees who can be extremely entrepreneurial in their business and personal lives, become suddenly risk averse when acting as a Trustee.
The main result of this risk averse approach, in my view, is a long tail of sub-scale charities in almost all sectors but notably in military services and health sectors. These all incur central overhead costs to run which could be saved, if the mission took precedence over survival, and Trustees considered mergers with other charities or more joint-working arrangements.
Most mergers in the charity sector appear to be emergency rescues when things have gone wrong rather than planned approaches with the aim of delivering more or better outcomes. It takes a brave board of Trustees to make a strategic call such as continuing a charity’s mission through recommending a merger. (As a Trustee myself with two charities, I admit I can see the challenge from the inside). Clearly, finding a merger partner is potentially costly and ATQ’s response to the Cabinet Office’s 2014 consultation on sustainability included a recommendation that some funds be set aside to support charities seeking pro-actively to merge or take over others.
The second recommendation from A Vision for Change which I fully support is for a £30m ring fenced innovation fund. The report argues that this should be a fixed proportion of BIG Lottery funds starting at 1% and rising to 5% over the next parliament. Since we began working on social investment feasibility studies back in 2011, ATQ arrived at a similar conclusion. If new public service innovative ideas are to be tested, then the monies need to be able to be ‘lost’ and so have to be set aside for that specific purpose and possibility. No civil servant wants his or her career affected by commissioning an innovation that somehow fails. Heaven forbid that they or their senior officers end up trying to explain how that could ever have happened to the Public Accounts Committee.
Many private organisations and indeed charities have equivalents to R&D budgets but somehow Government, despite all the challenges it faces, does not and this has surely hindered improvements in public services down the years.
- November 12, 2014
An article in the Guardian today (12th November 2014) caught my eye – margaret-hodge-southwark-health-social-care It was about Margaret Hodge MP, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and whose sometimes theatrical excoriation of both public and private sector managers has attracted much comment.
Now she is taking on the challenge of overseeing the implementation of changes in public services herself. She has started in the role of chair of the London Borough of Southwark’s “early action committee”. Its purpose is to re-organise services so as to intervene earlier and prevent social issues escalating and becoming more expensive to deal with later on.
As we know well from our social investment work and have commented on before, everyone agrees that this is the sensible approach to social inclusion problems but it has always proven very difficult to deliver – not least because in tightened times, budgets get drawn entirely into statutory provision leaving little or nothing spare for preventive work.
The article is pretty balanced and Mrs Hodge does of course, as the Guardian observes, have direct experience as a former leader of Islington Council – albeit nearly 30 years ago. So like the Guardian, I will watch with interest what lessons she learns from trying to lead a change herself rather than, along with her fellow PAC members, telling others what they think should have been done with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight.