- 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.