This is my blog to support the launch of the Joint VCSE Review’s new action plan. I have also written a piece for HSJ with Glen Garrod of ADASS and Rob Webster of South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Trust.
“We welcome the new action plan from the Joint VCSE Review, which has set out an important vision in which voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations work with the NHS to co-design and co-deliver health and care services with local people. The action plan has a strong focus on greater use of Social Value Act powers by health and care commissioners which enables commissioners to seek added social value from local providers and more value for public money in partnership with charits and community groups. Use of the Act should be more routine in health commissioning.”
Simon Stevens, CEO, NHS England.
What do voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations want from government and the NHS? Ask our statutory partners and many will say, “money” and then add “but we don’t have any!” The first part of that is true, of course. The VCSE sector can often manage with less money than other kinds of organisation, because it is often better at drawing on different kinds of resources as well: people’s freely given time, support from local community and businesses, use of community resources. But all organisations working in health and social care, whether statutory, private or not for profit, need money to run. The difference between statutory and voluntary organisations is not their need for money, it is that typically statutory organisations control that money, and VCSE organisations do not.
Two years ago the Joint VCSE Review held a full consultation with the VCSE sector and its partners, and produced a report and 28 recommendations based on what we found. We heard that VCSE did not want to be in the position of asking for money: they wanted to share responsibility for the resources available, and to help people who use public services to share that responsibility. When statutory organisations and commissioners say ‘there’s no money!’ they have often started with the assumption that they must keep spending the money they have on what they already do. Local people, particularly from groups and communities who are not well-served by current services, can take a different view, if they have the opportunity to take part in genuine decision-making (as opposed to being ‘engaged’ and ‘consulted’ by decision-makers reluctant to give up any real power). So our key message was that, if we are serious about community-based, community-owned health and care services, which both expect and ask more of citizens, we need to get serious about co-designing those services with the people who make most use of them. VCSE organisations are the only ones with any track record of doing that. The fact that co-design and coproduction are still seen as slow, difficult and optional, rather than essential to improvement and tackling inequalities, is a good indicator of how much current commissioning teams need their voluntary counterparts and the communities they reach.
King’s Fund research commissioned in response to the Joint Review found a clear distinction between commissioners who co-commission and those who see their VCSE partners as there to provide the services designed without their input. So our new action plan’s three actions include co-design becoming a core expectation, with commissioners recognising that some of their scarce resources could usefully be invested in user-led and grassroots groups which are their only viable routes to the people with whom they need to co-design the future. As areas start to co-design in that way, as pioneers like Greater Manchester are already doing, they are hearing a clear demand for health and social care services which help people to live well and to remain independent and resilient in the face of long term health conditions, so our other two actions are to embed wellbeing as a shared goal for health and care services, and to enable local leaders to commission, demand and pay for wellbeing and resilience. We heard from the sector about the need for tools to be freely available to small local organisations, not just to large organisations with research and evaluation budgets. And we were excited by the promising examples of social prescribing and other approaches which, when done well, enable commissioners to work with intermediary local bodies to get their resources effectively to the full range of VCSE organisations. We argued in our original report that fund should always be on a ‘simplest by default’ basis, avoiding expensive, time-consuming and overly bureaucratic processes which are often evidence of a lack of understanding of what the VCSE can bring, rather than reflections of any real regulatory imperative.
Our action plan, which has been adopted by the Health and Wellbeing Alliance, is an attempt to bridge the statutory and voluntary worlds. That bridge will enable people to travel more freely between their lives at home in the community and the world of service support which can too often be inaccessible. One tangible way to bridge between the values of the VCSE sector and what the statutory sector will place a value on, would be to use routinely the existing Social Value Act powers, which allow commissioners to demand social value such as use of volunteers, or employment of people with lived experience, from all of their contracts. Jon Rouse says, “The Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership based our working relationship with the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector on the recommendations from the Joint VCSE Review, which included that statutory and voluntary agencies should work together with local people to co-design better health and care services. We welcome the new VCSE action plan and expect to lead the way in using the Social Value Act powers routinely in our health and care contracting, to get the best value possible from public funds.”
Bridging between those two worlds means building from both sides, so I want to end with a challenge to my own sector. It’s not enough for us to talk about our community roots: we need to demonstrate that they are still strong and healthy. If we are to share in the power that goes with co-owning health and care systems and their resources, we must also be willing to share responsibility. The inequality of our current public services, and their outcomes, was the strongest message we heard during our consultation. As voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations we need to look hard at our practices and the way we make decisions ourselves, to be sure that we are part of the solution to that injustice.
Escaping the invisible asylum 