I have come to the end of my role as independent chair of The Joint VCSE Review which took hundreds of views from voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations and developed actions, co-owned by government and sector, for how statutory and voluntary organisations should work together with citizens to redesign a more community-based health and care system, and then deliver that model. At national level, we helped design the Health and Wellbeing Alliance and the Health and Wellbeing Fund. NCVO provided the secretariat and a huge amount of support and expertise to the review, along with too many colleagues from the VCSE sector and from the Dept for Health and Social Care, NHS England and Public Health England to list here – I’m very grateful to them all.
My conclusions and recommendations for future joint policy work between government and the VCSE sector are here, and I am looking forward to discussing them with Simon Stevens of NHS England, Duncan Selbie of PHE, and Caroline Dinenage, the Minister of State for Care, shortly. NCVO have kindly published my blog on it here, which begins:
What does the health and social care system want from charities and social enterprises? The answers to this vary, and sometimes contradict each other. Voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations are asked to be more efficient and to merge into bigger organisations which can be contracted with, but they are also challenged to remain rooted in their communities and to tailor their work with specific communities. They should be collaborating not competing, while grant funding continues to be replaced with competitive contracting. The public expect charities to be independent, strong voices challenging the NHS and councils when they let people down. Those bodies generally welcome constructive criticism – up to a point.
When the world’s expectations of us become impossibly complex, the question we should ask becomes simple: what are we for?
Escaping the invisible asylum 