Your questions answered on provider involvement
How can we maintain provider involvement in a Local Area Agreement environment?
We firmly believe that a ‘fit for purpose’ Local Area Agreement (LAA) depends on the involvement of the Third Sector. Our Supporting People (SP) Commissioning Board has always been very conscious of the need to enable a wide range of providers to enter the local provider market and the extremely high percentage of SP schemes currently provided by Third Sector organisations (98%) is proof of this. Again, we view the LAA as an opportunity, both to promote ‘market awareness’ of the Third Sector and to extend the good commissioning practice we have developed across all the LAA’s partnerships. SP providers themselves are good examples of the success of our approach.
In Lambeth we’ve adopted several measures which are helping providers to maintain and grow their involvement in the LAA environment. We’ve held several joint events, involving both large and small third sector organisations. These have tried to ‘demystify’ LAAs and, hopefully, allayed some fears about them. We strongly encourage larger organisations to form partnerships with smaller ones in bidding for contracts, so that service users are able to benefit from their knowledge of local issues and groups. Equally, we support groups of small service providers to form consortia, enabling them to bid for larger, more complex contracts. We’ve also involved local providers in service design and review and in developing a value for money assessment tool. We also have a long-standing provider forum, which we have used to communicate and discuss key issues with the Third Sector and we will continue to include them in upcoming discussions on the borough’s Sustainable Communities Strategy.
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How have providers reacted to changes in governance?
Initially we experienced providers as lacking a great deal of awareness about the proposed changes to local government and how these might impact both on the Supporting People (SP) programme and on relationships between local government and the Third Sector more generally. In Lambeth, we sought to address this by holding a series of events during 2006 and 2007 which were intended to raise awareness, address anxiety and point out the tremendous opportunities that the new ways of working will bring to providers who are ready to engage with them. These were events primarily aimed at small, local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) groups (and not current SP providers) but we found that some larger providers came along to learn, too.
Government has made it clear that more commissioning from the Third Sector is a clear intention for the future and we have taken the view that we have to do what we can to engage with providers and get them ready for the changes. Obviously some of the smaller providers locally have more anxiety about how they will fare in an environment where competitive tendering might become more the norm but partnering events and recent tenders managed by Lambeth’s SP Team have demonstrated that there are business opportunities as well as threats.
The impact of the changes in governance will not be felt by providers for a while yet but, once it has been explained, many have told us that they feel that Lambeth’s SP Team has put the programme in Lambeth on a stronger footing by engaging with the Local Area Agreement (LAA) on our own terms and in seeking to influence the LAA commissioning framework using our own experience and good practice. Some have expressed anxiety that the same state of readiness or engagement is not evident in other areas they operate in and this is what creates their fear about the future influence or strength of the SP programme.
Obviously, we have provider representatives on our Core Strategy Group and they have been informed and consulted about the changes as appropriate and we also hold regular provider meetings where the changes – and importantly the rationale behind them – have been discussed.