Your questions answered on the role of the commissioning body
Have the changes Lambeth have made to their Supporting People governance arrangements impacted on their ability to meet the terms of the Supporting People grant conditions?
Lambeth is a non-excellent authority and is therefore required to comply fully with the existing Supporting People (SP) grant conditions for non-excellent authorities. Therefore, the changes we proposed making to the governance arrangements – particularly the changing role of the SP Commissioning Body – had to be explicitly agreed in advance with CLG. Their concern (and ours) was that the proper governance, scrutiny and leadership of the SP programme was not detrimentally affected by the remodelling of the SP Commissioning Body into a LAA Cross-cutting Commissioning Group (CCG) with more senior representatives attending from across the partnership and with a wider remit and membership.
We have ensured this has not happened by ensuring that all SP commissioning decisions (however small) are made by the CCG and we have also remodelled our Core Strategy Group to enable some of the more detailed operational commissioning work to be managed through that group, ensuring that all SP voting members are present when these discussions occur.
We also obtained approval for the changes from the Government Office for London (GOL) given that we were proposing changes to governance that would impact on Lambeth’s new LAA.
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Which organisations sit on the Cross-cutting Commissioning Group?
Given that the Cross-cutting Commissioning Group (CCG) still has a role to play in respect of Supporting People (SP) governance, we have maintained senior level membership from the key voting partners – Probation, the Primary Care Trust (PCT) and the council as the accountable body.
However, due to the group taking a much wider commissioning role we have also seen new organisations become members - like the Learning and Skills Council, YOS and Regeneration. The Local Strategic Partnership’s lead officer sits on the group and was also a member of the SP Commissioning Body as previously constituted.
Council membership includes representation from all departments including director-level representation from Regeneration and Housing, Adults and Community Services, Community Safety, the Youth Offending Service, Corporate Finance, Corporate Procurement, Strategic Transformation, CYPS and Environment and Culture.
The widening of the membership of the group has allowed much more effective exploration of the possibilities for joint commissioning, senior level buy-in of the importance of this in meeting outcomes and the tackling of some of the barriers to working differently.
Supporting the CCG, we have established a Cross-cutting Procurement Group, which is chaired by the council’s Head of Corporate Procurement. This group brings together procurement leads from the key partnership agencies, with a view to working with the CCG to make sure that best practice is followed but also advising CCG on procurement options for new projects.
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How should our commissioning body be engaging with the Local Area Agreement now and in the future?
Getting Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) representation on the commissioning board is a really important step to take and one we would highly recommend to other Supporting People (SP) teams.
As we’ve already highlighted, we feel Local Area Agreements (LAAs) offer fantastic opportunities for joint commissioning with a wide range of public, third sector and private sector partners. However, to maximise the opportunities for SP services to be included in local partnerships, it’s really important that SP teams explore all opportunities to develop jointly commissioned services. This could include working with new statutory or third sector partners and/or assessing the need for services which are not currently delivered by the LAA.
Another approach that can really help SP teams, especially smaller ones, is to make use of local communications networks to promote their work and publicise their successes. There are many possibilities for doing this, for example placing an article in a local newspaper, Primary Care Trust magazine or a service user newsletter. Having a more ‘campaigning’ approach raises the profile of SP services both with Local Strategic Partnership partners and elected Members and makes them more aware of the benefits of including SP services when carrying out commissioning in future.
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How will Probation be involved in a wider governance model?
London Probation sit on the Cross-cutting Commissioning Group in the same way they used to sit on the Supporting People (SP) Commissioning Body. We now have representation at Assistant Chief Officer level and have been able to find increasing opportunities for involving Probation within the local partnership and identifying cross-cutting commissioning possibilities (ie around access to private rented sector move on for offenders, joint working on gangs and gun crime, etc.) as a result of the changes.