CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 540-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION SELECT COMMITTEE

 

 

THIRD SECTOR COMMISSIONING

 

 

Thursday 7 June 2007

LORD ADEBOWALE and MS JOYCE MOSELEY

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 55

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Select Committee

on Thursday 7 June 2007

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

Paul Flynn

David Heyes

Kelvin Hopkins

Julie Morgan

Mr Gordon Prentice

Mr Charles Walker

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Lord Adebowale, a Member of the House of Lords, Chief Executive, Turning Point, and Ms Joyce Moseley, Chief Executive, Rainer, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Let me extend a very warm welcome to our witnesses this morning. We are delighted to welcome Lord Victor Adebowale, who is the Chief Executive of Turning Point, and Joyce Moseley, who is the Chief Executive of Rainer. As you know, the Committee is doing an inquiry into commissioning involving the third sector. Both your organisations are particularly interesting to us because you are such big players in terms of commissioned services and therefore we would like to explore some of the issues around this inquiry with you if we may. We are also very grateful to you for the memoranda which you both submitted.[1] Do either or both of you want to say anything by way of introduction?

Lord Adebowale: Not really. You have our submission from Turning Point. I am at your disposal, as they say.

Ms Moseley: The same; no, and thank you for inviting us.

Q2 Chairman: Can we dig away a bit at some of the underlying issues here? Everyone is very keen to see the third sector generally play a greater role in services to the Government. What we would like to know from you as people who have been doing this for some time on rather a large scale is, what is it you think you bring to it that makes it worthwhile to be interested in developing third sector provision?

Lord Adebowale: There are a number of things. I cannot speak for the whole sector but my own organisation sees its role as bringing the following things. First, we are able to bring together different funding streams to create sometimes bespoke services that meet the needs of individuals and their communities. I am thinking of cases where people have both substance misuse and mental health challenges or learning disability and mental health challenges or where there are particular communities that have been under-served by public services. Where there is a need for, for want of a better term, a bespoke response my organisation is able to pull together funding from a number of different sources in the interests of the individual and the community in a way that I am not saying the public sector is unable to do but finds it more difficult to do. I think that is one of our strengths. I also think that there is evidence from my own organisation that we are able to get at some of those communities that the public sector has struggled to interface with, to get into services with or to engage with. There are some debates about value for money, I guess, when we bid for contracts. It is in a competitive environment often with both private and public sector organisations and if we win the contract it is on the basis that we have put forward a better value proposition, usually not just in money terms but also in terms of people. Those are the three things that I would highlight.

Q3 Chairman: The Committee last year went to New York and saw extraordinary things happening in Harlem, and when I read your memorandum and you talked about doing joined-up services for whole neighbourhoods it took me back to thinking about what we saw there. I cannot remember the person's name who was the driving force in that but he or she was an extraordinary person. What was amazing was that they were not just operating in terms of particular services; they were doing the whole joined-up thing, the whole life experience for people living in that community, and I wondered if you were offering that.

Lord Adebowale: In some cases. Certainly Turning Point's Connected Care proposition, where we have designed a way of bringing health and social care commissioning together and where we have got a way of designing the use of services and engaging with communities in a way that gets them to design and specify the types of services that they will use and often they can get jobs in as well, is an example of that kind of bespoke service response that Turning Point is able to do. We are very much driven by the inverse care law which states that those people who need social care most tend to get it least.

Ms Moseley: Adding on to what Victor said on the bringing together of funding streams and service provision, I would evidence that by our care leaving services where we provide social work and personal care to young people. What we also do is manage the housing provision for those 16-plus young people. We will also be bringing in specialist education provision to give them intensive input. We can bring in funding streams from Europe, for instance, which the local authority would find difficult to access. We have a £2.1 million contract with Surrey to run their care leaving services and over a year we have brought £1.2 million of other services into that to give a really complete and whole service to those care leavers, something the local authority I think would find difficult to do. We also work very much in partnership with them and they are very grateful for that.

Q4 Chairman: Is the argument though that what we need is a sort of mixed economy of provision in which the state will do some things and the private sector will do some things and the third sector will do some things, or is the claim that the third sector does things better than either the state or the private sector and therefore needs to be given a special place?

Ms Moseley: Sometimes we do, sometimes we do not. I do not think any sector has the monopoly on good practice. My background is in the public sector as a director of social services and I know there is huge passion in some public services but I also know there are some very poor services in the public sector, and I would say the same for the third sector. We need to look at which organisation can deliver services in the best way for those individual people. We deal with young people, young adults in the 10-25 age group. Many of them, because of the difficulties they are getting into, see authority figures in whatever state as something they want to avoid. We can get over that a bit and that is very helpful to those young people and to the local public services.

Q5 Chairman: I am trying to push you on this. It is quite fundamental to the argument. We had a seminar here a week or two ago with third sector people and to a man and woman they were wanting to argue that there was something extra that you get from the third sector. In fact, someone said that the whole point about it is that it is not the state, the idea being that it is better than the state. It is quite an important thing to get your head round, whether you think that, in a sense, anybody can provide services, horses for courses, or whether the argument really is that there is something so distinctive and better about the third sector that would make you want to insert it wherever you possibly could.

Lord Adebowale: My response is quite simple. It is not either/or; it is and/and. Most people that we provide services to, those 140,000-odd people, those that I talk to, and I have spoken to a lot, do not really spend a lot of time worrying about whether we are a public service, a private service or a third sector service. What they are worried about is the service, full stop, and generally that is the direction that people out there are going in. I would not sit here and say that the third sector should receive some special plea for public services. What I would say is that if you look at social care there is some evidence, looking back through the Commission for Social Care Inspection reports, that in some areas the third sector provides better services, better care. We can provide better care in a way that is driven by not-for-profit; if you look at our accounts you can see where the money is going. There are no shareholders, no distribution of dividends, so you could argue in some circumstances that yes, there are better services and there is some evidence for better chunks of services being provided by the third sector, but to say that the third sector is better than the public sector, or indeed better than the private sector, is a statement I would not support if any sector said it. It does not make sense.

Ms Moseley: I would certainly add that I do not think we have any inherent right to say that. However, again, if you look at bail and remand services for young offenders, which my charity developed before it was a statutory responsibility and then went on to deliver some services when it did become a statutory service, and we wrote the good practice guide for the Youth Justice Board and so helped the public sector to take on that responsibility but then many of the services that the voluntary sector was running were taken in-house when special grants came to an end, there is clear evidence that those services no longer performed as well. There is something about the fact that you are running a specific service on a contract that gives you a real focus and that focus can then dissipate a bit when it is taken back into the more general youth offending team, which is what happened in that service, and that can be demonstrated. I think there is something about the fact that we deliver what is on the tin. If you have got a good contract in a well-commissioned service we have a real focus on it.

Q6 Chairman: I am sure colleagues will want to ask you about particular examples so that we can see some of those in action. You talked about not having an inherent right to be treated differently but, in terms of the commissioning process and the contracts, when I read your submissions, particularly Rainer's, there was a kind of irksome sense in terms of the regulation, the bureaucracy, "If only they would deal with us in a more straightforward and simple way life would be so much easier". What I want to know is whether you think this amounts to a claim on the part of the third sector to be treated differently in commissioning and contracting terms.

Ms Moseley: I just think it is about improving commissioning. I think the phrase that the public sector does not know how to buy and a lot of the voluntary sector does not know how to sell is something to hold on to. I think we gave some examples of that. I think we ought to be regulated. I think we ought to be selected for quality. If we are spending public money that is what should happen, but when you have to provide three box files of your policies to someone for a contract which is worth about £50,000 a year when you have been working with that authority for 10 years that is when it becomes irksome and that is just over-regulated, over-zealous contracting people, particularly within local authorities, who do not see beyond their very narrow responsibilities.

Q7 Chairman: But that does not apply just to the third sector. It could apply to a private contractor or anybody else.

Ms Moseley: Absolutely, yes.

Lord Adebowale: The point I would make on this is that in terms of the services to the public better value could be got out of the third sector by simply applying some of the thinking that applies to the private sector - longer term contracts, for instance. There are many cases where third sector organisations do not enjoy the same level of long term contracting that the private sector takes for granted. Full cost recovery: again, it is assumed without question in some cases that the private sector will make a profit. Nobody questions it, it is never clawed back, it is just that that is the way it is, but in some third sector negotiations it is assumed that we will be subsidised by fund-raised income or that somehow we do not need to cover the costs of providing a service. I think that mitigates against good services to the public rather than being a special case. I would agree with Joyce. The private sector also complain of the over-burdensome procurement process, some of it led by European law, that requires massive amounts of time and effort to be spent on what are known as PQQs, pre-qualification questionnaires that are just ridiculous. In fact, the contract bid is often three pages and the PQQ is four boxes. It just does not seem to be accurate. I think there is a huge debate to be had about commissioning. It is the skill of the age in the sense that everybody is concerned about value for money, everybody is concerned about ensuring that we reach the people that need services most. That is about commissioning. That is not an issue for the third sector. Again, if you look at some of the work that KPMG have done, if you look at the work of the Public Service Reform Group, all of them, including the Audit Commission, would be looking at commissioning as one of the issues that we need to pay attention to.

Q8 Mr Walker: Lord Adebowale, one of my concerns is that large organisations like yourselves, when you are contracting or bidding for contracts, crowd out small, established, local charities. In my constituency of Broxbourne we are served by a very good local drugs charity called Chrysalis, which is staffed by outstanding people, not in my constituency but in the constituency of my colleague, Mark Prisk, Hertford and Stortford, but they are having their contract terminated by the County Council in September and I understand that you are one of the organisations bidding for this more global contract across half of Hertfordshire, and if I have got that wrong I apologise. How do you answer that concern, because it is a genuine concern, that you are almost corporate in your outlook, that you have a cross-United Kingdom presence, that you are just knocking out small charities who can retain that essence of a charity but do not have lobbyists, do not have marketers; they purely focus on delivering a local service?

Lord Adebowale: I think it is a really interesting question. We work with a whole range of small organisations. I would just say that there is a market place within the charity sector, as you well know, as there is in the private sector, in which both large and small operate, and in a market place first of all I would not assume that small charities are any better or any worse than large charities. There are excellent small charities, there are some not very good ones, and vice versa. Hertsreach is an example where we work with a whole range of small charities to pull together a county-wide substance misuse service, which I think Chrysalis is part of, so I think we are working with Chrysalis as a small charity. We also were part of the Government's Change Up programme where we put a significant amount of our own resource and time into working with a whole range of small charities, not on the front-line service delivery but on the back room stuff, the human resource services, the finance services, the things that they find difficult to finance and provide for because they just have not got the resources. Sadly, the funding for the Change Up programme was withdrawn but we have continued to retain a relationship with those charities. Similarly, we work with Kikit in Birmingham, which is a very small drugs charity specifically focused on a particular part of the community and we work with BRO-SIS, which is another small charity that works with people with HIV and drugs challenges in the east African community. We have a number of examples. It is not something that we need to boast about. It is something that we do because it is not about being big; it is about being good. We will work with anyone really who is interested in the values of our service. I just think it is interesting that there is an assumption that in order to have large charities or social enterprises, which is what Turning Point is, the small ones must die. Actually, some of the fastest growing social enterprises, third sector organisations, are very small and will probably be bigger than Turning Point in five or six years and want to be bigger than Turning Point in five or six years, and good luck to them.

Q9 Mr Walker: So when you are bidding for a contract do you look at what already exists in the way of provision and do you then in your bidding incorporate how you would work with those existing providers, because some of them, obviously, you will want to work with and some of them you might take the view are not doing a good enough job and you would not want to work with?

Lord Adebowale: The short answer to your question is, absolutely. In fact, we would not have got most of the contracts that we have won if we had not evidenced that we understood what was happening locally, that we had developed partnerships or relationships with small local charities and that we were working alongside them. But they have a choice too and some small charities choose not to talk to us or get engaged with us, and that is a choice they make. What we do not do is force the issue either way. I cannot think of a service that we provide currently in any of our sectors where we are not doing so alongside local groups and small local groups at that.

Ms Moseley: I can add to that some examples where we were bidding for services in Wessex with the Wessex Youth Offending Team, which, as you all know, covers Hampshire, Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight and one other, I think. We knew, because we had already been working in that area, that there was a very good service within Portsmouth, which probably was not big enough to take on the full contract. It was something that the Wessex police and the Wessex YOT wanted for efficiency, for consistency across their whole area, so we discussed that with the commissioners and said we were very willing to work with them and the commissioners acted as a broker, if you like, saying yes, that was what they wanted as long as we could come to agreements about providing a consistent and similar service across the whole area, which is what we did and that has gone on to us working with that organisation on other service deliveries. Again, it goes back to what Victor said about the skills of commissioners. If they see themselves as people who are responsible for their community and for making the best of the resources in that community you can then get into a better dialogue with them on those sorts of partnering arrangements. Often they do not see themselves like that. They see it as a very narrow contracting process rather than a commissioning process, if I can make that distinction.

Lord Adebowale: Earlier you asked what were the benefits, the value-added bit of the third sector, and I think Joyce has just adequately described one of those benefits. In a market where resources are tight, which is often the case in delivery of social-care-type services, competition that is not managed by an intelligent commissioner wastes those resources. One of the benefits of the third sector, I would argue, is that we have a value which is about retaining those services, so the kinds of deals and the kind of work that both Joyce and myself have described retain resources in the sector and in those services. If those services close that resource is generally gone for ever; it is not going to be rekindled, so that is one of the things we are able to do where in other sectors it is a case of, "You are too small and you cannot compete; tough, you are out of business". It is slightly more sophisticated, I think, in the third sector.

Ms Moseley: Whether it is contentious or not, I think the commissioning people locally do have to make some hard decisions sometimes about which local small groups are good.

Q10 Mr Walker: Very briefly, because this is probably quite a long answer to a short question, how do you structure your relationship between yourselves and small charities to ensure that small charities retain their fleetness of foot and local focus?

Lord Adebowale: I am not quite sure I understand the question.

Q11 Mr Walker: You are a major UK player. You win a contract, there are small local providers that you are going to work with. How do you ensure that in working with those charities you protect their uniqueness, in a sense?

Lord Adebowale: First of all, there are a number of rules. The first is that we do not dictate to them how they define themselves. They define what it is that they offer and how they offer it. Often the relationship is with the local service manager, ie, the Turning Point service manager will already know who they are because they live locally, they work locally, they understand the local area and will already have been in dialogue about how we can work together and what the services are, but it is different in different areas. Not far from here we have a service in Brixton, ACAPS, which works with a lot of young people, probably a few thousand in the course of a year, who are known as NEETs - I think it is a rather unfortunate phrase - not in education, not in employment, not in training. We are working with those young people getting them into training that will give them work in our sector, and in order to do that we have to work with a range of other small local charities that might have engaged with the same young people. What we are not interested in is taking over those services. Nine times out of 10, in fact, in 100 % of the cases, those services want to work with Turning Point because they want to offer a service for those young people that means that the young people are not going from pillar to post having to tell their story twice, which is, as Joyce will tell you, one of the reasons why young people drop out of services altogether. We look at pooling resources, back office services, so that we are not all spending the money on the same things, a lot of the things that I am sure you would consider to be good business practice, without ever getting into a debate about takeovers or changing. It does not get there because the dialogue is focused on the needs of the client and the community, but there are some small local charities, and I respect it entirely, which take the view that it is bad and do not want to talk to us. I think that is fine if that is what they want to do. It is a free country.

Ms Moseley: Just on that point, sometimes we have gone into fairly formal subcontracting arrangements with a small charity because that was what they wanted. At other times it is very much on trust and some of our money just goes over to them, with some audit trails, of course. I think there was an assumption there about small being always fleet of foot and community based, and I suppose I would want to say I think we are too. I would say that a part of making us very community based is the number of volunteers we use as an integral part of our services, who are always taken from the local community, and that may be something we will pick up on later.

Lord Adebowale: The formal answer to your question is that there is also quite a lot of subcontracting. We subcontract services as well, so it is not straightforward "large is good".

Q12 Julie Morgan: I wonder if you could tell us what percentage of your income is voluntary income and how you raise it and how that has changed over the years.

Ms Moseley: It is quite small and always has been since our origins in 1788 when it was all voluntary income. At the moment it is 4 % and rising, we hope. That is funds raised from donor corporates and trusts, that sort of fund-raising. We also have some income which is derived from reasonably low investments that we have and the income from those investments is used directly for the charity. We have a small fund-raising team which our trustees have invested in from our reserves in order to try and increase the percentage that is fund-raised, and we see it very much as adding value, so not subsidising the contracted services we have but adding value to the public services we deliver. It is very hard; sometimes young offenders are quite difficult to raise money for.

Q13 Julie Morgan: What methods do you use to raise money?

Ms Moseley: We have tried and investigated various methods. We have a fairly small donor base to whom we send out appeals and newsletters to encourage them to know more about us. We have tried knocking on doors with a basket of charities, as it is called, using an agency. That was fairly successful. We have tried face-to-face, better known as "chugging". That did not work for us because we do not have a very high profile. Unless you have a high public profile getting money directly from the public is extremely difficult, so we go a lot to trusts and foundations for money where we are putting in bids for grants, and they are often very specific grants; it is not free money in that sense. We also work with some corporates. For instance, Artemis Investment Management work very closely with us on our Lambeth youth inclusion programme and have become very involved. A group of young people from Lambeth are going with staff from Artemis this weekend to climb mountains in Scotland, for instance. They have taken a very personal interest in the charity.

Q14 Julie Morgan: Does the fact that the voluntary income is so small and you are so dependent on statutory income affect you as a voluntary body? Does that affect the way you work?

Ms Moseley: I do not think so. What I am finding is that bidding for voluntary money from trusts and corporates, for instance, is as detailed and tricky sometimes as putting in a bid for a public service. You have to show the same evidence, you have to show the same business-like abilities to spend that money. The corporates and trusts want to know that they are going to be able to rely on that money being spent well, so there is a coming together of the way we operate. If I can go under the question in terms of our abilities to, say, campaign or lobby for the young people we work with, I do not think it makes any difference whatsoever. We have always been a charity that has used the evidence from our services very directly from our young people in a quiet way. We do not shout loudly about our campaigns. The fact that we work in 150 communities, we have that many contracts, if not more, means that we are not reliant on any one provider of money in any way. We have just done some research around the housing of care leavers. We run some very big care leaving services where we hold the statutory account for the social workers in our teams, but that has not stopped us sending our research to every director of children's services and the Government saying, "You are not doing well enough in terms of the way you house your care leavers and we have the evidence to show that", so I do not think so.

Q15 Julie Morgan: And you do criticise your funders?

Ms Moseley: Absolutely.

Q16 Julie Morgan: Good for you. Do you feel it inhibits you in any way?

Ms Moseley: No. What is more constructive, if you are taking an individual contract that you might have for a service, is the dialogue and the discussion you have as part of the monitoring of that contract. If it is a constructive relationship rather than a ticking-box type monitoring arrangement you can say, "Look: because of something that is happening in your authority you are not getting the best out of us or from your young people, so together can we change that?" In that sense that sort of lobbying is much more constructive at a local level.

Q17 Julie Morgan: Do you have any examples where contracts have been ended or lost because of your criticism of funders?

Ms Moseley: No.

Q18 Julie Morgan: Can I ask the same of you, Lord Adebowale?

Lord Adebowale: Turning Point is a not-for-profit social enterprise. We are a business. We do not have any shareholders, we do not distribute a dividend at the end of the year. About 95 % of our income is contract income with statutory services. We operate in 250 different locations around the country. We have hundreds and hundreds of contracts, well over 400, I would say. We do raise money from trusts. In fact, we had over a million pounds from Comic Relief. We have had some large grants to do specific work in areas that we are campaigning on. Does it stop us from campaigning? Hell, no. Let me give you some examples of the campaigns that we have run. At this moment we are running a campaign on blood-borne viruses in needle exchanges and the need for the Government to radically review its advice and practice on needle exchange. We have called for safe injecting rooms for injecting drug users. The report is called The Sharp End.[2] I am happy to send you all a copy; in fact, we almost certainly will send you all a copy. We campaign very loudly. We think it is important for our service users, who tell us their stories and who want us to make sure that their plight is heard in order that services can be changed across the piece. We work with them very closely. We have a campaign running at the moment on the children of alcohol-misusing parents. One in 11 of our children in this country will be going home tonight to a parent that will be misusing alcohol. I and my colleagues think that is scandalous and we think it is not just about education, and we said that yesterday when the Government announced its alcohol strategy. We said, "It is fine to educate. What we need is treatment", which is still a postcode lottery. We ran a very effective campaign on learning disabilities and the fact that too many people with learning disabilities are in long-stay institutions rather than in the community as members of that community. That effectively got the Government's focus, its resources and attention on meeting a target to close long-stay institutions which we have been working on with them. I could go on and on. We are very clear about the fact that this is a democracy and the fact that we receive funding from any sources does not prevent us from speaking out on behalf of our clients. In response to the question have we ever been threatened locally, it would be fair to say that there are some local commissioners who are nervous about campaigning. In my personal experience it has never stopped us from campaigning locally. There are some very clear rules that we apply to campaigning. One is that we never campaign on anything for which we have not got a positive solution, so it is not just about saying, "This is wrong. You are nasty". It is about, "Look at how we could do this better, look at how we could get better value for people and better value for money". We always campaign on things that we know about and that our service users engage with and ask us and want us to be involved in, and not just our service users but also our front-line staff. Thirdly, while we do campaign loudly nationally, as Joyce has pointed out, we also campaign quietly and effectively locally. I have never in my career withdrawn a campaign that we thought was valid and valuable on the basis of a threat by a minister, MP, councillor or anyone else for that matter, and we would not.

Q19 Julie Morgan: Do you have any doubts about being so dependent on statutory funding?

Lord Adebowale: No, and I will tell you why. It is an interesting question because I certainly know that some of the writers that have a critique of this particular model tend not to have the same critique of private sector organisations, or indeed public sector organisations, that have effectively a monopoly relationship where they have one supplier or one provider of their funding and it is never questioned. I do not see why it should be questioned in our case and the evidence is that it has not stopped us from campaigning and campaigning very effectively and very loudly. We have not got a problem with it at all.

Q20 Julie Morgan: I suppose you could say the public sector are more directly accountable to the public in a democracy, as you were saying earlier on. How do you see your accountability?

Lord Adebowale: I think we are incredibly accountable, actually. There is a slight difference in my response to that point in that we are regulated by the Healthcare Commission, the Commission for Social Care Inspection, the Housing Corporation, the Audit Commission and the Charity Commission, which I think is enough to be going along with, but we also have the scrutiny of our contract commissioners in several hundred different locations to contend with, so I think the regulatory aspect of accountability is very clear and something we take very seriously, and, frankly, we would be out of business if we did not. In the more general sense we are a very transparent organisation. I think people see what we do. Because we campaign publicly people can critique us publicly, and often do. I think that creates a different level of accountability which I guess is very modern in these days of public accountability through the media. I do not shy away from it. I do not think it stops us from being effective.

Ms Moseley: Could I add to that point because I think there is another dimension and I am confident that Victor would agree with it, which is the accountability to our beneficiaries, to our young people, and the accountability to our mission and what our charitable objectives are. Something that I always ensure I ask our front-line staff and volunteers when I go and visit our services is, "Are you delivering a service to these young people which you feel is of good quality, is meeting their needs and is what you think these young people need?", and if there is huge doubt about that then I would want my operational staff to be questioning why we are in that contract. We will also, of course, turn down and not go for a contract if we do not believe it can be delivered to the quality that we are prepared to deliver at, so there is that other level of accountability.

Q21 Paul Flynn: It is very good to hear that you are not inhibited in your campaigning by having the burden of being caught in possession of intelligent ideas. You had the campaign on crack, you had the campaign on trying to emphasise that the Government's use of the criminal justice system is not helpful and that they should be choosing more the health and social care outcomes. We are coming up to the 10-year review of the 1998 strategy. What will you be saying to Government about what they should do?

Lord Adebowale: The drug strategy?

Paul Flynn: The Government strategy which started in 1998 is going to be reviewed; it is a 10-year strategy.

Lord Adebowale: That is the drug strategy?

Paul Flynn: The drug strategy.

Lord Adebowale: There are so many.

Paul Flynn: Indeed, absolutely.

Lord Adebowale: I think we will be saying the following, first that this Government's attention on getting more people into treatment has been very useful and very effective and it is something that we have campaigned for since well before I arrived at Turning Point. We have consistently said that treatment is the most effective way of managing the substance misuse challenge in this country - and, by the way, when I talk about substance misuse I refer to alcohol and other drugs. The Government has gone a long way in increasing the resources and the attention. We will say that the criminal justice slant on much of the Government's policy on drug misuse, while being useful in one way in that it has released resources and has certainly focused on the nuisance element, needs also to focus on prevention, ie, those people that are at risk of taking substances in a way that will be of harm to themselves and others and need access to treatment in ways other than through the criminal justice system. We will also point out that the issue of dual diagnosis, ie, that there are significant numbers of people with mental health challenges, and some put it as high as 60 %, who are also self-medicating or taking substances both legal and illegal, needs to be thought through. There are few services that are able to deal with that dual diagnosis and in a sense, unless we can deal with that challenge, there is a real danger of the inverse care law hitting those people hard and costing public services more money. Those are the kinds of things that we will be saying by way of assisting the next drug strategy and those things will be based on sound research and experience of delivering drug services to 70,000-odd people.

Q22 Paul Flynn: You suggested that you have a better way of dealing with crack. What is it and what hopes do you have of the Government adopting it?

Lord Adebowale: The report you are referring to is a report on crack that we did about two years ago, the elements of which were that there was a need for more crack services, that there was tending to be a bias towards opiate services and not stimulant services generally, crack being a stimulant, that there was evidence that crack was being taken with heroin in a practice known as speedballing, and that services needed to be aware and more research needed to be done on that kind of poly-drug misuse, and also that more research needed to be funded to look at more effective methods of working with crack users.[3] We have also used some of the research from The Crack Report in The Sharp End Report which I referred to earlier in that it is also clear that injecting drug-users have also started to inject, and again this is something not just familiar to Turning Point, but also to Joyce's organisation, to Rainer, where you have drug-users who are using heroin and crack, an injecting drug which will do two things. One, it will rot your veins and your arteries very quickly and, two, it increases the chances of blood-borne viruses and illnesses. The increasing use of that kind of drug needs a different kind of service response, what we are arguing for. We know that this Government has a real problem with safe injecting rooms, despite the worldwide evidence that they reduce nuisance and increase health outcomes for drug-users and we will campaign until the Government listens, so that is the kind of thing that we say in those reports.

Q23 Paul Flynn: Is there a sense of frustration for you and your charity, perhaps both charities, and you say it in your report in this area as well, that you are working within straitjackets where perhaps, if you were operating as a charity in other parts of Europe, you would not have the problems you have? You have already reached the higher echelons of the House of Lords and, if you had control of the whole system, you would move into 10 Downing Street, which would be a great move, but, if you had the power to change the system, what system would we have?

Lord Adebowale: I never confuse access with influence. I personally, if I may speak personally for a second, remain both an optimistic person, but also yes, I am frustrated. Every time I go to an area, which I have been doing for the last 30 years, I guess, where public money is being spent to little effect, I know that not just Turning Point, although I will speak for Turning Point, but also Joyce runs an excellent organisation which could be providing services better or providing a service to these people. I am frustrated that the Government does not always take on board, and engage with, the opportunities to deliver services that we know will work for people who are marginalised and I think it is frustrating that the Government has not engaged with the idea of safe injecting rooms. I think it is frustrating that, although we have had a lot of support for our Connected Care service, what we want is a partnership with a government that, how can I put it, is willing to invest with us in mainstreaming services and service approaches that we know, because we have done the work, will work. If you look at the history of the third sector, you will see the start of many things that the public now take for granted, such as social housing, the Health Service actually and the Probation Service, and what I am suggesting and what frustrates me is that, given that is the case and given that we have more sophisticated methodologies now of assessing need, that cycle could be faster, I guess, and we could be working more in partnership. As I say, it is not either/or, it is and/and, so that frustrates me, yes.

Q24 Paul Flynn: Joyce Moseley, I do not think you operate in Wales, as far as I know. Do you? Do you operate to a large extent in Wales?

Ms Moseley: We are just starting to and Communities that Care, a small organisation, we now house them, they have become a part of us, but they still retain ----

Q25 Paul Flynn: It is about time since you have been going since the 1800s!

Ms Moseley: 1788.

Q26 Paul Flynn: Well, there is a certain lack of ambition there if you are just getting into Wales now! You tell the story, which is obviously important to you, of what happened in the mid-1800s when the Government and Newgate Jail wanted to pass on some of the young offenders and you made the point of saying, "Well, we'll accept them, but only if it is within the spirit and the tradition of our organisation". How much are these remarkable results that you have down to the fact that you are picky about the people you take? Are you selective in the number of people you take, please do not be offended by this, because it does seem extraordinary high, the record of achievement that you have?

Ms Moseley: If we have got the contract to deliver, say, bail and remand services, for instance, there is no picking and choosing at all; you take what the court is working with.

Q27 Paul Flynn: Well, why do you make that point? What is so special about the Rainer tradition?

Ms Moseley: If I can finish, what we will be picky about is whether we go for that contract or not and, as I said before, whether we are prepared to work in the way that some contract is set up. I want to add a bit to the previous question about the frustration. I think that the concern I have is that the good ideas that are around at government level, policy level and the difficulty of getting those translated into practice on the ground, that delivery chain is too difficult and there are too many hurdles, and I go back to your example. I know that Victor's organisation and mine together would love to provide criminal justice drug services to a whole community and really work with community groups and so on, and we know that could work and we have got evidence from other parts of the world. We cannot do it because nobody at the commissioning level is thinking in those ways, so there is something about those good ideas being translated into mechanisms to get it to happen which is what I am frustrated by.

Q28 Paul Flynn: You quoted an example, an initiative by the charities which was taken up nationally, and it was needle exchanges. That happened under the Tories, so it was a long time ago. You take a large campaigning role as well, and Turning Point probably does, but are there other issues you would like to see changed?

Ms Moseley: The two things certainly I would quote more recently are bail and remand for young offenders and care-leaving. Rainer, when it was known then as the Royal Philanthropic Society, did start those two services and campaigned to get them to begin statutory responsibilities and those have been very recent changes and we can show the direct relationship between what we innovated and then what became a public service as well as the Probation Service which, people have recorded, we started back in the 1870s. What we would like to see change now, well, certainly if I look at young offenders, I think the 26 % increase in the number of young offenders who have been brought into the criminal justice system in the last few years is an unnecessary waste of public money as well as an ineffective way of dealing with young people who are at the very early stages and is often as a result of unanticipated consequences of other things. If you take the police target to increase their rate of bringing people to justice, you can see a direct relationship with that target and the number of young people being brought into the criminal justice system. Therefore, if I was criticising the Government, which I have, I have been on the Youth Justice Board and been very involved in those deliberations, the increased criminalisation of young people and the increase of custody for those young people just does not work and it is not having an effect on the young people in those communities.

Lord Adebowale: With reference to the issue that you are most interested in, I think, which is the third sector, the one thing that needs to change really is the commissioning.

Ms Moseley: Absolutely.

Lord Adebowale: It needs to change in the following ways: first of all, the Government needs to define clearly what it is, and the one thing I know about large, complex systems is that you need to define what is important; we then need that definition to be applied ruthlessly and the mechanisms of commissioning, in my view, need to be defined; and the commissioners need to be held accountable for commissioning outcomes.

Q29 Paul Flynn: Your memorandum lays stress on the amount of energy, time and research that goes into it, huge amounts of your time spent doing a job you should not be doing, preparing to win contracts. This really is an awful waste of your time.

Lord Adebowale: I think poor commissioning leads to poor procurement and poor procurement leads to poor contracting. A lot of the commissioning or so-called commissioning that both Turning Point and Rainer are subject to is not commissioning, it is purchasing and purchasing based on price, not on value or on any other kind of analysis. I am not blaming because I think many local commissioners are up against it and they feel the need for it to be a price-based purchasing model, but I think governments need to be really clear about the commissioning issue because that is the thing that defines how public money gets spent and what it gets spent on and, until we get to grips with that, I think we will be wasting it across the piece.

Ms Moseley: That sort of commissioning and contracting means you do not get out of us what potentially you can get which is the innovation, the different ways and the transforming of services rather than just transferring out in the same vein because there is no, if you like, 'wriggle room' within a contract for us to try out and experiment, and that is a real loss for everyone and a waste of public money, in my view.

Q30 Paul Flynn: Can I make a final point which does not apply to your organisation, which I think we both regard as being a splendid organisation in every way, but, as a general rule, criticism of the nature of charities is that charities have a vested interest in continuing the problem they are dealing with and expanding their area of work, whereas statutory bodies have a vested interest in diminishing the problem. The example, I will give just a brief one, is homelessness and rough sleepers. We know there has been a reduction in rough sleepers in this city to about a third of what it was and everybody would agree with that, but there has not been a diminution in the activity of the charities looking forward; in fact there has been an expansion and they have been empire-building in those areas. Is this not the nature of the third sector, that they do have that vested interest in expanding, exaggerating and continuing the problem they deal with?

Lord Adebowale: I cannot really speak for, and I think it is important that I do not pretend to speak for, the third sector, but what I can say for my own organisation, sadly, is that I do not believe we will ever be short of work. We have doubled in size and the numbers of people that we see have continued to increase year on year. I think the nature of the challenge changes and, therefore, the nature of the organisations that are dealing with one challenge changes and, in that sense, the organisations in the third sector are no different from organisations in the private sector. If the market shifts and the needs of the market shift, organisations will look at the services they provide and look to change them. Now, I do not see there is anything wrong with that and the example that you have given is something I know something about, having been the Chief Executive of Centrepoint. We campaigned very, very hard to end youth homelessness and to certainly end the sort of homelessness you are referring to on the street. When the Government invested in the targets to reduce street homelessness, we supported that and, alongside a lot of other organisations, put services in place to achieve that target. However, simply because we have taken people off the street does not mean that those people cease to be vulnerable or cease to be in need of support in their own homes, and I am speaking theoretically and I am going beyond, I guess, my brief here, but your question is an interesting one. What it boils down to is that, if an organisation sees that there is a need for end services in a transformed market because things have changed, I personally see no reason why it should not change its service offering to meet that need. I do not think that is the same and I am sure that you would find it appropriate to express alarm at the thought that any organisation in my sector was seeking to generate a social challenge, and I think it is a rather cynical comment and it is not one that applies to organisations in other sectors. My organisation would be more than happy to see the end of substance misuse as a social challenge in this country, but the reality is that it is unlikely and the kind of society in which we live means that there will always be people who have those challenges and require an appropriate level of support, and my organisation is ready to hear from them, as we are from people with mental health problems and learning disabilities, of which there are 1.5 million people in this country.

Ms Moseley: I will perhaps go a bit further than Victor and say that I do have concerns that sometimes there are too many charities and that there is an element of the survival instinct which takes over sometimes. Speaking for Rainer, we have a clear statement of intent by trustees that, if it looks as though it will improve services for young people, we will discuss with any other organisations the idea of mergers and alliances and working together to try and reduce the sorts of things you are talking about. As an instance that I know about, I thought it was sad, but very brave, decision, for instance, of the Family Service Unit, the FSU, to join with the Family Welfare Association and that is painful because of histories and so on, but, having made that decision, what they have created is a very strong organisation for families, so I do not think we have the right just to exist because we exist and I think we should, as trustees of organisations, always be having that as a question in our minds.

Lord Adebowale: I absolutely agree with that and I would give the example of a service that Turning Point used to provide, a significant service actually in London, which was HIV services in the 1980s when there was an increased level of funding and for the statutory sector there was a different type of response. We looked at our core skills and we decided not to continue providing those services and we do not now. Some would argue that that was premature, but that is a decision we took and we will continue to stand by. I agree that no organisation in the public sector, third sector or the private has the right to exist simply because you exist and I think we would all agree with that.

Q31 David Heyes: I want to continue with this core issue, I think, about the problems of poor commissioning and perhaps try and tease out of you some of the ideas you have got and some of the thoughts you have got on how that needs to be addressed, but I will just preface it with a comment from my own experience. The last respectable job I had before I became an MP was as a CAB[4] manager and my recollection of that - I am going back six or seven years ago now - is that maybe more than half of my time as the leader of that organisation went into dealing with issues about bidding for contracts, the monitoring process on contracts and dealing with all those kinds of very complex issues which, in an ideal world, I would have liked to have delegated to somebody within the organisation, a kind of contracts management. Of course the resources were never available for that because you could never get full costs recovery or it was always difficult to get that and it was very difficult, almost impossible, to generate the surplus that would be needed to fund that kind of back-up, so I am very familiar with the kinds of problems you are talking of. I think it would be helpful to the Committee to get some more of your thoughts on the record about the problems first before we maybe turn, as a second question, to the potential solutions.

Ms Moseley: If you take the commissioning process, it is made up of whole different sections; I think that has to be part of the clarity of definition that Victor referred to. I think it has to start, and this, I do believe, is the democratic responsibility of, say, local authorities or the Government to assess the needs of their local area, but that has to be done on what I term 'intelligence-led commissioning'. You need to look at the data, you need to be talking to the people providing services to get ideas, you need to be looking at your resources, et cetera. Those are the people who actually need to know something about, if it is young people in our case, their needs and they need to understand the risks they face, the risk and protective factors around them and so on; they need to be in some ways experts. What happens at the moment is that that process gets, if you like, contracted into a shortened version where procurement professionals, the ones with the legalese, contracting bit, are leading that process rather than being the next stage at the point where those commissioners with knowledge are deciding the sorts of services and the sorts of outcomes they want to achieve. I also think there needs to be the ability to enter into a preferred provider status at some point so that we are experts in providing services and that expertise needs to be listened to and needs to be discussed with commissioners so that there is an agreement reached about the outcomes and how those outcomes are reached. I think when it comes to the contracting, and Victor has already mentioned it, longer-term contracting, contracting which is about outcomes, clear responsibilities around monitoring and what results are required and clear outcomes about shared problem-solving. Often very unforeseen things happen with the sorts of client groups we are talking about and something might happen in that local community, more drug-dealers will come in and change the nature of the offending patterns of young people, for instance, so you need to be able to be fleet of foot and discuss those with your commissioners at a point rather than a rigid approach to the contract you have which allows no room to respond and work flexibly with what is happening.

Q32 Chairman: Is there something about EU procurement rules which makes intelligent commissioning more difficult than it ought to be?

Ms Moseley: No, I think EU procurement rules are often something of a smokescreen.

Lord Adebowale: I have been involved in a number of attempts by the Government to define 'commissioning' in a way that is helpful to both them and us, not just the third sector actually, but I think the private sector, as I have said.

Ms Moseley: The CBI have done quite a good paper on it.

Lord Adebowale: The CBI, yes, so it is not just the third sector, but commissioning, as I understand it, is the means by which you understand and manage the marketplace in the interests of providing a service for individuals and their communities, and it should provide a platform for procurement. It is not the same thing as procurement, and this is the point about the European rules. I could give examples of commissioners who have refused to talk to us because they consider it to be commercially sensitive and you think, "Well, actually we are the very people you should be talking to", commissioners who go fishing for it and put us through a massive process of questions and information and then basically take the information and give the contract to someone that was already providing it, and I am sure you are familiar with that one, commissioners that commission on the basis - and they call it 'commissioning', but it is not commissioning - of a year's contract and you have a chat with the commissioner and you say, "This problem has arisen", and the commissioner personally says, "Well, I don't like that client group. If you work with that client group, we will end the contract", and we say, "Well, there is a need in that particular market and in that particular area of service", and they say, "Well, if you do that, we will end the contract", so we go ahead and do it and the contract is ended. Therefore, commissioning which is not commissioning is expensive because every time you end the contract you have to go through the whole process again and sometimes it happens on an annual basis and it is the money wasted in that process and the bureaucracy of it, so there is a real problem, as you know. As you may be aware, the NCVO[5] tended to focus on the contracting end through the Compact and, I have to say, I do not want to speak for anyone else, but my personal view is that the Compact is still giving birth to the kind of vision the NCVO would like and I have yet to have a manager come to me and say that the Compact has been on the table when there has been discussion with commissioners as commissioners tend to be non-commissioners and tend to be focused on the price. Those are the kinds of problems that we are seeing which, and I am speaking for Turning Point, in virtually every case result in wasted money, wasted public taxpayers' money and possibly poorer services than non-commissioning. Of course, if you repeat that several hundred thousand times, you are looking at a lot of waste and I think that issue does not just apply to the third sector, but I think it applies to the private and public sectors as well, to be honest.

Q33 David Heyes: I think we need to move on to ideas about ways of resolving that. You both kind of make the exhortation that the Government, local authorities should do something about it, yet the context is a great imbalance of power, is it not? I guess, Joyce, as a Director of Social Services, you have hugely more resources. You are sat on top of a much bigger budget than you do as head of one of the largest voluntary organisations, that is true, and any local primary care trust or local authority, any single one of them is going to be massively bigger than the biggest voluntary sector organisation, so there is this huge imbalance of power there and it is not sufficient, therefore, to just exhort them to change their ways. How do you get them to do that?

Lord Adebowale: There are some things that I think we need to do. First of all, as I have already said, the commissioning needs to be defined. I think it is one of the things over the next five to ten years that the Government, no matter who is in power, will need to get a grip on as a key way of doing business as the Government moves much more into the commissioning of services rather than the provision of them. That is not a statement of preference, it is just the way it is. Commissioning is going to become very important, I think, to define it and as the skill of doing it, and that is what needs to be done. I think that the regulation or the regulatory environment needs to hold commissioners accountable for the outcomes of their commissioning practice, so, if you go to an area where a particular community has not got a service, literally has not got a service, and you say to the commissioner, "Why is that?", and they say, "Well, we haven't got enough money", I think the question ought to be asked, "Can you audit-trail your commissioning process? Show me how you arrived at this situation", because sometimes it is not about the money, it is about how the money was spent which starts with commissioning. So there is a question of accountability for commissioning outcomes which I think regulators need to take on board which they are not doing sufficiently, in my view. If they did so, then commissioners would have to engage with the market in a clearer way. On the contracting issue, certainly in social care, and it is something that Turning Point has done a lot of work on, in the building business, if you are going to commit a lot of taxpayers' money to a building, you have to use a JCT[6] contract, a standard form of contract which has clauses in it, which is appropriate to the size of the contract and which is clear as to where the risk is and it is not loaded on one side or another. However, in social care it is still the case in too many instances where contracts, as Joyce has pointed out, are often loaded in such a way that we take all the risk, there is no risk taken by the purchaser of that service or they are not really getting the value out of that contract they should be doing, it is unclear and basically the lawyers might benefit down the road, but certainly the client does not. What I have been arguing for is better standardisation of contracting across the piece which I think we could do with, certainly in social care. Those are some of the things that I think would help in getting to grips with both commissioning and contracting. Procurement has been the detail and I would leave procurement alone. There are files and files on procurement practice, some of it coming from the EU, and I think less is more in that case, but I think that commissioning and contracting need some attention.

Ms Moseley: I would add a couple of things to that. At the moment, the Government is putting some money into training 2,000 commissioners across the country. Now, if those commissioners, say, from local authorities are trained on their own, we will be back to the same thing. We ought to be being trained and discussing what 'commissioning' means across sectors so that actually there is an opportunity to understand each other's drivers. I go back to what I said, that local authorities do not know how to buy and we do not know how to sell. We actually need to understand where each other is coming from so that we can both contribute to a better commissioning process, so I think there is something there about making discussion and training open across the sectors. I think the other key driver we have to change, and it is probably the only driver now, I look back with rose-coloured spectacles to the Community Care Act when I was told, "You have to spend 83 % of your money in the independent sector", and that was a huge watershed and a big change for the voluntary sector and the private sector obviously. That is not going to happen. I am sure no government is going to come in and say where public money has to be spent by whom, at the local level. The only driver there is is through the various inspection regimes on public bodies and at the moment there are no aspects of that which encourage. It is starting to happen, but there is little which is in there which will encourage good, creative commissioning processes and that, I think, will be across the whole lot, whether it is Ofsted, whether it is the joint area reviews, whether it is through supporting people, housing and so on. I think there is something there which could be cross-government so that you have actually got some consistency about what is being looked at; back to Victor's definitions issue.

Lord Adebowale: Mr Heyes, your point about the power thing is very important in relation to what Joyce has just said because in the health sector, for instance, where you are getting an increasing number of foundation trusts, the theory is that they will compete in a mixed economy. However, there is an experience I fear, which has happened in other places, where actually what you get is a kind of false economy, a false market in which the foundation trusts are supposed to be independent but also have a relationship to the commissioners that they have known and have historical relationships with. Basically, they want to keep their market size, their market share, and they are in cahoots, for want of a better term, with commissioners against any other interlopers, as they are seen, into those markets. Therefore, whilst it is not public or it is not known, suddenly you find that these contracts that come up for tender are all being won by former trusts that are now foundation trusts in exactly the same way as they were before because nobody is questioning that and nobody is saying, "What was the commissioning framework? What was the procurement process? How were these contracts designed?" I think that is something that the Government needs to pay attention to because there is no point in having a mixed economy if it is skewed.

Ms Moseley: Or if there is not political leadership at the local level to say that actually it is something they want to see, and I think there is still discussion to be had there.

Q34 David Heyes: Ironically, I found myself in a position locally, as an MP, of being asked by voluntary organisations to intervene as advocate and make the case against the local authority for the unfair pressure and the unreasonable expectations that were being placed on the voluntary sector.

Lord Adebowale: In a sense, if the commissioning is right and the procurement platform is right, then it should be transparent and everybody would see that and there would be no need for a special plea because everybody would know what the score is.

Q35 Chairman: When you talk about more accountability for creative commissioning, do you really mean that that should be done by the regulator, by the inspector? Is that the mechanism?

Ms Moseley: I think they should be regulated and inspected on.

Lord Adebowale: I am with Joyce on that. At the end of the day, given the ecology of regulation that we have, if X amount of money has been spent, the basis of that expenditure surely must be accountable to someone. If there is a section of the community that is getting a poor service or no service, it seems to me that either that section of the community should be able to complain or make a case that says, "Well, how come X amount of money was spent in this way and we're still without a service or with a poor service?" The commissioner should have to account for the process that was gone through in order to provide the procurement platform that procured the services that are now in place, "Can you audit trail? What methodologies did you use?" One of the things our organisation has been pushing through the Connected Care process is the methodologies, the actual techniques that commissioners use to engage with the communities, who often are surprised by the approach which again is odd, in getting them to help design the services that they will use, and it is getting those techniques applied by commissioners consistently and holding them accountable to it which I think will change the commissioning landscape alongside, as Joyce has said, increasing the professionalism of that particular skill and I think, until we do that, it is going to be hit and miss.

Q36 Chairman: Yes, I understand the argument. I just wanted to ask you more precisely, who do you think is probably going to hold commissioners to account?

Lord Adebowale: You have got the Audit Commission. There are a number of bodies and I think each could have a role in the regulatory framework. I am not qualified to go into the detail of their statutes, but it seems to me that it is not unreasonable to be looking to the Audit Commission, the Healthcare Commission and others and to say, "Can you look at the commissioning framework?"

Ms Moseley: I think it is something that certainly the new Chair of the Audit Commission, who I know was personally very involved in the development of commissioning around the Community Care Act, would be interested to see. I think it would also be interesting to look, and my instinct says you will find something, at good services out there as defined by things like Ofsted and joint area reviews, is there a correlation with the extent of working within a social market of those authorities or, the other way round? If you come across authorities where services are defined as poor, can you see that actually they failed to look outside of themselves into a social market to help improve the services for their residents and their communities.

Q37 Kelvin Hopkins: Your strength has been, and your role in the past has been, providing for niche sectors, largely for the excluded minorities, not the included majority - that space between the provision of absolutely vital social services, education, health, police and where there was maybe no provision in the past. So you have not concentrated on universality or equity, but you have just been dealing with problems as you found them and provided for people who, if they were not provided for, society would not really bother about very much. With drug addicts dying, we would still function, but we could not function without education or without a broad health service. Do you think there is a natural boundary between what the third sector should do, your sector, and what should be statutory provision because the reason you are here and the reason why we are doing this inquiry is that the Government is now pressing for your sector to take on a wider role and to take over what in the past would have been regarded as more statutory, general provision? Is there a natural boundary and are you reluctant to move in that direction?

Ms Moseley: If you take universal services, my view is that you cannot see the sorts of services we deliver outside of the concept of the universal services. I think if you take, say, care leavers where there is a responsibility on the State because they have often taken over the parental role, or young offenders may be a better example, if you are not actually putting intensive services in there to change their way of behaving, the whole of that community, the universal, suffers for that, so I do not see a separation out, but it has to be looked at as the whole and we have to strengthen universal services, for instance the education service, when it comes to young offenders much more at that universal level, the school level, in order to continue to offer a service to young offenders because we know that a lack of education is so correlated to offending rates. I would want to see our services to young offenders working absolutely in partnership with the universal education service because that is how you are going to get the best results for the individual young people, but stopping them offending is surely a benefit to us all. When you said that nobody cares about the drug addict dying, they certainly complain about the number of offences and housebreaking because of the way we do not deal with the addiction problems that are there. I do not know whether I have quite answered your question.

Lord Adebowale: Putting it another way, I think it is a very interesting question and it gets to the heart of the issue. It is interesting that nobody really asks the question of the private sector, whether there are any areas in which the private sector should not be providing a service or indeed the public sector. No one has really debated that issue. I know there have been people who think certain things, but it has never really been encapsulated in a debate. I would say two things. We provide a drug service in Central London and I am pretty certain that, if that service were to close today, or I can guarantee actually, you would notice the difference by Monday morning as you walked through the West End. Now, it is funded by the taxpayer through one means or another. Is that a public service? I think the people walking through Soho on Monday morning would probably argue that it was. The fact that it is provided by a third sector organisation, no. We provide the service and I think it is very much a public service as opposed to a luxury which could affordably not to be provided, say, if people did not put their hands in their pockets and fund us. If someone were to have said to me a few years ago, "Should you be providing this service? Should it not be provided by the local authority or the local health authority?", I would have said, "Well, if the local health authority can come up with a value-based proposition that the commissioners, whoever they are, are willing to buy, fair enough". However, if we can come up with a service which keeps those substance mis-users out of nuisance and stops them from dying, because of course people dying on the streets, I agree with you, certainly some men or women on the Clapham omnibus would say, "I don't care", but they would care if they saw the body and they would certainly care when they saw the bill to the NHS, so I think we are providing very much a public service and I do not really have a wall that says, "This far and no further" because I do not think we provide a luxury service to society. I do not think we provide add-ons where it does not matter if it goes bust or goes under because I think it would matter and I think it would matter a lot. We provide the service to one in 400 of the British population and I think that, if those services were to be withdrawn, you would notice the difference.

Q38 Kelvin Hopkins: I am putting my thoughts into a somewhat cynical question. I agree that the work you do is absolutely immensely valuable and I am not in any way decrying it. What I am trying to get at, and you made the point earlier, is that much of what we have now as statutory provision started as voluntary sector organisations - education - churches started to educate people in Scotland and it developed from there. Health was provided by voluntary organisations and it gradually progressed towards being statutory, state provision. Is what the State is now suggesting a move in the other direction, moving what is now statutory into the third sector? Is this the Government's objective, rather than reaching out to people perhaps even now who are not being reached and providing more of the kinds of things that you do and I think would be immensely valuable? Our surgeries are full of people who need services such as this.

Lord Adebowale: I will tell you what I think is unhelpful in this debate; it is talk of takeover. I am not interested in taking over public services in the sense that will not bid. We are very clear about it. I do not want to provide services to people with, say, learning disabilities cheaper than the public sector, but to the same standard as the worst provider in the public sector or the private sector. In other words, if somebody says to me, "Can you replace a public sector service cheaper?", I will say, "Well, I want to provide a better service", let us be clear about that. I am not interested in takeover, I am interested in partnership. I can understand people in the public sector services who are working and have got families and hearing that they are going to be taken over. It sounds like, a loss of jobs, reduced rights, et cetera. I have to say, Turning Point's and indeed, if I may say so, Rainer's terms and conditions for our staff are strong and certainly would compare with any public service and long may it continue because I think our staff deserve it. I want to work alongside public services and I think we do on many occasions and I will also work alongside private sector services in the interests of, as I say, Turning Point's mission and our service expertise. In doing that, I do not see that there are areas of no-go, providing that it is adding value, not just replacing cheap with cheaper. I personally and my organisation just are not interested in doing that and we are not interested in takeover talk either.

Ms Moseley: Whilst we do that sort of work and will be delivering services to the public, that does not stop, and should never stop, the emergence of other organisations or us doing it for a need that becomes apparent. I think what we probably do is innovate in the way services are delivered to a known group, young offenders or whatever. You were talking about the Damilola Taylor Trust or the Suzi Lamplugh Trust, fantastic, they come together around a particular issue, around something and start to highlight things and I do not see why that should ever stop because third sector organisations take on, and start delivering, more of the services to the public.

Q39 Kelvin Hopkins: If I could approach it another way, all of this has been driven by an ideology coming from our political leaders that they want to reduce the role of the State. They want to dismantle it and load its responsibilities on to others with private sector commissioning, the Nicholas Ridley agenda, which was to get rid of local authority provision of direct employment entirely and farm everything out to private contracts. Now, is the third sector being used to an extent as one possible way of unloading what is now statutory, state provision, on to another sector. And is there a danger that organisations like yours could become companies over time and could become more like the private sector, operating on a contract basis but doing essential public services?

Ms Moseley: But there is another way of looking at it which perhaps my over-enthusiastic optimism is responsible for, which is actually that looking at a social market is about improving the quality of services. I think whilst we move into a social market in terms of provision, what I would want to see - this goes back to the discussion on commissioning - is a much strengthened role for those local, democratic, public services which is about being held to account for what they are delivering to their local population and how they are communicating and defining those issues with their local population. Honestly, as a Director of Social Services, I could not understand why we were delivering inhouse all the services we were delivering. They were not done well and others could do them better. However, I maintained or felt I had the absolute responsibility with the local politicians and Members to say, "Let's understand the needs of our community and what it is that we ought to be providing here", and this was in an inner London borough, so we knew we needed particular types of services which an outer London borough would not need, and we were responsible for that. Who provided it was not the issue and that did not diminish, in my view, the responsibility of that local, public service.

Q40 Kelvin Hopkins: Essentially, you are saying what I was saying earlier, that there is a kind of interface at that point. Say, if a child is being abused, you have to have a responsible public authority to deal with such a situation. You cannot have a private company, saying, "That's a bit difficult. We'll not do that one".

Ms Moseley: No, no.

Q41 Kelvin Hopkins: So there is an interface between what has to be provided by direct state provision and what can be done by other organisations.

Ms Moseley: But, as a Director of Social Services, I could easily have said, "We are responsible for ensuring that a child who is abused gets a service and, therefore, I will contract with a private or a voluntary organisation", and of course the NSPCC has the power to do that, "to investigate all child abuse inquiries". If that is what the contract is, it is not about picking and choosing and I would not see it as picking and choosing either.

Lord Adebowale: I think your question is almost a general, political question in that there are two arguments and both arguments equally, if they were to succeed, would, in my view, distort the reality. One argument says, "Let's just have a market. Let's not have a government, in a sense, local or national, to define 'commissioning' and let's just leave it open to the market and every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost". That is one argument, and I am talking extremes here. The other argument, which is equally present sometimes in the room, is that the State should do everything, that the only provision that charities - Turning Point is a social enterprise, a particular type of charity, it is worth emphasising - should be doing should be at the very margins of what the State does, voluntary, two or three people doing what they can.

Ms Moseley: Out of the goodness of their hearts.

Lord Adebowale: That kind of thing. Both of these arguments are extremes. You have suggested that the third sector or certainly my organisation or Joyce's might be used in some way. I think we are savvy enough to be able to argue our case clearly, and I hope we have done, and present our services in sharp contrast to those extremes because I think the balance is, as Joyce has quite rightly pointed out, that people want services that work and that are effective both in terms of cost and value, that is the end of it. I think we have reached an interesting point where the debate is sophisticated enough to allow that to happen. What would worry me is if the debate became pulled in either direction to the point where it was impossible to actually get the kind of flexibility that people demand now, that people demand of their services that meet their needs, not the needs of the politicians or the Government, but their needs, and that is what I am here to do really.

Kelvin Hopkins: I would like to pursue it, but I have had my time.

Q42 Mr Prentice: Kelvin has stolen my script really! We are where we are because the role of the third sector is being massively expanded or massively hyped, and I am still not entirely sure, but the Government tells us that it wants to open up supply and we talked earlier about what the Government is doing to open up supply, the training of commissioners and so on. The Government tells us that it wants to open up direct support, such as training and professional development, but what is actually happening on the ground to take that forward?

Ms Moseley: I think the gap between rhetoric and reality is still there. My communications at central government level, I think, are very genuine discussions about how to open up a social market. I think that what I talked about earlier, the gap then down to the delivery point where most of the commissioning is either at local authority level, LSC[7] funding, there is that gap particularly, I would say, at local government level where I do not think the arguments are as accepted around the notion of social markets as they are at central government level.

Lord Adebowale: I think "hype" might be a good word actually in the sense that I have not noticed any massive shift in the paradigm.

Ms Moseley: Some of it is going the other way actually and getting taken back inhouse.

Lord Adebowale: Absolutely, or local or central government. I will not go into it, but I can think of instances where large contracts, big money, have gone to the private sector and it has never touched the sides and there certainly has not been a debate asking, "Is there is a not-for-profit way in which we could deliver this service?" It just has not happened. There has been an assumption, which, you could argue, is based on hype, that the private sector will do it better, and I would argue that that is an indication that they are better lobbyists than we will ever be. I am kind of bemused by the question in a way because I think the evidence is that on the ground the public and private sector services are not being swept away in favour of the third sector, firstly, and, secondly, as I have said, I personally and my organisation have run alongside a particular set of values and we are not interested in talk of takeover because I do not think it helps the debate. When you talk about growth, the growth in public, government funding over the last year has been, what, 1.5 %; hardly a revolution.

Ms Moseley: For the last few years actually.

Lord Adebowale: It has hardly been a major shift in financing. The PFI, public finance initiative, and the like were designed for the private sector and no such government intellectual rigour has been put into the financing of the third sector.

Q43 Mr Prentice: I was going to come on to ask you about the voluntary finance initiative that you tell us about in your memorandum. Have you spoken to the Treasury about this and what kind of response did you get?

Lord Adebowale: We have put it to our umbrella bodies. What kind of response did I get? Well, from some people short, sharp ----

Ms Moseley: Shocking.

Lord Adebowale: ---- and not repeatable, and from others a considered response. The fact of the matter is that we have not got VFI. We have got futurebuilders which is to be noted as a good thing, but it is by no means anywhere near the financing that the private sector enjoys.

Q44 Mr Prentice: Forgive me, but the futurebuilders fund, what exactly is that?

Lord Adebowale: It is, in short, a venture capital fund, I guess, set up by the Government and I think it was £125 million that the Chancellor set aside to create a step change in the ability of third sector organisations to compete in delivering public services and it was designed to do two things. One is to give grants, which it does not give lots of because I was involved in the design of it, but largely it is really about investing, so my organisation has received recently, after a long and very detailed application process which certainly would be on a par with any private sector investment approach, £10 million which we will be investing in services which will, we and futurebuilders believe, increase the effectiveness of the public sector spend in a particular area, so it is venture capital, but it is dwarfed by several orders when it comes to the VFI and PFI; there just is not a comparison.

Q45 Mr Prentice: That is interesting. Back on this hype and spin, the Government tells us that a large number of local government services are still largely provided inhouse and there is the suggestion that perhaps they could be floated off to the third sector, foster care and adoption and so on. I know you do not want to give us lists and I know you are not interested in poaching, but are there services currently provided by the State which would be seen as mainstream services that you think could be better delivered by the third sector over and above those which you have mentioned already this morning?

Ms Moseley: I would say there are mainstream services that I think and know Rainer could deliver better than they are being. It goes back to our very early discussions, I think you can talk about, "The third sector automatically delivers things better", but I think it is a particular organisation. I think there are some services, because of the nature of the people they are dealing with, where the third sector has the edge by being the third sector because of the feelings people have towards the statutory sector.

Q46 Mr Prentice: So I am not going to get a list for the reasons that you have just explained?

Ms Moseley: Well, I could certainly give them. There are the care leaving services we run where I think the young people, by their nature, as older adolescents are starting to fight against authority anyway and the authority in their lives is the local authority because they are their parents, so actually us delivering services often can deal with some of that in a better way.

Lord Adebowale: As long as what I am about to say is taken in the context of what I said earlier which is not about takeover, it is about partnership, I think there are substance misuse services, some aspects of mental health services, and it depends again because mental health is a big service and it can be sub-divided into several different areas, certain learning disability services, offender management and employment services, all of which and aspects of which would benefit, I think, from review and better commissioning. Whether the results of that commissioning would be that the third sector plays a better role depends on how good we are at engaging with commissioners and putting in strong ideas.

Q47 Mr Prentice: I wanted to go on to this business about how good you are because one of the criticisms is that in the third sector there are not necessarily complaints procedures in place, and you talked earlier about all the regulators that are looking over your shoulder. Do we need an ombudsman, a kind of third sector ombudsman, a charities ombudsman, to make sure you do what you are supposed to do?

Lord Adebowale: Well, what can I say. We are regulated to within an inch of our lives clearly.

Q48 Mr Prentice: You said that earlier in fact.

Lord Adebowale: Certainly speaking of Turning Point, I have a whistle-blowing policy which is, I think, better than any you would find in the statutory sector, we have internal policies which are transparent and which are available for people to see and the Charity Commission are very clear about their role. I am unconvinced basically of the need for an ombudsman to do what you have suggested any more than I would have an ombudsman for the private sector in that regard. We like to think we do what we say on the tin and, if we do not, then there are many mechanisms by which we can be held to account.

Ms Moseley: If any commissioner worth their salt was going to put a service which was about young people, young offenders, employment, with organisations that did not have those basics around complaints and so on, they should not be doing it.

Q49 Mr Prentice: One final question is about the nature of the people that you employ and who are employed in your organisations. You told us that you have got the same terms and conditions, or in Turning Point the same terms and conditions. That is not true across the sector, is it?

Ms Moseley: Probably not.

Q50 Mr Prentice: People are doing the job on the cheap, volunteers coming in. That is not the case?

Ms Moseley: I can only talk for Rainer here.

Q51 Mr Prentice: No, I am not talking about your two organisations, I am talking about the sector more generally, that volunteers get involved because they like the idea of working for a particular organisation and they may take less than the market rate because they want to be associated with that organisation.

Lord Adebowale: What can I say. Again it is one of those questions. I think if you were to compare the third sector with the private sector, you would find the private sector more than ready to employ cheap labour under appalling conditions. Speaking for my own organisation, we do not. My staff and I have got to look at ourselves in the mirror and we pride ourselves on good terms and conditions for the work that is done and I baulk at the critique that the third sector is cheap labour. Having said that, we have said, I think both of us, that there are some practices in the statutory sector that expect us to do that and in fact would want to take advantage of that.

Q52 Mr Prentice: Well, that is an important point that you have just made, is it not?

Lord Adebowale: Yes, and it is unacceptable. We ask for full costs recovery not because I want to drive a Rolls-Royce and buy a private island, but we ask for it because that is what it costs to provide the service which includes paying decent salaries and ensuring that the conditions under which our staff work are good.

Q53 Mr Prentice: I am right in thinking that the staff in both organisations are unionised and you encourage people to join the unions?

Lord Adebowale: Yes.

Ms Moseley: Yes, the union is there at every induction meeting we have, recruiting if they wish. I just wanted to say that I worry about bringing together, that volunteers are doing that work and certainly I think in any organisation which is using volunteers appropriately, then they are very distinct from staff and are actually adding real and different value and it is not about doing a job at a cheaper rate.

Q54 Mr Prentice: But volunteers very often become staff.

Ms Moseley: We have a very clear process where, if we have a volunteer who has been working with us and they are trained and they are supported, and we have excellent training programmes for our volunteers, if they wish then to become staff, they have to go through the same recruitment process as anyone else.

Lord Adebowale: We have just under 2,000, I think, 1,800 full-time equivalents, but we employ volunteers and I use the word "employ" because we expect them to be police checked, we expect them to be trained, we expect them to be supervised and we do not play around with the term. I think most organisations that use volunteers that I am aware of operate the same methods, but I cannot speak for the whole sector any more than I could speak for the whole private sector.

Q55 Chairman: We shall have to end. We have had a really solidly interesting session for which we are very grateful. I hope you feel that we have covered the essential territory. I think that what you were saying about commissioning is what you particularly wanted to leave with us in terms of what we might say, so I hope you feel that we have gone where we should have.

Lord Adebowale: Thank you for the opportunity.

Ms Moseley: Thank you and, if there is anything, and I am sure I probably speak for Victor here, our organisations can do in terms of you coming and seeing and looking and talking to staff on the ground, you are very welcome.

Lord Adebowale: I am more than happy to second that.

Chairman: We may well do that, so thank you for that as well. The only alarming thing was when Victor said that his organisation only criticised when it had a solution. Now, you realise that would stop politicians in their tracks and we may have to delete that from the record! Thank you very much indeed.

 

---

[1] Ev 15, 26

[2] Turning Point, At the Sharp End, 2007

[3] Turning Point, The Crack Report, July 2005

[4] Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB).

[5] National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO).

[6] Joint Contracts Tribunal (JCT).

[7] Learning and Skills Council (LSC).