Examination of witnesses
Councillor Anne Brown and Councillor Stephen Powers.
Q150 The Chairman: Councillor Brown and Councillor Powers, thank you very much for coming to see us. We are most grateful for your time. I am just going to put on record something that needs to be said at the beginning of each session. The session is open to the public and is being broadcast on the parliamentary website. A transcript will be taken of your evidence. You will be sent a copy of the transcript to check it for accuracy and to advise us of any corrections. If, after this session, you wish to clarify or amplify any points made during your evidence, or if you have any additional points that you want to make, you are welcome to submit supplementary written evidence to us. Both of you do not necessarily have to answer the questions that my colleagues are going to put to you. Please do so if you wish, but if you feel that your colleague has said it all, there is no need for you to repeat it. Perhaps you would like to introduce yourselves for the record, and then we will begin with our questions.
Councillor Anne Brown: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am County Councillor Anne Brown. I am the portfolio holder for communities at Essex County Council. I have held this post for 18 months. This was a portfolio that we thought we needed because we have over 10,000 voluntary groups across Essex and they certainly needed a voice.
Councillor Stephen Powers: I am Councillor Stephen Powers. I am a cabinet member at Newcastle City Council. My portfolio area is policy and communications, which is a relatively new post. It has existed for around two years in Newcastle. The particular focus is on changing the cultural nature of the city council and how we interact with our partners; and, particularly with reference to today’s session, it is around the relationship with the local authority and the CVS.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. I will start with a general question. What is the role of charities in local communities and how does this relate to the role of local government?
Councillor Anne Brown: Local charities can provide support and deliver programmes and services to their local communities and the wider public. They can be much closer to residents than county councils. Local charities can often respond quicker to the local needs than the public sector. Local charities have direct access to volunteers and can provide support with empathy and experience, and enable their service users to improve their lives. We really value this in Essex. We treat our charities as our partners. Local charities are vital to both complement and deliver the provision of services, either in partnership with local government or directly. Now, in Essex, we are finding that our CCGs are coming around, are joining us and are using the volunteers who are available across Essex.
Councillor Stephen Powers: I concur with much of that, and I will not repeat it. Let me add one extra thing. In Newcastle, the charitable sector does not see itself as being a replacement for well-funded public services but certainly a complementary offer to what we were able to provide. Charities are very much at the heart of our culture and identity as a city and within the region as well, around compassion and working collectively together. It is a really important relationship that local authorities have with charities and the link that charities offer us, particularly with communities.
Q151 Lord Rooker: Good afternoon. I basically want to explore with you the change in recent years of the move from grants to contracts. Would you talk to us about the implications it has had for the relationship between the charities and local government? I have to say that I do not know Essex well, but I have always thought of Essex as a region on its own. I can well understand that with 10,000 voluntary groups—that is not an attack on Newcastle, by the way—the sector is massive. Should they be replacing statutory provision or can they provide it better in terms of working with partnerships?
I have not come with supplementaries, but there are a couple of things I would like you to deal with. Could you do contracts for more than a year, because we have had a lot of complaints from charities about the difficulty with that, and what about a longer transition period when they take over a service delivery, because that is also a period of change for them?
Councillor Anne Brown: Yes, you are absolutely right. We have found that very issue. Our most recent contract is for our 0 to 19 children’s service, which has been won recently by Virgin and Barnardo’s. In this contract, we are using a lot of our voluntary sector. This contract is going on for seven years. We will tie in our voluntary sector not just for one or two years. We have a carers’ partnership that we have just gone into with six of our voluntary sector partners across Essex, giving us a network for carers. We are into that for three years. There are these contracts and they are getting longer as we get more confident in each other. The voluntary sector is something that is growing. We need to have confidence and we need to be partners. As I see it, the duration of contracts will get longer and they will improve.
Councillor Stephen Powers: It is too simplistic to say that there is a big shift between grant giving and procuring contracts with the third sector in Newcastle. We have quite a large and substantial grant mechanism with the Newcastle fund—yesterday it was agreed in cabinet—which gives a £700,000 grant programme that went to 28 different organisations. We have a cultural programme as well that supplies money to organisations of £600,000 a year. We still operate a very large grant-giving programme.
Within Newcastle, organisations in which charities figure are strategically important within the marketplace and extending provision in Newcastle. For us, as local authorities, giving data that they are carrying out tasks on behalf of the contract, it is still very important that we are able to hold them to account, as we would for any private sector organisation. For us, going hand-in-hand with great expectations on contractors comes expectations that commissioners were getting full cost recovery out of those contracts. That can be a bit of an issue, and it is a new burden on charities that are used to receiving grants from councils that do not have those levels of expectations on them in ensuring that they are able to demonstrate properly best value for money. That is a bit of a learning curve for charities that are now being commissioned for contracts to take on board.
The Chairman: Is there anything else you wanted to add? If not, we will go to Baroness Stedman-Scott’s question.
Q152 Baroness Stedman-Scott: When the Social Value Act went through both Houses, there were great hopes for the impact it would have for communities and organisations involved in delivering services. The evidence that we have heard here is that about 33% of voluntary organisations are saying that they have been asked to demonstrate social values. By default, the other 67% have not. I would be interested to know if it has changed the commissioning approach of local authorities to contracting these services.
Councillor Stephen Powers: In terms of the Social Value Act, which asked local authorities to approach commissioning from the outset with social values in mind, we have absolutely built social value into our whole design process when it comes to commissioning services and procuring services. We have done that right from the start rather than it being an afterthought at the end. That is probably happening in other places. There are examples of where it has not really worked if you do not take it through right from the start. When you ask about the social value elements, such as the number of training placements and whether it creates value, the benefits were that larger bidding organisations were able to accommodate the costs additionally to secure contracts. But in Newcastle we have designed the social value commissioning framework, which is based on our local social value commitment, which examines opportunities for social value as part of the initial definition within the commissioning process. We believe that our framework represents the embedding of the core objective of the Act, but it changes the focus of our commission activity while not necessarily undermining the ability of small organisations to come forward.
I offer a quick example, if I may. We tested out our framework using stakeholder events at the commissioning stage for two very different service organisations, which were our family support services and our winter maintenance. The framework brought some clear social value perspectives in terms of service design and contract structure, which were then fed through our procurement process. For example, the stakeholder discussions influenced the geographical locations of family hubs within our family support services contract. We were able to demonstrate being able to embed within our communities and being able to have a close link with our communities. The structure of our family support services contract enabled smaller and local organisations to bid for different lots of the contract, rather than setting out a bid for the entire contract, as a large organisation would be looking to do.
As to the future environmental impact of our winter maintenance service, by proposing a new vehicle—a leasing and purchase structure—we were able to specify a move to more environmentally friendly vehicles while offering short-term use of council vehicles to remove a barrier for entry of small organisations. We have four findings about that, which I will be happy to pass on to the Committee, if that would be useful.
Councillor Anne Brown: I agree with a lot of what Councillor Powers has said. In Essex, we have gone a step further. We think that social value needs to be addressed more strategically and in a more joined-up way. It does not feel as though it is joined up. We, as a local authority, need to adopt a social value strategy—we think this would help us—and it is something we are looking at at the moment.
Q153 Lord Bichard: Traditionally, the voluntary sector has been a source of great innovation. I speak as someone who used to work in local government, but a lot of the innovation has come from the voluntary sector—the charitable sector. Given the financial pressures that exist at the moment, given the way in which grants have reduced and commissioning and contracting have increased, which is a way of prescribing what the charity sector does, do we have a crisis in the sense of innovation now being constrained, and, if we do, what are you doing to confront it and to help the voluntary sector to continue to provide these great new ideas?
Councillor Stephen Powers: For us, undoubtedly, charities are finding it more difficult to access funding both from local government and other sources. That is hampering their attempts for innovation. However, we do have a lot of innovative charities operating within many parts of our local marketplace, across the region and nationally as well. The council’s focus has been on identifying innovations that generate both community benefit and cash-flow efficiency. We are trying to support the sector to look in more detail at the financial business case for preventive interventions. However, there is not an abundance of individuals with the necessary skill set within these organisations, so upskilling the sector, particularly in data analysis, evaluation and impact assessment has been key for us to be able to support innovation within the sector.
Lord Bichard: When you spoke earlier you used the term “holding to account”. That is another way, is it not, which some people would argue is causing charities to be much more risk averse because they are concerned that they are being held to account and will be found failing if they do not do what the local authority prescribes?
Councillor Stephen Powers: We might pick up on this later in terms of compacts. Certainly, it is a benefit to have a good solid relationship, where charitable sectors see the local authority as having a supporting role rather than somebody they have to worry about, who is going to come through the door one day and tell them everything they are doing wrong. While it is necessary for local authorities to hold to account those who are commissioning services and providing services to make sure we get the full-cost recovery and best value for money, in terms of the structures and the survival of the sector, certainly within my local authority, it is about building a competent relationship with each other that is there to support each other, to look at innovation, to share best practice, to offer the skill sets and the expertise that we may have in-house to support them.
Lord Bichard: But if we go to Newcastle and we speak to the voluntary sector, the charitable sector, there, that is exactly what they will say, is it?
Councillor Stephen Powers: I would hope so; yes. Certainly that is what they feed back to us. They welcome the council’s work and the relationship that we have.
Councillor Anne Brown: One thing we have to be very careful of is setting one charity against another. This is about contracts going out to the voluntary sector. We need to keep them together. We need to encourage them to work together. We have done a lot of work. We have had conferences and workshops, trying to get them to think differently—innovation. How do we get them to be our partners? This has really worked in Essex.
We have just been able to set up a network of carer services right across the county. It came from the voluntary sector itself. They came forward to us. This is working extremely well. We are very proud that we have come from a very poor position nationally for carer support. We were in the bottom quartile. With the help of our voluntary sector, we are giving people in Essex a much better service. We have a happy voluntary sector and they are coming up with some real innovative ideas. That is six charities that have come together. I am really pleased that this is the way we are going and that we are looking at it in our befriending service. We are looking at it in as many places around the services as we can. We are looking at it with our meals-on-wheels service. How many groups can we get together to provide a good service? They will relieve social care in lots of ways. This is one of the ways where we can find some extra funding at the moment. We are very grateful that our voluntary sector is helping us as it does.
Outcomes are the way we are looking when we go out for all services. We are not so interested in what is happening on the way through. We are looking to say to the charities, “What are the outcomes? What can you provide for us?”, and we are even saying sometimes, “This is the amount of money we have. What can you do with it?”.
The Chairman: You said that in one case—in the carers’ case—the charities came to you. Is that right? It was their initiative.
Councillor Anne Brown: Yes.
The Chairman: But you are also trying to encourage others to take the same kind of role of getting together. How do you encourage them to get together? Do you make suggestions? Do you offer them monetary temptation if they were to make a bid together? How does that work?
Councillor Anne Brown: We have had conferences and workshops; so the different charities come together. They form friendships and liaisons in different areas. Across Essex, we sometimes have black patches where there are no services. So the voluntary sector has naturally been able to come together and close some of these gaps for us. When we are thinking about a new service we go out, we look at the charities we have in the area, and ask them for their ideas. We try to build it from the bottom upwards.
Lord Bichard: But, at the end of the day, you are still asking them to compete against each other, are you not? You said you were not doing that, but you are.
Councillor Anne Brown: No, we are not. We say to them, “If you wish to become a network, here is the money between you that you can spread out across the county and provide us with a service, and we will look at the outcomes”.
The Chairman: You mentioned Virgin and Barnardo’s.
Councillor Anne Brown: That was our 0 to 19 children’s service.
The Chairman: Who is the lead partner there?
Councillor Anne Brown: That will be Virgin and Barnardo’s, but they will be using a lot of our voluntary groups. This is a completely new service, so it goes from pre-birth right up to 19.
Lord Bichard: They will be contracting with a wide range of small charities across Essex.
Councillor Anne Brown: Yes.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. Lord Rooker has another question.
Q154 Lord Rooker: In some ways, Councillor Brown has answered some of my question, but I will put it on the record because it is part of the questions that we wanted to ask. This is about how charities can help local authorities redesign their services to meet the current situation of increased needs and limited finance. I am going to ask about specific services. You have given us some examples with your other question. I understand that in Essex you have this “whole place” community budget. What sort of role are the charities playing in that? Does this limit them in the way you have got them in? If I remember rightly, Essex has a very large population, of 5 million.
Councillor Anne Brown: No. It is 1.6 million.
Lord Rooker: I got that wrong, but is still big. If they are so involved, are they inhibited in their other role of sometimes pushing you and saying that things are not working well enough? Have you come across that as a consequence of them being involved in contracts and delivering services? You were in the room when I asked Councillor Light about the issue of health—he raised the health service himself—and the relationship in delivering a health service in a way that local government has not been involved in for many years. Is that an area where Essex has examples as well?
Councillor Anne Brown: We use our health and well-being board to bring our CCGs in. I can go to the health and well-being board and put the points from our voluntary sector there. Our voluntary sector works directly with CCGs now and we are encouraging this. We have boards for the different services, such as the carers’ services. We have a board and all the CCGs sit on these boards. We are now pulling the health service into working with the voluntary sector as well. The health service is beginning to understand what the voluntary sector is capable of helping them with.
Lord Bichard: Does that mean that the voluntary sector has played a leading part in the production of the sustainability and transformation plan in Essex?
Councillor Anne Brown: I would not say a leading part, but it has been part of it.
Lord Bichard: Would you like to give me a feel for how involved they have been, because they generally have not across the country?
Councillor Anne Brown: This has not been in place for years and years. This is something that has come from our public health team. I have the communities portfolio, which is a new portfolio, but growing. We are only 18 months into this, so you cannot look backwards and see what the voluntary sector was doing two years ago. We are certainly using its evidence and expertise far more than we ever have before. That is as far as I can go.
Councillor Stephen Powers: There is an important role for the charitable and voluntary sector to play in the transformation of local government. The challenge in local government is huge, as I am sure you have heard on many other occasions before. In Newcastle, we have had £121 million cut from our budget so far, with another £40 million to come during the next two years, which is about a 50% reduction in our revenue spending on what we are able to provide in services through either cuts or increased cost pressures. The challenge is huge. If we are being realistic, we would never be able to meet those challenges without transformational approaches.
In Newcastle, the CVS, as well as service users, has been at the heart of when we have looked to recommission services and procure them for the transformation of what we are doing. For us, it needs to go beyond just a conversation with those who have been providing those services to include those who use those services particularly. You are right: there is a degree of competition with organisations to deliver services. If we just spoke to the person who is already delivering the service, they would tell us how great that service was and defend their service. But if we speak to the service users and other organisations, they can have a friendly look at the service that we are providing and tell us how we could improve that service and deliver a better offer. The end product is a more cost-effective service but also a service that delivers better outcomes for other service users, which is fundamentally the most important thing for us.
In Newcastle, the example that I would draw on is the recommissioning of our domestic violence and sexual violence services. We went from what is best described as a scattergun approach of lots of different service providers across the city providing different pieces of services in an unco-ordinated and un-joined-up approach. If you had somebody who had suffered domestic violence and fled the relationship, they would go to one service to get one form of help, then go to another for another bit of help and then to another service. By that point, they may have spoken to half a dozen services and gone through the dramatic process of explaining everything they had experienced.
By working in partnership with service providers, we recommissioned that service from scratch, from the ground upwards, and we have built a new state-of-the-art facility with an integrated service that is based in the refuge that has been built. If you were going to go somewhere to see something, I would definitely recommend you come to Newcastle to see that. Because we had worked in partnership, different contractors came forward, in some cases, but the contractors are based collectively together in this hub model to be able to provide that holistic service approach. Things like that are real examples of how you can improve services by collectively working together.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for those examples.
Q155 Baroness Gale: How might regional devolution change the relationship between local government and the voluntary sector, if at all? What opportunities do you think it might present for more effective working?
Councillor Stephen Powers: If I am being honest, I am not quite sure that it would fundamentally change the relationship. For us, the sector is very different in different localities. It does not necessarily lend itself to co-ordination across a much larger footprint. In fact, in Newcastle we would probably argue that we would consider the benefits of greater localisation rather than trying to expand offers to provide a geographical coverage. None the less, there are opportunities for more powers and more resources being devolved to a regional level, which should improve opportunities for councils to move ahead with charities on key issues. The one that we are particularly interested in is skills and employability rather than waiting for government to release a national programme. It is better to work with our partners to deliver something. Devolution should build on the strengths of the community and voluntary sector organisations to respond to local circumstances and move away from a one-size-fits-all approach that you may get if national government launches something as opposed to devolving those powers to a regional level.
The one current weakness of the devolution model that has been pursued in England is the prescriptive way in which the consultation and the arrangements of what is in that offer have been brought together. At the moment, it is very difficult, from Newcastle’s experience, to engage outside the political spectrum with organisations about what should be in the devolution deal and what would be the best offer for them. It would be a much better offer within devolution for us to more meaningfully engage our partners from the ground up to build up our devolution bequest, rather than having a top-down approach about what conversation we can have with government.
Baroness Gale: Have you started doing that?
Councillor Stephen Powers: We have not. We are still being quite prescriptive. We had a devolution deal that was in the process in what was called the NE7, which involved seven local authorities working together. That collapsed at the 11th hour, but we have restarted the programme with three authorities—Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland—to try to move ahead with our own devolution deal, but it is still very much a conversation between local authorities and government, rather than being able to have meaningful communications with our wider city partners. We know what we want as a local authority but we do not know the answers for everything, so we need to better understand what other people want. The Government’s process for devolution at the moment does not quite allow for that to happen, so it could be improved.
Councillor Anne Brown: I want to give you a different perspective. Newcastle is a unitary authority but Essex is a county authority. If you think about devolution, the charities would be able to get funding from two different levels. They would be able to come to the county for extra funding or they would be able to go to their district council or their borough council. I think that the voluntary sector would do quite well out of devolution.
In addition, regional devolution would require local councils to work more closely together, which would benefit the voluntary sector. So devolution has a lot of good things in it for the voluntary sector.
Q156 Lord Harries of Pentregarth: This is a question for both of you. How do schemes such as the Newcastle fund and the Essex community initiatives fund support charities in delivering positive outcomes for local communities? How do they ensure that they target resources effectively?
Councillor Stephen Powers: In Newcastle, the Newcastle fund is the city council’s primary grant programme for the local voluntary sector. The current criteria are focused on building individual and community resilience, linked to the council’s overarching priorities around tackling inequalities, decent neighbourhoods, a working city and a fit-for-purpose council. Beyond those parameters, the fund is sector led, receiving and funding a wide variety of activities across the city. We are currently conducting a review to determine the future focus of the fund, taking account of the financial pressures that I alluded to. In the latest round, over £2 million-worth of bids were received for a fund that is only providing £750,000. So about a third of those who applied to the fund were successful. That was based on their ability to deliver against those local priorities and needs that we had set out.
As part of the Newcastle fund review, we launched a call for evidence back in September, and we are currently working through in response to that, to see if we are matching the best outcomes that we can get from it. Again, I would be happy to provide the evidence to the Committee once that is published.
Councillor Anne Brown: In Essex, our CIF fund, along with other grant programmes that Essex provides, including the independence, choice and control fund, which is jointly funded with two CCGs, provides important ways to enable local charities to build capacity, to start up new initiatives and to create innovative programmes. We also have four different funds that are held by the Essex Community Foundation. The interest from the capital is given out in grants every year. We have several places that local voluntary groups can go to for funding.
The CIF fund has six-monthly evaluation reports, because we want to know the outcomes and we want to keep an eye on this money. In addition, the independence, choice and control fund is a three-year grant that reduces each year—100% of the grant in year one, 90% of the grant in year two and 50% in year three—thereby enabling local charities to receive the grant and to plan for additional funding from other sources to provide greater sustainability of the service.
Q157 Lord Lupton: This question is for you, Councillor Powers. The Newcastle City Council has set out an objective to become a co-operative council. How does your council seek to embed co-operative principles in its way of working and, in particular, how does it seek to involve charities in that approach?
Councillor Stephen Powers: Back in 2012, we committed the council to becoming a co-operative council. Part of that is about establishing the political leadership to drive forward that work across the organisation. My cabinet post was partly created to achieve that. Since we have become a co-operative council, there have been many examples of initiatives and new ways of delivering services rooted in those co-operative values and principles. They vary in scale from small partnership build, such as self-funding library services, to large leisure facilities and to new ways of working with the voluntary sector organisations and other partners, even in the private sector.
The first part of that was delivering a cultural change within our organisation, getting officers to think of new and innovative ways to deliver services. One of the most fundamental parts was getting the council to realise that it does not have to deliver everything itself or does not have to lead the delivery itself, often being brave enough to allow the responsibility for service delivery to rest in the hands of other organisations, particularly within the community and voluntary sector, and for the council to be an active partner in that rather than the leader. That sounds almost common sense, but getting council officers to change that view is incredibly hard.
As to some examples that I want to draw out in terms of the community and voluntary sector, we have already given examples of how, through the Newcastle fund, we support them. We have also looked at partnership building with Newcastle Futures and at how we develop skills and opportunities for young people and old people who are out of work. That has been driven by looking at a co-operative approach that involves, beyond just the council commissioner service, working collaboratively with education providers, with the voluntary and community sector and with business leaders, to make sure that we are making a holistic offer to people. Also, fundamentally, coming back to my earlier point, it is about finding out what service users need, what skill sets they are missing, how they want to engage the services and how they want the services to be improved.
Reflecting on the important roles that smaller, voluntary and community organisations play in reducing inequalities, we have mentioned the Newcastle fund, and I wanted to pick out how much we have spent on it. In November 2014, the number of two-year awards we agreed amounted to just over £500,000. From April 2016, for an allocation of three years, grants to a total of £779,000 have been awarded to 28 organisations. So, over a three-year period, we have allocated over a million pounds-worth of funding to those organisations. This increases activities, building capacity within communities and helping people to help themselves, which is fundamental to what co-operativism is about. It is about empowering communities and individuals. Co-operativism is not just co-operativism within a local authority or even within a region.
I am part of the Co-operative Councils Innovation Network, which is a network of other councils that are or have ambitions to be co-operative councils across the country. Building on that partnership work of sharing best practice in supporting each other in offering peer challenges and learning exercises, going into councils to offer an external view of how to be more co-operative, is important, as is helping drive that activity out into the communities and out into the voluntary sector rather than keep them in-house.
Lord Lupton: Looking at it from the other end of the telescope, are the charities in the area embracing this or are they resistant to it?
Councillor Stephen Powers: They are absolutely embracing it. The idea that they see themselves as equal partners in service delivery is incredibly important. They do not want to be treated as purely bidders to commission services. They want to be treated as equal partners, improving the outcomes of the individuals whom they care so passionately about. Being able to collectively embrace that has been really important.
In terms of the leadership role that different organisations can have, they want the opportunities to be able to say, “We think we can offer the leadership on this. We want collective working from the council, but we do not necessarily want the council to come and lead it for us”. So they are embracing it.
Lord Rooker: This is a follow-up. This is not meant as a negative question, by the way, but I am deliberately following up what you have just said. Before you came here today, did you discuss what you were going to say here today with the voluntary sector—these partners of yours?
Councillor Stephen Powers: With some of them. It is quite a large network to speak to everyone. I spoke to a couple of individuals, partly because I wanted to say that I was coming here, and it is a great thing to come here, but also to ask their views on whether they felt the relationship was working out. I spoke to Sally Young, who is the chief executive of the Newcastle Council for Voluntary Service, which is an umbrella organisation tying all of these together, to test her out in terms of—
Lord Rooker: You have answered my question: 10 out of 10.
Q158 The Chairman: Both of you have had considerable experience of compacts in the voluntary sector over quite a considerable period. Can you tell us a bit about how well you think they operate and how they could be made more effective?
Councillor Anne Brown: We are currently reviewing the role and function of our compact. It is the intention to enable the compact to become a set of practical guides of best practice for both sectors to work with. That is the local authority and the CCGs, but it is also the voluntary sector. We have recently jointly agreed a commissioning checklist for both sectors to follow. If you ask me in six months’ time, I will have a better answer for you.
Councillor Stephen Powers: In 2014, the Newcastle Voluntary Sector Liaison Group was recognised for its innovation partnership working to improve the quality of life for Newcastle residents, and it won the Local Compact Partnership Award for that year. In Newcastle, we continue to work hard to harness that relationship, and the Liaison Group and the Wellbeing for Life Board have recently endorsed Newcastle’s compact refresh, which we have just been through. We are happy to share the outcome of that. For me, the compact represents a valuable statement of principles and sets the tone for how we work together, which is something that is very much valued by the council and by the community sector. However, for me it is not the bit of paper that defines the relationship. It is the people working together to make good on the commitment to that compact, and working relationships are most important rather than what is in its detail. For me, the compact is, above all, a commitment to dialogue, to fairness and to respect between our different organisations.
As to what could be better, I am not quite sure where that might go because, from my perspective, the whole point of the compact is about supporting a relationship. If there were other issues, there is a whole host of legally enforceable remedies to look at—contractual remedies and things like that—and trying to strengthen the compact would not really add to these, but it is important that the compact sets out what it is and what the expectations are of that in terms of the relationship.
The Chairman: Although you would not necessarily say that it is the essence of the relationship, I assume that you do not think it hinders the relationship.
Councillor Stephen Powers: Not in our experience in Newcastle. It is about the relationship that we have in terms of our commitments to each other rather than any enforceable obligations that you would impose on someone.
Q159 Baroness Stedman-Scott: This is our final question and one where you can make a recommendation to us. What one recommendation should the Committee make regarding the charity sector and its relationship with local government?
Councillor Anne Brown: I have not spoken too much about our CVSs this afternoon. We have 12 CVSs across Essex. They do a fantastic job in supporting and guiding our voluntary sector. I would like some clear specifications for outcome and the key performance indicators for funding CVSs. That is where I would like some help. To provide the right support, representation and capacity to their local areas is something that we value, but we could do with some steer on how we should be doing it and how much it should be, bearing in mind that the other councils—if you are a county, the district councils and the boroughs—also fund the CVSs.
Councillor Stephen Powers: Mine is, thankfully, different. It is good that we are not saying the same thing. There are lots of examples, but in trying to narrow it down to one, for me it is for charities to engage in a strategic role with the councils, particularly in the transformation and service reform, with the one proviso that it is a recognition that would require some capacity building within that sector.
The Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed for those ideas. We cannot promise that they will feature in our recommendations but we are very grateful to have them. Thank you very much for coming to see us this afternoon and for the examples which you have given us, which have been particularly valuable to my Committee. Thank you very much indeed.
