Acevo welcomes the Government's continued interest in working with the Voluntary Sector to help deliver better and more personalised services to citizens. Ralph Mitchell, however, argues more needs to be done by the VCS and Government to ensure results.
Acevo (the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations) welcomes the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review and its commitment to increasing the overall spending for the Office of the Third Sector to £150million over the forthcoming CSR period. It is good too to see how the third sector is now acknowledged in the strategies of most government departments, from ‘building strong communities’ to ‘care for older people’ and from ‘access to employment’ to ‘community transport’.
Taken together with the recent policy statements, particularly in the Office of the Third Sector’s Action Plan and the 2007 Third Sector Review, both of which committed the Government to ensuring a greater role for the third sector in the delivery of public services, this increased spending and planning with the third sector in mind represents a welcome step in the right direction.
‘The right direction’ because the third sector has a proven track record, with independent research and government opinion increasingly agreeing on the added value that the sector can bring to public services.
‘A step’ because policy objectives and spending commitments will not allow the third sector to make the real difference it can if they are not backed up by further action.
As acevo have long emphasised, fundamental changes are required from both the third sector and government. Third Sector leaders need to be able to take risks and to maintain a position of interdependence with funders, as well as ensuring strong governance and accountability. They need to be better able to manage organisational development, monitor and record their track record with a solid evidence base, and better able to write bids, market themselves to and negotiate with commissioners.
But the Government’s commitment to the third sector’s role in public service delivery must equally be accompanied by significantly improved commissioning practice.
Acevo believe commissioners will need to show a genuine commitment to openness, transparency and inclusiveness to secure real third sector involvement in public service delivery. Third sector leaders need to be involved not just as bidders, but from the very outset as an influential part of the design process for commissioning systems. Only then will funding start to find its way to providers best placed to achieve results as opposed to those best placed to win contracts. And the challenge here is not just one for commissioners: third sector organizations need to raise their game and be ready to co-operate and challenge at every step of the processes of designing and commissioning contracts. Acevo has undertaken significant investment to offer training tools to the sector to help it prepare for these and other challenges. And we will continue with this investment, expanding our services to members in order to ensure that they are ready to maximise the part they can play in delivering public service contracts.
Beyond openness, dialogue and relationship-building, it is essential that the Government’s high level priorities be translated into specific outcomes and services at the levels closer to the ground. Acevo’s Director of Strategy and Enterprise, Peter Kyle, has already stressed in his response to the CSR that governmental cross-cutting will be essential to back up the spirit of the commitments in the review. The achievement of real results will also require public service contracts of manageable size for the relevant third sector organisations, and better governmental monitoring and regulation of all levels of the contracting chain where subcontracting is involved.
The Government has also committed itself to helping the third sector ‘step up’ to meet the challenges associated with bidding to deliver public services. This help is vital. The sector needs to be better at bidding, marketing itself, and proving its track record. We also need robust governance and clear lines of accountability to stakeholders. But if the Government wishes to draw on the benefits the third sector can contribute, it needs to make sure that these improvements happen – and to understand that helping them to happen will yield better results than seeking to compensate for their absence through tightly defined and ultimately constrictive contracts. Projects such as Futurebuilders and Capacitybuilders are once again a step in the right direction in this regard – but more needs to be done.
That chimes with acevo’s broader view of the state of third sector involvement in public service delivery. The Government’s objectives are to be commended, as are the initial steps it has taken to achieve them. Much has been achieved – but there can be no let up in the reform agenda. Acevo is working and campaigning tirelessly to see that agenda through, striving to empower the third sector and to provide it with the opportunities in public service delivery that could ultimately make a real difference to the lives of the people we serve. We are going in the right direction. And we must keep going.
