Oral evidence: Citizen and Public Services, HC 800Tuesday 28 January 2014

Oral evidence, 28 January 2014.

Witnesses

Danny Kruger, Chief Executive, Only Connect, Charlotte Ravenscroft, Head of Policy and Research, NCVO, and Kerrie Eastman, Chief Operations Officer, Streets2Homes, gave evidence.

Chair

A reminder of the hashtag, which is #publicservices on Twitter. Could I ask each of our witnesses to give their names for the record, please?

Danny Kruger

I am Danny Kruger. I am the Chief Executive of Only Connect.

Charlotte Ravenscroft

Good morning. I am Charlotte Ravenscroft, Head of Policy and Research at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

Kerrie Eastman

I am Kerrie Eastman. I am Chief Operations Officer at Streets2Homes.

Chair

Treasury Questions start at 11.30. We might run over a little bit, but we need to be over in little more than half an hour, so we need to be very brief. I am very sorry about this, but we need to be quick with our questions.

Robert Halfon

Good morning. How do you think that local charities and small community groups can engage the citizen to have more power over the services they use, and more say?

Kerrie Eastman

From our point of view, we can connect at a grass-roots level because we have a knowledge of the local area. Also because we are not a statutory provider, there is less fear there for our more vulnerable clients.

Charlotte Ravenscroft

Certainly most charities are based at a local level and it is in their DNA to be working with their local community. Often charities are set up by people who have had a personal experience that they want to address, so they often involve service users the whole way through their work, for example on their trustee boards. It is just a fundamental part of what they do.

Danny Kruger

I would agree with that. There is a useful distinction between what might be called formal citizenship, whereby a demographic or perhaps a commercial contractual accountability is built into the service that is provided, and the more informal nature of engagement, which is a more useful way in which local people can be involved. What really matters is the relationship between the local people who might be using the service, volunteers and staff who are trying to bring it, and those who are funding it. If the relationships between those parties are real, we have a functioning system, even if the super-accountability arrangement—or commercial arrangement—is not there. It is all right to have a bit of informality locally.

Robert Halfon

Do you think that a lot of the contracts go to big private corporates or big, as they are known, Tesco charities—the big, ginormous charities—and that often grassroots charities that are really local and who, as you say, do not get statutory support are at a disadvantage and do not have the resources to go to procurement and funding and so on?

Kerrie Eastman

That is not the case with us. We work very well with our local authority and we do get grant funding from them to pick up on their non-priority.

Charlotte Ravenscroft

There has been quite a positive policy agenda around trying to involve more voluntary organisations in the delivery of public services under this Government, as well as the last. However, in practice, what NCVO hears from a lot of our members is that there are barriers facing charities, at a local level in particular. Some of those barriers include things like a big shift from grant funding to contract funding and they involve contracts getting larger, to a scale where charities either are not able to bid or would need to be bidding as a subcontractor rather than the main provider. Despite the Social Value Act, which is an excellent piece of legislation, unfortunately we are seeing a shift away from the consideration of quality to a consideration of price. Because of the pressure particularly that councils’ finances have been under, they are looking to secure the cheapest deal, rather than necessarily the best quality. Some of our charities can be undercut by other bidders.

Danny Kruger

Because of the funding cuts, the contractors—commissioners—in local authorities are being forced back into their core service: their statutory requirements. Therefore, we see a reduction in the proportion of funding that is going from local authorities and coming to charities. So, in the era of the Big Society—this relates to research from the Centre for Social Justice that came out recently—a smaller proportion of council money is going to charities than previously. That is not because there is any great desire to restrict charitable funding; it is because local authorities are required to deliver statutory services and so they are cutting what they regard as peripheral. The challenge is for commissioners to see the difference between procurement and commissioning. They need to distinguish between simply issuing a very prescriptive tender for a specific service that needs to be delivered according to certain specifications within a set price, and thinking more holistically about the outcomes that need to be achieved, which is more of a commissioning approach. I hope that would encourage them to think about the alternative providers locally that could be involved in the delivery of the service. A bit more imagination and courage on the part of commissioners would see the proportion of money that goes to local charities rise again.

Robert Halfon

What should Government be doing to help grassroots charities and community charities? What are the major obstacles and what could be done to help—just national Government?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

The single biggest difference that would help charities is more pre-procurement dialogue. As Danny was saying, any commissioning process should be involving charities in considering what the needs are of the community or the citizens being served. They need to consider how services are currently working for them and how they can be improved. In order to achieve that most significant change, which is upfront dialogue and discussion, we need strong political leadership at both national and local levels to say that is an entirely desirable part of the commissioning process. We also need to see more training and support for commissioning and procurement staff. There are positive policy changes, like the Social Value Act, but they are not being brought to fruition by all public bodies. We need to make sure that there is appropriate training and support for the staff who will need to implement those policies. Finally, there are some policy opportunities at the moment that the Government should be pursuing. For example, the European Union is about to raise procurement thresholds quite substantially, which will mean that, below procurement thresholds, local authorities and other public bodies can use more innovative and engaged commissioning processes. The Government needs to give a really clear steer that that is a desirable thing to do and that they encourage that. They could also look at implementing some of the other EU proposals, like banning the use of price as the sole consideration when awarding a contract. Honestly, with any public service that is providing services to citizens, any commissioner should always be concerned with quality, with the social value that can be achieved and the price that is being offered. That is how you get good value for money.

Chair

A very full answer. Can we have shorter answers please?

Mr Turner

My question, Ms Ravenscroft, is connected with your answer earlier on, when I think you said that you are better negotiating and relating with small local charities rather than big national charities. Have I expressed you correctly?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

I was saying that charities operate at different scales and the majority of charities primarily serve their local communities. However, there are, obviously, charities operating at scale and that are able to deliver public services at scale. Barnardo’s is a good example. They are the largest provider of children’s centres in the country. However, when we are talking about their involvement in public services, the majority of charities would be either local services or specialist.

Mr Turner

When you have small charities, that seems to be fine, but when you only have large charities, which in some areas seems to be the case, it is very difficult for local charities to intervene and sometimes compete. Why is that?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

As I mentioned, there is a trend in commissioning terms to be aggregating contracts. There are much bigger contract lots to be bid for, in which case there are barriers to small or medium-sized charities that may like to bid for them. We do see some successful models where larger charities are bidding for the contracts and then working with a network of smaller local and specialist providers. An example of that is the Salvation Army, which has a contract with the Ministry of Justice around human trafficking. They are working with 10 smaller local and specialist providers to deliver that service.

Mr Turner

Can I ask, Mr Kruger, what would you do to involve these smaller charities much more than is the case at the moment?

Danny Kruger

There are two things: one easy and one difficult. The easy one is to do what the Ministry of Justice is doing with the transforming rehabilitation contracts that are being issued this year, which is to allow what they call Tier 3 providers—the small, local, grassroots organisations—to be involved in multiple bids. The problem with the Work Programme contracts is that you basically had to cosy up to the prime bidders in advance of the bid and basically back the right horse if you were going to deliver the work locally. Now, under TR, you are allowed to be involved in multiple conversations, which is very useful for us. We only serve London. If were to be in the wrong bid, that would be a shame. That is a good principle that the Government is adopting. My difficult answer—the grand, biggest one—is that rather than relying on the European Union to enforce good practice, we need to be going in the other direction, which is to stop issuing these vast national contracts or regional contracts full stop. The great problem, as we were hearing from the previous panel, is that those problems are not particular to the commercial sector; they are particular to large organisations that administer billions and billions of pounds of public money under centralised contracts. My simple solution to everything is localism. Contracts need to be more local and even more local than regions. Within London, local authorities should have more power to commission and more flexibility to do so. You need to engage the local taxpayer. My answer extends to rebalancing local finance. I do not know if that is within the remit of this Committee, but local taxpayers should be paying for local services more directly, rather than everything coming up through the Treasury and down again. Local people need to be properly involved in holding services to account, so that commissioners, providers and the local public are all in a proper relationship. That is the big answer.

Alun Cairns

Mr Kruger, in your answer before Mr Turner asked and in your answer to him, you talked about the process and you cited the fact that the cuts will have forced commissioners to take a more centralised approach. Instead of focusing on the process, would you accept that focusing on good examples of outcomes where an organisation or a local authority has pursued a much more local approach is a much better way of encouraging other commissioners to follow a similar model?

Danny Kruger

I think that is right, where there is flexibility. I am talking in these grand terms, but we deliver very small amounts of work all over London. There are contracts in the single thousands in some cases—little fees and grants we get. At that level, there is a great opportunity for flexibility and innovation. You see some pretty bad practice on the part of people who are handing out that money, especially around the end of the financial year. Equally, you see some really good innovative work. I just think contracts should be smaller and more local, and then you have got the opportunity for good practice to be experimented with and, you hope, spread. That is the advantage of the federal model in America, where different states can experiment and good practice can be spread. The problem with the UK is that everything is so centralised and one big mistake applies across the country.

Alun Cairns

As we heard from previous witnesses.

Sheila Gilmore

Some of the questions on commissioning covered social value. To what extent have any of you been involved, say at a local level, in setting the specification? Quite often that is where problems lies, even at a local level. If there is a specification for an advice service for a whole city, for example, then it can be difficult. Have you ever had a chance to be involved at that early stage?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

I have not personally, but referring to my earlier answer, the most important change that we would like to see is that cultural change, where commissioners are working with the local voluntary sector early on before they decide how they want to go about contracting a service. If they reach out to the voluntary sector, they can certainly have a better understanding of a service user’s needs, how the service is working in the community and what some of the gaps are. I absolutely agree with you. That is the key critical change that we want to effect and it is mainly a cultural change. It is, to a large extent, a local change that needs to happen as well as national.

Kerrie Eastman

When our local authority is setting its priorities when it is being reviewed, we all sit around the table with it and have homeless partnerships meetings as well to discuss the issues that are coming out. When we review the action plan, we identify new services that are going to be needed in the area. We also review any established formal and informal working practices going on already. If there are any changes to services or anything—for instance, it has been identified in our area that we need a night shelter—we were part of the consultation. It has now gone for consultation with the councillors and will be released in the next few weeks. Then we would be able to bid for that, hopefully, for a grant.

Chair

How much does the instability of continuous contracts affect you? You rely on the relationship with the council for the stability of your business, yet the contract comes to an end. It must be very difficult for you to plan your business when you do not know whether you are going to have your contract renewed. How do you deal with that?

Kerrie Eastman

That is awkward, but charities like my own have different funding streams. The local authority is not our main funder by a long shot; they are quite a small funder. We have different projects running because our clients have very complex needs. Although we are a homeless centre, our main thing is getting people back into housing. There is also pathway planning with them and getting them back into employment, education and training. We integrate them back into society, so we have all different funding streams to fund the different projects.

Danny Kruger

I agree it is about having diverse income streams, so that you are not putting all your eggs in one basket. Again, it is about the relationship locally that ensures that you basically get a sense of whether work is going to be commissioned in the next cycle. Coming back to Ms Gilmore’s question, there has been a really good example for us of engaging with commissioners early on in relation to the Tri-borough, where three of the councils in west London have amalgamated their commissioning. They issued a contract that actually anticipates the transforming rehabilitation work that the Government is issuing nationally about helping short-sentence prisoners rehabilitate before they are released and subsequently. There were a lot of conversations between them, little players like us and the medium-sized charities, Catch22 and Turning Point, which eventually won the bid that we are in. That was quite a well-designed process. It was very difficult for the council because they were trying to be innovative but there are all these rules around procurement regarding transparency, or rather confidentiality. They could not share a lot of the details that they would like to have shared with us about what the service would look like and what the finances would be. Of course, there is TUPE, which was the main obstacle to the whole process, whereby the independent providers have to take on the public sector staff, or rather the staff transferred over from the previous contract. That was more of a problem. However, there was a very good attitude on the commissioner’s side about engaging with the potential providers of the bid.

Lindsay Roy

Can you tell us briefly how well the current model of subcontracting for charities and voluntary organisations matches the aspirations set out in the Big Society initiative?

Danny Kruger

Personally, I do not think it does match the aspirations. I think the aspirations were for a transformation in the way that social action was organised and public services delivered. There have been some important legislative changes in areas we have not looked at particularly today—schools being one. There has been the Public Services (Social Value) Act and so on. Good things have happened in this building, but the cultural change that we hoped for has not yet permeated fully down. As I said, there are some very good local commissioners, but I do not think we have seen yet the full transformation that we would see if small organisations had more of a sense of access to public money and in terms of local responsibility. We are still a way away from that, and I am very unhappy if all we see at the end of this Parliament is a large-scale transfer of power and money from a statutory monopoly to a commercial oligopoly. That would be a shame.

Chair

Why do you think that has not been achieved?

Danny Kruger

It is a question of time. I am not saying it will not happen. There are lots of good signs that there is going to be change. There are good straws in the wind that we can see. I raise two particular problems: one is around access to capital. In these difficult times, there has been a real problem with small organisations like ours having the resources to invest in the innovation and upfront capital costs involved in delivering large-scale work. We need to be professional and have some capital to deliver the work. The other is about leadership. Big Society has gone off the agenda politically and I regret that because, even in tough times, when obviously the priority has been deficit reduction, we could have seen a greater emphasis on encouraging the sort of social transformation that needs to happen. Perhaps we will see it come around in the next election campaign—a revival of Big Society rhetoric. I would be pleased if that were to happen.

Lindsay Roy

Is there anything else that needs to be done to bring about that cultural change? You have itemised three things already.

Danny Kruger

There is a role for the citizen and the private sector in general—not just the commercial organisations, but citizens and philanthropists, trusts and foundations. This change is not just about public money; in fact, it specifically needs to be about mobilising the resources of the whole of society. I would like to see a greater emphasis on intelligent social investment, rather than simply charitable philanthropy, although that is really important too. This is a very positive development of recent years but we need to see more of it: private money flowing into social action to capitalise work in advance to pay for outcomes. I would like to see a mixed economy of the finance. That would be a big part of delivering the Big Society too.

Lindsay Roy

Will charities be inhibited from lobbying under the Lobbying Bill?

Danny Kruger

I am afraid I do not know anything about the Lobbying Bill. I think we are too small to have paid attention to it. I am sorry, but I do not know anything about it.

Paul Flynn

Thank you very much for your evidence. It is a refreshing change from the snake oil salesmen that we were exposed to in the first half of this meeting. Apologies to snake oil salesmen perhaps; “charlatans” is possibly a better word. Mr Kruger, you are clearly disappointed in things that have happened with the Big Society and so on. You wrote that political leadership is needed to bolster social entrepreneurialism and to galvanise the public to step up to their responsibilities. How is that to be done? What is wrong with the political leadership now?

Danny Kruger

I do not know how it should be done, but I guess I would like to hear the Prime Minister talking about the Big Society again, which he did in his Christmas message, which was encouraging. There is money and there are people. There has been a great investment of public money in social enterprise and social investment through Big Society capital and other initiatives to stimulate our sector. While there have been these terrible cuts, especially locally, there has been some investment from the top—from the Cabinet Office and the Treasury—in our sector and in the growth of the new social economy. That is all good. The other side of it is the people. It still remains a shame that the brightest and best are not coming into our sector. They are not necessarily chasing the money either; they are going into the media and the creative industries. All that is great stuff; they need the brightest and best too. However, it would be great if we could see more people coming into our sector. TeachFirst is a great example. That is a really good indication that, if high-quality good graduates want to work in the social sector, they are going to work in schools. I just wish we had more of a sense of status and there being a really great career for people who want to work in the front line and strategically in the social sector.

Paul Flynn

Trying to breathe life into the Big Society is rather like resuscitating a corpse. It has not been a great political success. Do you think Labour should revive the Third Way perhaps as well?

Danny Kruger

The Big Society was a great success and remains one. We are talking about a brand with immense cut-through. Of course, it is going to be mocked and despised because it is a political initiative. Actually, I think that it resonated with people and they understood it intuitively. It connected with people and their aspirations to see a more connected Britain. There is the opportunity to revive it, but we have to see the evidence of it working on the ground, otherwise it would look a bit silly.

Paul Flynn

Ms Eastman, could you tell me how things are from your point of view? Do you see the Government as having devolved a power resource into the community in a practical way?

Kerrie Eastman

Harlow is one of the most deprived areas of Essex. I think it is in the top five, unfortunately. We do have the pots of funding there sometimes to deal with the issue. At local authority level, do you mean, or Government? Local authority, yes, they are understanding of the issues at a local level and are willing to work with us.

Paul Flynn

We have been told about accountability. Regarding the people you deal with, if their views were to be taken into account more, would there be some improvement?

Kerrie Eastman

With our clients?

Paul Flynn

Yes.

Kerrie Eastman

Yes.

Paul Flynn

This has been emphasised to us by Which? and many others on the part of it. Ms Ravenscroft, what measures would you like to see adopted to ensure that this is done—that local people can challenge Government decisions? What, in practical terms, can be done?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

I will give two examples of where charities are doing this really well. I went to visit a very small charity called the Daffodil Advocacy Project in Redbridge recently. It works with adults with learning disabilities and helps them to navigate what are quite complex services locally. I was speaking to the service manager, and she explained to me that many of their service users do not use speech, so it takes time to build up relationships with them, understand how they express their preferences and make sure that they are able to interact with local public services, make decisions about their housing tenure, their health care and how they would like to live their lives. There are lots of very fantastic charities like Ms Eastman’s and that project in Redbridge that are actively helping citizens inform, shape and experience public services in a different way. There is an absolutely fantastic opportunity to do more of that kind of work, which will help at the margins where people are not able to access mainstream services. We would like to see more of a transformative impact, where, as commissioners get a better understanding of their community’s needs, they can think about changing those services, designing them differently, making them more accessible and working with the voluntary sector to deliver those services where appropriate. There is huge potential, whether it was the Big Society narrative a couple of years ago or the political consensus that there is, to hugely transform public services by building on citizen engagement.

Paul Flynn

You strike a rare note of optimism. Do you really think there will be a serious improvement within 10 years?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

We need to get the delivery right. There is a supportive and enabling policy environment, but delivery at the moment is inhibiting the Government and the broad political ambitions.

Chair

How is it inhibiting those ambitions?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

As I mentioned earlier, it is in relation to things around the funding environment in particular, for example the shift from grants to contracts. Not everything needs to be a contract. If you are the only charity that can deliver a highly specialist service locally, commissioners need to remember they can use grant funding. Payment by results and large contracts are excluding many charities from being able to bid to provide services.

Robert Halfon

Do you feel that, because you are a smaller charity, when it comes to getting the contracts and the grants, the bigger charities or the bigger companies have an advantage because they have more resources? There is not necessarily a level playing field; it is much harder for you to access funding than it is for them.

Kerrie Eastman

With certain things, yes.

Robert Halfon

Could you give an example?

Kerrie Eastman

Housing associations: we have put a bid in for a night shelter, but if a housing association comes along as well, even though we could probably deliver it better, they might get the bid.

Robert Halfon

Why would they? Because they have more—

Kerrie Eastman

Because they might have a building—things like that—where we would not.

Charlotte Ravenscroft

We have many examples where our members tell us that specific procurement requirements are put in place that are completely disproportionate. They require them to have a certain level of turnover or a certain ratio of turnover to the contract size, or they are required to have a high level of indemnities, insurance or ISO standards.

Robert Halfon

What could be done? Kerrie is saying that they may have more expertise.

Kerrie Eastman

No sorry, not more expertise. They have got the initial funding. They have got more resources to start off with. Like with payment by results, we cannot do that in a charity like ours, because you have to have the results before you can get paid. We cannot do that.

Robert Halfon

What is the answer?

Chair

Can I just add an element to this? A lot of services that are contracted are actually a contracting of statutory functions like social services care, for example. How could grant funding be used to deliver services that are statutorily required to be provided? Is that possible?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

There are circumstances where obviously you need a competitive tendering process and contracts are appropriate. But I am saying that there can be a mixed economy, where there are also grants for particularly local highly specialised innovative services. What needs to happen—the main change that needs to happen—is cultural. It is about commissioners having a discussion with their local voluntary sector upfront early on because they will realise that maybe a charity they would like to bid would not be able to bid if they put in place a payment-by-results basis or some of the stringent requirements I have been talking about. They would understand better the local market of providers.

Chair

So, in fact, a county council like Essex could take the pressure off its statutory social services by grant funding charities and local organisations who provide more of a supportive role but do not necessarily deliver the statutory services? Is that the sort of thing you imagine; am I on the right track?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

There are circumstances where that can work. For example, Turning Point has a service where they support the commissioning process itself by recruiting community researchers, who go out into the community and interview people about their experiences of the services and how they could be improved. That kind of thing can inform the design of the mainstream services, which may or may not then be delivered by a charity when they are ultimately delivered. However, they will be more responsive to citizens because they have worked with local communities and the voluntary groups around which they often mobilise.

Chair

Mr Kruger, maybe you could answer this. Why do you think the pressure on public finances is not actually creating an incentive to innovate in these ways? It seems to restrict people’s views of possibilities.

Danny Kruger

You can react in two ways. The situation you have just described whereby a council grant funds organisations to deliver services is what it does to itself: it grant funds its own departments to deliver services without any expectations around outcomes or value. It might do internal reviews, but it is basically just paying for the inputs of the work. Charlotte is right: sometimes that is appropriate. However, there is no reason why that cannot be delivered by an external organisation. I think the pressure of the public finances, as I say, can cut in two ways. Some councils will circle their wagons and restrict their activity and innovation in order to defend the status quo as much as possible. Bear in mind that what we or I am talking about is a threat to the local monopoly of the statutory sector. There will be officers in councils who do not like this agenda and who see innovation as a threat to their empires. There are other councils—I have mentioned the Tri-borough, which is the three inner-west London councils—who are responding to the funding pressures by innovating, and they have to, not least if they are to deliver the statutory requirement around children’s centres, for instance. Things have got to change, and they recognise that is going to happen by innovation and outsourcing in a good way.

Charlotte Ravenscroft

There is more opportunity for councils to get better value for money in these constrained times. For example, City of York Council wanted to commission a new café provider in their council building, and in order to get the best possible outcome from procuring that service, they consulted with the community and put in provisions around: “This café should also provide employment pathways for people who are out of work.” In addition to getting a café, they have ultimately contracted with a charity called United Response, which works with adults with learning disabilities. It is creating jobs in the local community for people who are significantly at a disadvantage in the labour market. In doing that, they have spent the same amount of money they might have spent with any other café provider, but they have got the added social benefits of having worked with a charity. There are many ways in which councils can do more.

Chair

How can we better spread this kind of imagination?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

There is a definite role for political leadership and for the sharing of innovations, particularly across councils. The LGA would have a significant role to play in helping to share experiences.

Chair

A lot of this is not just about cost containment; it is about risk mitigation and that somehow going for bigger established contractors reduces risk. How accurate do you think that is? Is it a false perception?

Danny Kruger

It is a bit of a false perception. It is legitimate that commissioners expect a certain level of professionalism and accountability for the use of public money, but we waste so much in unnecessary compliance, box ticking and hoop jumping even before contracts are issued, let alone once they are in place.

Chair

Kerrie Eastman, how did you persuade Harlow that a small organisation like yours was not a risk?

Kerrie Eastman

It was because of the experience we had had of working with the homeless. Who better to try to get them into accommodation?

Chair

Even though you were small, you had a track record?

Kerrie Eastman

Exactly, and building up our reputation gradually. Gradually, they have trusted us more and more and more. We have even been successful with another service, even though that was payment by results almost. We now work in partnership with them.

Charlotte Ravenscroft

We spend a lot of time thinking about financial risks in this process, and actually there is a real risk of failure to deliver a quality service. The bigger financial risk in the long term for the Government will always be that, if the services are not meeting needs, those needs eventually escalate and get worse. The cost of providing acute services is often far greater than providing preventative ones.

Chair

Finally, Mr Kruger, the Open Public Services White Paper is all about devolving to local communities and to citizens. On a scale of one to 10, how devolved are we now?

Danny Kruger

I would say we were devolved four, with the prospect of more. The current trend of direction is very positive, but there is a lot to do.

Chair

How quickly do you think you can do this? What are the constraints?

Danny Kruger

If there was a real mandate issued at the next election by whoever wins the election to implement a real social transformation involving the devolution of power to local communities, we could see things happen quite radically in the next Parliament.

Chair

How disappointed are you that, in many cases, powers have been devolved and they have not been used responsibly or indeed there is no take-up, particularly in certain kinds of communities?

Danny Kruger

There is a problem with low take-up. Again, it comes back to leadership, not just politically but by the powers that be locally among the private sector and the public sector to encourage people to take the opportunities that are available to them.

Lindsay Roy

Is one or 10 the top of the scale?

Chair

I think four was—

Danny Kruger

10 is the top.

Chair

10 is fully devolved and one is fully centralised.

Lindsay Roy

It is below average?

Chair

It is we are not there; we are a long way off.

Charlotte Ravenscroft

It is important that we talk about localism and devolving from a national to a local level, but it is also really important what happens at a local level, because where we are seeing larger aggregated contract sizes at a local level, it is not realising the aspiration that was there for what could be achieved with more local services. One of the key things your Committee could helpfully recommend is more training and support for local procurement and commissioning staff to particularly share good practice.

Chair

Whose responsibility is it to provide that training?

Charlotte Ravenscroft

At the moment, for example, the Cabinet Office is providing the Commissioning Academy. It is going to reach a limited number of commissioners over the next couple of years. It is a very good start. They should ramp it up, build on it and try to make sure that they are reaching as many of these commissioning and procurement staff as possible at a local level, so that those ambitions can be realised when power is devolved.

Chair

Are there any other comments? If I may say so, I think we saved the best until last. It has been very helpful. If you have other thoughts or recommendations you think we must include as a result of this morning’s session, please send them into us. We would be very grateful for that. Oral evidence: Citizen and Public Services, HC 800 24 [1] In the contract areas we operate there are only 2 prime contractors, G4S and one competitor. I.e. there are just two, not four prime contractors.