As some of you will have already noticed, OPM has set up a new blog, covering all of the issues facing public services trying to improve social outcomes; you can find it here.

The posts are based on the lessons we’re learning from our work with organisations across the country in all different sectors, including local and central government, education and skills, children’s services, community justice and health and social care. There’s a particular focus on the practical side of the Big Society reform agenda, the challenges in building resilient communities, the fascinating and complex dynamics of local organisational and efficiency reform, and the personalisation of health and social care.

From now on, all information regarding our Public Interest Seminar series will be posted there – including announcements about up-and-coming seminars, briefing papers covering the main issues, and short reports of the points made at the seminars themselves. We’ll keep this blog online, for the moment at least, as an archive of the material from the seminars to date.

Hope to see you at a seminar soon. To keep up to date follow OPM on Twitter: @OPMnetwork.

The next in OPM’s public interest seminar series will focus on the issues around engaging patients and the public in healthcare services in the future, especially in the context of the changes facing local areas as the ‘Big Society’ agenda is implemented.  

The seminar will be run in partnership with Involve, a not for profit organization specialising in public participation, and will focus on the future of patient and public engagement in health: how will this work, in the face of health service reforms, rising patient and public expectations, new providers and wider policy initiatives such as the Big Society? Does the planned introduction of HealthWatch present a genuine opportunity, or will this simply be ‘more of the same’? What lessons can we draw from the mixed success of local involvement networks? The seminar will draw upon the experiences of a range of organisations including local authorities, health bodies from the private and voluntary sector and patient groups.

The seminar will be held on Monday 11th October, in the evening (6pm for a 6:30 start, finished by 7.45), at our offices at 252b Gray’s Inn Road, WC1X 8XG, a ten minute walk from King’s Cross. The seminar is free of charge, but places are strictly limited so please do let us know as soon as possible if you would like to attend by emailing kgreen@opm.co.uk.

Confirmed speakers include Brian Fisher MBE – Patient and Public Network Involvement Lead, NHS Alliance. Brian has been a GP for 25 years and has pioneered a number of approaches to user involvement in the NHS, including community development (for which he was awarded an MBE), Patients as Teachers and patient access to health records. The NHS Alliance is an independent organisation that aims to champion and support all those working in primary care.

Before the general election, David Cameron pledged to provide ‘neighbourhood grants’ for the poorest areas to develop their community organisations and engage in building the Big Society. It is clear that money from unclaimed assets will provide funding for a Big Society Bank, but ensuring that community organisers are present in deprived communities to utilise this money and grow genuine community-led organisations will be a great challenge. There will need to be innovative solutions to how limited investment can effectively build capacity and develop leaders in these communities. Addressing these challenges will be central to establishing how the Big Society could help tackle social inequality.

This article from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation argues that public money is needed to build the Big Society – that is, to develop and sustain the work of voluntary and community organisations, particularly in deprived communities.

As Madeleine Bunting points out in the guardian there are limits to what the third sector can provide. Voluntary and community organisations will never be able to replace a strong welfare policy in tackling nationwide inequalities. Furthermore she points out that building the kinds of local organisations through which this widespread civic engagement and decentralisation can be achieved requires a strong small business sector which has been run down in the UK and unable to support such development.

Here the David Cameron outlines his vision for how the Big Society can fight poverty through engendering social solidarity and responsibility as an antidote for the irresponsibility which has been encouraged by an overly bureaucratic and meddling government. Ideas of neighbourhood empowerment and increased equality of opportunity are posed as practical ways of enabling such responsibility for everyone in society although the actual detail of how to practically reach these aims is still up for debate.

Far from the notion of tackling inequality Anna Coote criticises the concept of Big Society for omitting principles of fair play and equal opportunity in this article. She also suggests developing the co-production of public goods and a shorter working week as ways of promoting genuine community involvement in reducing inequality.

In the preceding months and weeks, many discussions about the Big Society have been taking place at OPM.   In our last post on the Big Society, we argued that early indications from central government - particularly the promise of a general power of competence for local authorities - pointed to a need for local councils to artciulate their role in developing the Big Society.  In the spirit of delivering on earlier promises, in our last post we committed to offering a series of  initial thoughts on how councils might begin carving out a role in building the Big Society.  In the immediate, it seems likely that councils will need to start by mapping local voluntary sector capacity and interest in relation to different areas of service provision.

From what little the government has revealed about the Big Society, it is clear that local government will need a developed understanding of local community organisations and their capacity to deliver particular services or share decision-making powers (or some combination of the two).  Altering delivery models for ‘hard edged’ services like childrens’ and adult social care will likely be seen as most risky, whilst it is easier to envisage how local parks, leisure facilities, museums and libraries could potentially see greater involvement from volunteers, perhaps from existing ‘friends of’-type groups.  When mapping local voluntary sector capacity and interest in building the Big Society, councils will need to begin by asking the following:

• What services would local people be willing to see delivered differently? Which would they be uneasy about seeing delivered through other channels?
• What groups and individuals are willing and able to play a more substantial role in services?  What would be the potential costs and benefits of increasing their involvement in service provision, and what could that involvement look like? 
• Will governance and management essentially remain the same but with an increased delivery role for volunteers? Or, will entire elements of services be removed to arms-length organisations – community groups, charities, social enterprises, employee-owned cooperatives (amongst others)?

Keep checking the OPM Public Interest Network blog for further posts on this topic.

According to a senior figure at the Audit Commission, the organisation will have to cut its budget by almost a third over the next three years following the government’s rejection of comprehensive area assessments.

http://www.lgcplus.com/topics/performance/audit-commission-to-cut-30-of-budget/5017029.article

The Treasury has instructed England’s regional development agencies to freeze all spending through the 2007-2013 ERDF programme, meaning that potentially £4bn in matched funds could be lost to England’s poorest regions.

http://www.lgcplus.com/briefings/services/economic-development/web-exclusive-treasury-freezes-2bn-in-eu-regional-aid/5017259.article

Local government leaders have met with key Whitehall officials to draw up a joint-submission for this autumn’s spending review, evidence according to several attendees that there is a growing interest and engagement with the idea.

http://www.lgcplus.com/councils/total-place/place-based-budgets-gather-pace/5017160.article

Plans announced by the government in a White Paper on Monday (12^th July) outline radical changes to the way the NHS in England operates. GPs are to take responsibility for commissioning, hospitals are being encouraged to move outside of the NHS and operate as social enterprises, patients are to be given more information and choice and Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) are to be axed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10557996

Health secretary Andrew Lansley has said that with most commissioning to be done by GP-led consortia, there is “no job left for PCTs’. SHAs will be abolished as statutory bodies during 2012/2013 and PCTs from April 2013 meaning that tens of thousands of their staff will lose their jobs over the next four years.

http://www.hsj.co.uk/news/policy/sha-and-pct-jobs-crisis-ahead/5017193.article

Responsibility for public health is being passed to local authorities, with directors of public health to be given health improvement funds in proportion to their relative local population health need. Councils are set to supplant PCTs in the planning of NHS services and could be contracted by GPs to help them commission. Several senior NHS leaders have seen these steps as a move to more integrated health and social care service provision.

http://www.hsj.co.uk/home/health-white-paper/coalition-hands-public-health-to-councils/5017105.article

Responsibility for overseeing commissioner and provider strategy at a national and regional level is to be split immediately as new managing directors of commissioning and of provider development are hired.

http://www.hsj.co.uk/news/policy/nhs-to-take-immediate-steps-to-split-oversight-of-commissioning-and-provision/5017156.article

The NHS has set aside £1.7bn this year for reorganisation costs to help GPs take over budgets from NHS managers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10647910

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Monitor are to operate a ‘joint-license’, with Monitor to become the economic regulator of all health and social care providers by April 2012.

http://www.hsj.co.uk/news/acute-care/monitor-and-cqc-to-run-joint-licence-from-april-2012/5017110.article

To date, the coalition government has made only a limited number of formal announcements about the potential role of local authorities in building the ‘Big Society’.  The new government has so far focused its attention on the central role that the voluntary and charitable sector could play in developing the Big Society, whilst representatives of the Local Government Association (LGA) were allegedly not invited to attend the government’s Big Society launch[1].  Relatively small amounts of non-state funding from dormant bank accounts and social investment ISAs[2] have so far been identified by the new government for Big Society initiatives, and this funding is likely to be channelled directly into start-up social enterprises rather than local councils.  Although the above snippets of policy and strategy may seem to presage a rather limited role for local authorities in building the Big Society, the new government has also re-issued a commitment to give local authorities a ‘general power of competence’[3] that David Cameron first made in a speech to the LGA prior to the general election[4]. 

Judith Barnes, partner and head of local government at Eversheds LLP, characterises a power of general competence as follows: ‘no action – except raising taxes, which requires specific parliamentary approval – will any longer be “beyond the powers” of Local Government in England, unless the local authority is prevented from taking that action by the common law, specific legislation or statutory guidance’[5].  It is worth noting that amongst legal experts in local government, the term ‘power of general competence’ seems to be more widely accepted than Cameron’s proposed ‘general power of competence’, but this may be something of a moot point[6].  This commitment to providing local councils with a general power of competence is contained in the brief ‘policy programme’ that accompanied the Big Society launch event at the Cabinet Office[7], and is intended as a way of providing councils with sufficient power to deliver services more creatively in ways that promote community involvement.  For some time now, it has been clear that increased powers for local government are unlikely to be accompanied by much, if any, funding from central government.  In his speech to the LGA in July 2009, Cameron said ‘the good news is that I want to give you a lot more power.  The bad news is that there won’t be a lot more money’[8].  In short, it seems that local authorities will be largely responsible for carving out their own role in building the Big Society, and may need a certain degree of help and support in achieving this. 

Some initial ideas about how councils might play an important role in building the Big Society will follow in our next post.

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[1] http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=12984

[2]  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jun/22/nat-wei-big-society-adviser-conservatives

[3] http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/latest-news/2010/05/big-society-50248

[4] http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2009/07/David_Cameron_Speech_to_the_LGA_Conference.aspx

[5] Ibid

[6] http://www.lgcplus.com/policy-and-politics/constitutional-reform/power-of-general-competence-a-panacea/5011720.article

[7] http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/407789/building-big-society.pdf

[8] http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2009/07/David_Cameron_Speech_to_the_LGA_Conference.aspx

Here’s our summary of the seminar discussions. Read or download below:

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