Making an impact in a time of change
Today we are publishing our impact report setting out what we have achieved at the half way point in our strategic plan 2010 – 2015. We’ve kept it very brief – I know you are all very busy! – but we wanted to give a sense of what we’ve been doing and the difference we think we’ve started to make.
When I look back over these past two and three quarter years, I am struck how the winds of change seem to be set at gale force – and there is no sign them blowing themselves out. With reform, structural change and deficit reduction, new opportunities and new risks all collide in what can feel like a bewildering vortex, sweeping away familiar certainties and leaving a landscape where no one can be sure how things are going to work.
Of course, for an organisation working for reform and system change, navigating in this atmosphere is exciting as well as scary. –The old ways were not working for the revolving doors group, and there are some real opportunities now that can drive the change we want to see. These include:
- The Big Lottery’s Fulfilling Lives programme – which will invest £100m in 15 areas starting this year to improve services for people with multiple and complex needs and to change local systems.
- Initiatives like the Tri-Borough community budget across Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith which will refocus efforts on short sentenced prisoners, building on the learning from our link worker pilots and our models.
- The Troubled Families programme, which is working with families with multiple and complex needs. – In some areas we are helping think about how the approach might be extended to individuals in the revolving doors group, who are often linked to the same families.
- The government’s Social Justice Strategy and the Social Justice Cabinet Committee, which creates a policy framework and cross departmental decision making body that has the potential to drive such an effort on a national scale.
- The Ministry of Justice has commissioned us to support probation trusts and prisons to find new ways of involving and listening to service users to improve the way they work.
- The government has accepted one of our core messages – that short sentenced prisoners need support to address their complex needs to tackle reoffending. Current proposals will see this delivered by private and voluntary sector providers, with an emphasis on “what works” to cut reoffending rates.
- The government has committed –subject to approval of business case this autumn – to roll out criminal justice liaison and diversion services to all police custody suites and courts across England. We are helping with this process through our work with partners in the Offender Health Collaborative which has established and supports the National Liaison and Diversion Development Network.
- The Home Office continues to promote Integrated Offender Management, and in more and more areas this initiative is bringing together partners across different sectors with probation and police to provide a more holistic package of support to people considered to be at the highest risk of reoffending.
There is a lot here to celebrate, and much to be hopeful for. Yet simultaneously other changes mean that things could get much worse.
Welfare reform, designed to incentivise work and to cap spending on benefits, will put more pressure on people who feel a long way from the jobs market. Members of our service user forum say they are yet to feel the changes to benefits changes, but are worried about how they will affect them. Housing benefit caps, the “bedroom tax”, Universal Credit and the passing of Council Tax Benefit to local authorities will all impact most on those least able to cope. Housing associations are predicting a 50% increase in arrears and it will be those least able to manage the transition to single monthly payments or make up the shortfall in rent who are most at risk.
The government wants to help more people off benefits and into jobs. But there is little sign that the Work Programme or other initiatives are effectively reaching out to people with multiple needs and finding way to engage them in the long road back to work. Of course, fast tracking employment help to prison leavers is sensible, but if the approach happens in a silo without recognising that people will have more pressing priorities and needs then it will fail.
The theory that this pressure will drive more people into work I think is flawed. My fear is that when you pile on the pressure you drive some people deeper into despair and exclusion. And this is happening just as some of the support that people need is being taken away – councils in some areas are considering drastic cuts to local Supporting People services to balance the books, leaving vulnerable people without the safety net they rely on. Likewise, changes to legal aid are reducing the advice that is available to people – Shelter is considering closing swathes of its advice centres as a result. I also recently heard that a great employment scheme which is providing support to homeless people and ex-offenders is at risk from grant cuts, with no sign that the Work Programme will support it.
Even before those changes happen, we are seeing a reversal of the progress made over the past decade in tackling issues like rough sleeping. Latest stats from the Department of Communities and Local Government show that rough sleeping has increased by nearly a third over past few years.
Locally new structures like Health and Wellbeing boards are designed to encourage integration of services. Working with local police, probation, councils and health services, these could make a real difference. But as one change, like the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners, starts to bed in, others like the potential break-up of probation trusts comes over the horizon, making partnership working more difficult and planning forced to become even more short term.
I could go on. Not least about the opportunities and potential hazards of Payment by Results – but more on that soon.
So as we celebrate what we have achieved with our partners over the past couple of years and the positive signs of change, we are now have to consider where we will focus over the next two years to best support those leaders in government, councils, police, NHS and elsewhere who will need to make sense of all of this change and who are seeking to increase opportunities for men and women in every community to escape from chaos, crisis and crime for good.
Do let me know what you think – of what we’ve done and what we should be doing next…
