A Nottingham Introduction - Citizens in decision making?

On the occasion of the Nottingham Council for Voluntary Service AGM and its appointment of a new Chief Executive it seems worth asking some fundamental questions about what NCVS exists for and, behind that question, what the voluntary and community sector exists for. In the last few years there has been a great deal of interest in the role of the voluntary sector and it has been connected to debates about local democracy and citizen involvement. As I write I have, beside my computer, a photocopy of a journal called Agenda from December 1997 and in it there is a quote from Hillary Armstrong, local government minister which says, "We want to put local people in the driving seat on local government - so that they are in charge of what the priorities are and how councils spend their money. That means modernising the democratic process. We want councils involving citizens a lot more in establishing priorities." After what has happened in Nottingham recently I am very sceptical. Some local governments are clearly currently incapable of delivering this. In the context of a centralisation of local government with the formation of local cabinets run by a tiny circle of more powerful councillors and local officials this is deeply worrying for civil society. Things are, indeed, running in exactly the opposite direction to what Hillary Armstrong says she wants to see.

Most local people if they are active as citizens in local decision making are going to become involved through the voluntary and community sector and, in practice, what I think we are seeing in Nottingham and elsewhere is an attack on the independence of this sector by local government and pressures, to reduce it to a client status.

There are several reasons and processes that are bringing this about. Perhaps what is happening in Nottingham is also to a degree connected to local government reorganisation. I have heard it said that, in days gone by senior officials and politicians in the city council, with far fewer responsibilities, were used to exercising detailed control over what happened in their patch in a way that was never possible in the far larger county council. In the county a larger amount of delegation was inevitable and it was part of the culture of that organisation. When the city took over the chief county responsibilities it did not change its culture of top down control. What made this worse was that in the reorganised structure a great emphasis was placed on appointing senior staff and then the money ran out for more junior ones so that the city is a place with a lot of senior managers. Thus perhaps, for the rest of us, including voluntary organisations transferred over to combined county and city funding and monitoring, we are now not only filling in two lots of forms. There are lots of managers and we are being "managed" to distraction. This is made even worse by the current fashion for separating "policy" from "operational management" - i.e. forming policy in offices and by officials who are separated from experience and administrative practicality.

There are also other tendencies which are positive and helpful. So it is not a simple thing. In this paper I argue that there is a need for a really fundamental review of what is happening. I highlight what I see to be the problem areas although I do not claim to have the answers - to find the answers we need a collective discussion as a starting out point and then, to go further, different groups will often have argue about their own problems in their different unique circumstances.

The Bigger Picture - A Multinational Market in Tradable Community Services?

Before going further however let us look at the bigger picture. About a year ago I read a lecture by Professor Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, Blairite guru and proponent of the "Third Way" in the news magazine "Third Sector". According to Giddens the non governmental "Third Sector" was getting more influential and it had a role in the formation of government policies. In return the government was demanding "modernisation" in how funding was provided and time was used. Giddens argued that charities must embrace social entrepreneurship, charities must be go-getting.

"It seems to me that this effort bargain is at the front line of what we all should struggling for" declared Giddens. It seems to me on the other hand, that the "effort bargain" is turning into a thoroughly bad deal for the voluntary sector. I cannot say if the "effort bargain" is proving worthwhile at the national level. I know that it is not in Nottingham.

In fact if Notttingham is anything to go by voluntary and community groups are actually being pushed into a client and dependent status with less influence than we had before. Moreover if anyone has "influence" it is the bigger voluntary sector organisations with the cosier relationship to government while the smaller ones, and the genuinely independent ones, are being pushed aside or put under pressure.

Of course I hope the voluntary sector does increase its influence. I look forward to the day when Greenpeace vanquishes Monsanto and when the non governmental organisations of the world bring the World Trade Organisation to its knees. I fear, however, a very different kind of scenario. In this scenario the negotiation agendas of the European Union at the World Trade Organisation is crucial. On the international level, if these people have their way, there will eventually be tradable health and social services carved up by the multinationals.

The private sector may ease its way in to the local scene in different ways. In the context of problems in the human services there is an increasing tendency to hire management consultants like KPMG or Price Waterhouse to make recommendations for managerial changes. Such consultants then frequently recommend the need to bring in private sector methods and private sector outsourcing. The alternative where there are problems of course is to look within out own ranks for solutions - that is the idea behind a voluntary organisations skills exchange. However I fear that when organisations like CVS uncritically adopt and go along with business descriptions of the way they are working it may smooth the way for the business take-over. Let us instead be a bit clearer. We are not in business because we active in a realm of activity where people are acting as citizens and not as market providers serving customers. (see later comments for the crucial difference between customers and citizens.)

Measurable packages of community services - the contract counter revolution

In order to make the health and social services tradable you have to organise it as measurable and comparable packages provided at budget predictable costs. Even if you are not going to trade health, community care and environmental service packages there is still a pressure - in order to exercise budgetary and performance control in a way convenient to the people who manage the purse strings, to organise services in "packages" with comparable measurable outcomes and costs. This is the broader context in which we should see the trend towards providing services in contractual agreements based on specific and measurable targets.

In the old way of funding the voluntary sector it was not measurable outputs that were funded but a role. In some cases this was then monitored subjectively by officials who worked side by side with voluntary organisations - often serving on their managements. The officials could tell whether, in their judgement, the money was well spent or not. Such on the spot officials were also better able to assess the intangibles - how did an organisation actually feel. Were the people in it happy? Was it increasing its participants' self confidence. In other cases in the past trusts and charities specialised. These trusts developed deep relationships with their funded protégés - here too it was possible to know what was happening on the ground. Increasingly however, as the sector and funding has expanded, more and more funders are at an arms length relationship with the activities and organisations they are funding and have little time to stay in touch. They stay in contact with paperwork only and something very vital is then lost.

As elsewhere in the public sector the issue has been how you supervise and control processes and people who you are not standing over every day and not in direct contact with. The answer found is to get people to regulate themselves - to insist on measurable outputs and measurable outcomes and then on self monitoring against those measures. This puts arms-length organisations on a kind of autopilot - on a course constructed as far as possible at the time of the application process and soon afterwards.

It would be too one-sided not to acknowledge that the trend towards applications and monitoring on the basis of specific and measurable targets has often led to improvements in focus, clarity about what one is doing and better performance and quality control. But there also new problems, costs and disadvantages. It is now well overdue for the voluntary sector to review the costs and disadvantages of this way of working to see what can be done about them. This is a job for us - not for KPMG or Price Waterhouse or the city or county council.

The costs and consequences of measuring

New methods of performance control have often proved unworkable, demoralising and stressful and downright destructive to the voluntary sector (and, indeed, across the board "at the public sector coal face" where services are actually delivered.) The reason is that while in the private sector you can produce airbuses, tanks or Mars bars in long runs in which each sellable product is identical, in the human and environmental services things are much more variable. Projects are different, cases are different, each location is unique and many of the services delivered are highly intangible because they are often about person to person emotional interaction. You cannot easily measure intangible but crucial outcomes like increased personal confidence or happiness and it is almost inevitably insulting when an individual is measured for someone else, on a high pay scale, about their voluntary commitment. When funders were in much more direct touch this was less of a problem - it was possible to sense whether a place was happy or not, whether participants were getting something out of it. . Now, when the officials go out once a year on a monitoring visit the personal contact cannot be the same and is not the same. It feels like more like a spot check or a test rather than a working relationship.

The thing that many users of services often valued about the voluntary as opposed to the statutory sector is that the personal gap between service providers and users felt smaller. In the community the service felt much more personal and less intimidating. There was a tendency for the voluntary and local group to be asked to do things for clients other than the services that were originally conceived - and the flexibility do this existed. When one was funded to fulfil a role this wandering off objectives was not so much a problem - voluntary groups could evolve to the real on the ground situation. Now such a role change could be perceived to be "off target" on the service level targets and milestones.

Many services do not lend themselves to statistical analysis. You can only count things when they are in a common category - and virtually nothing done in any one organisation in the local voluntary sector is exactly comparable with anything done in another organisation.

Even worse the demand that one sets up measurable outcomes in some cases inevitably means measuring the client group and sometimes the very act of measuring stigmatises and categorises the client group you are trying to draw in, marks them out and damages what you are trying to do. Time and again measuring "client outcomes" defines and emphasises the "clients" as people with problems and thereby confirms this identity, lowers their self esteem and pushes them back into those problems. Measure people and you stop regarding them in their individuality and this is often just what they need.

Paradoxes are unavoidable in human relationships. If human relationships were mechanically predictable we could make funding bids with exact forecasts of the outputs and outcomes and meet the forecasts without problem. However there would then be no meaning to the word "voluntary" which implies that people get involved through their own free will. Unlike the statutory services people get involved in or take up voluntary services as volunteers and/or users because they choose to.

When it is unproblematic to count people (because they are not being counted as part of a stigmatised group) the performance of a voluntary group can often be sufficiently measured by the number and regularity of people who turn up to use it. People do not come back time and again unless they are getting something out of it. This however is rarely enough to satisfy our betters who want ever more figures to prove that we really are "pursuing excellence".

Application processes and performance control - Byzantine complexity

It can all lead to great complexity and great inflexibility. There are many funding programmes nowadays which seem to want to give finance to exactly the right kind of social, environmental and community aims - somehow, however, making applications to them always seems to be tantalisingly too difficult, requires too much work, is too hemmed in by conditions and/or are in other ways just out of reach. A large part of the difficulty arises trying to fill in multipurpose application forms of massive length which simply are not designed in a way that matches what your organisation does or which ties you down to the future in a way that is unrealistically inflexible. Such exercises can be unbelievably stressful when not only one's own future but that of many colleagues depends on the outcome. Stress is a cost, incidentally. I am writing this essay at the end of a sick leave period caused in part by the very pressures described here. At a certain point the demoralisation, stress and frustration drives people away from their jobs - at this point it cannot really be said to be improving things any more.....

To make a bid now resembles taking an examination for a master's degree in voluntary sector administration. This is a trend that the organisations run by the people with degrees in business administration may be able to cope with but it does not help the process of "capacity building" which newer and smaller organisations are undergoing. It makes it more and more difficult to get an organisation started and drawing in lay people for this uphill task is now asking a lot. The entry barriers to community and voluntary activity are growing and, as in the market, when entry barriers grow, so does the tendency for large organisations to take over the market. The big fish eat up the small ones. Independent organisations become dependent ones.

In the bidding it is often quite impossible to make any sense at all of the application forms partly perhaps because of the attempt of the funders to construct a bidding process in which very different kinds of activities and applications can be forced into a spurious kind of comparability. To make things comparable and quantifiable it is necessary to impose uniform definitions and criteria on activities which are not in fact quantifiable and which are not in fact comparable.

When monitoring information goes upwards and nothing comes back....

In management theory, monitoring and evaluation information is collected with the intention of being part of a feed back loop. It is turned into suggestions for change and improvement. However this is often not the case if the information is going to the appointed Nottingham City Council Project officers. It is put in the post to them and then disappears. The rumour is that, in many cases, the information not only does not come back as suggestions for change, it goes into the waste paper bin. Or, if it does not, it might as well do so - as nothing else comes back.

All that monitoring then does is create a pervasive sense that, as far as the funders are concerned, project workers have to be checked up on - or a "paper trail" is created to cover the backs of funders unless anything goes wrong. Often enough, monitoring forms are sent out by officials who one does not really know. There is a Kafkaesque situation where one does not know whether officials are or are not judging your work and whether, if they are, they have any real qualifications in comparable experience of what you are doing, to be adequate judges or your work or not. It is an institutional framework that could be almost designed to produce paranoia. Why should you trust someone you never see and do not know to be able to judge your work?

Such a feeling would not have existed in the days when financial decisions makers were officials who actually got out of the office regularly and were working alongside you discussing with you the issues day to day. As the gulf between the grant givers and grant receivers gets ever more distant such problem will continue to grow. In the case of the council, if the officials were not processing quarterly returns but annual ones they might have enough time to go out and get involved with the groups - but that would never do. Policy officers might get contaminated by involvement in operational issues and perhaps the officials would "go native" - becoming too sympathetic to the voluntary groups and helping them in their criticisms of the council, as used to happen.

Two stage bidding

The new national fashion for two stage bidding adds complexity and raises the question of whether the amount of resources spent applying for bids, considering them and supporting the bidding processes may not actually now exceed the amount of resources actually eventually handed out. This is connected to an apparent trend at a national level to use large national voluntary sector organisations as agents for the handing out of finance to smaller local level ones. Of course this is another pressure towards the concentration and centralisation of the voluntary sector. Many of the national level organisations operate as empires who will doubtless be very well placed to move in and profit from the trend towards comparable "packages of voluntary services". Unfortunately, in the process, the notion of the voluntary and community sector as pioneering adaptations to match local circumstances and local gaps will disappear.

The recent example of the green spaces and sustainable communities programme by the new opportunities fund seems to me to exemplify this. The role of Green Spaces in Sustainable Communities seems to me to be an inherently local one - it is one of the few relatively simple and inexpensive areas in which local communities can genuinely exercise some control over local resources in a local interest. Yet when this programme was organised it was first put out to national level organisations to organise the distribution and administration of money at a local level. This followed a consultation which was doubtless well publicised in London but was not known to a of a host of people busy in various community gardening ventures in Nottingham until it was too late. I work in a project whose core notion is a green space and a sustainable community - yet it has so far been impossible to apply for money.

The watchdog and pioneering roles of the voluntary sector - destroyed by the inflexibility

Two former roles of the voluntary sector which are particularly badly hit by quantifiability are the watchdog role and the pioneering role. In effect we are all now expected to make more and more detailed descriptions of what we are going to achieve in the future and how much it is going to cost and what the outcomes are going to be, all in measurable form. Whether it is budget forecasts or measurable outputs and outcomes someone above us expects us to create a predictable view of what the future will be - in the case of Nottingham city council for up to three years ahead - and we have got to send them regular reports every three months about how well we are doing in measuring up to this god- like expectation of planning, predicting and creating the distant future according to plan. This is difficult enough when one is establishing a service based on past precedent which will be based on routines - it is a complete impossibility when you are actually trying to pioneer completely new processes - as is involved in development work. When you develop things there is trial and error, there are sudden leaps forward and sudden set backs. You can forecast processes for which you have a trial and prototype, or activities which have a routine character, but not new ones. Development is not very predictable. But with output plans for every three months for the next three years one is tied into a rigid plan - it is not very easy to change direction. Were the funding organisation equipped with an orientation to the operational day to day issues because they were actually around week by week that would not matter so much. Without this to change direction is bound to feel like failure.

Watchdog roles are also going down the pan. As a watchdog you bark when you become aware of an issue - it is an essentially non-plannable and topical role which does not lend itself to predictable in output targets. Of course a positive outcomes in the watchdog role is getting public authorities and other players to change their minds - which is just what they often do not want to do.

Influencing policy? - Pull the other one.

When Professor Giddens and Hilary Armstrong promises that the voluntary sector will be able to influence policy I therefore regard this with a great deal of scepticism. You can influence policy best of all, not by responses to their consultation papers but by showing a model works through successful innovation but you cannot innovate tied into an output straight jacket over 3 years. I certainly could never have developed Ecoworks under the current city council regime.

So when Professor Giddens and Hilary Armstrong say the voluntary sector and citizens are to be invited to influence policy more I have my doubts. In Nottingham in the last few months the city council has argued a case explicitly against consultation rights for community associations when community centres are sold. In the case of Hyson Green it has also demonstrated that it will interpret service level agreements any way it wishes. It is busily dismantling its network of community development workers which it did without real consultation (because community workers helped local people speak out and therefore played a feedback role) and it is attacking practical services resources to community and voluntary groups.

At the best of times, when you are actually being listened to, the attempt to influence policy is extraordinarily time consuming so that you have to virtually abandon involvement in anything resembling "social entrepreneurship". If you want to do something directly about your problems then you may find you do not have the time for "influencing policy". This is what I have found over the last few years. Once I started developing a project I disappeared from policy making forums for several years - and several people remarked on this. I came back when I found the council wrecking what I and other people were trying to do - at Hyson Green Community Centre, when they took away the building from us to sell to their own chums, undermining a lot of voluntary work there and completely underming my faith in them as a trustworthy partner.

It is true, of course, that while I was developing a practical project I got lots of brown envelopes with sticky address labels on them full of invitations to consultations about urban regeneration policy, partnership councils, health and social services new agendas, new deals in this and planning zones in that. These policy programmes come on top of, and further complicate, the meetings that I was invited to as a result of reorganisations in local government, the health services bureaucracy and Europe. Few of these policy changes were ever really helpful because whatever their intended aims as individual programmes the net effect of this restless energy with which government "improve things", when they are all added together, is chiefly to eat up the precious time that you would like to devote to developing your project on the ground and because, whatever the programmes say about local involvement, the officials and politicians seem to do just what they please anyway.

Local Government Reorganisation - when you are serving several masters

One particular policy rearrangement that has turned out, in my tiny corner of the world, to be far from an improvement is local government reorganisation. As is the case with many organisations who serve the Nottingham conurbation I am now funded not from one, but two, sources: the city and the county. This means not one but two sets of bidding processes and not one but two kinds of monitoring and supervision arrangements. I also work with an organisation that is funded from yet further sources with their own monitoring and re-application arrangements. The overall result is our tiny organisation often feels supervised by the "men in suits" to the point of distraction.

What may seem a perfectly reasonable demand by each funder taken separately can hopelessly stress an organisation on some occasions. Suddenly the demands on an organisation to reapply for funds and filling in the returns, comes, like badly timed buses, all at once. The paperwork has to be processed through the same admin. worker and the same over stretched voluntary managers and the same screamingly tense development worker(me). When you are only paid to work a three day week the situation appears even more absurd. (As when the city sends out refunding forms and monitoring forms right in the middle of the summer holidays with a four week deadline.) It has largely been a situation of this kind that has wound me up so much I am writing this on the sick. If I am not refunded now I think a life on the dole or another job of another kind may well be a personal blessing.

What is the NCVS doing about it - the role of "voluntary sector leaders"

This bears on the policy role of the umbrella organisations like the NCVS. The sort of problems described above is the sort of thing NCVS should have been searching for solutions for. Yet while these problems have been developing I haven't actually seen the CVS doing anything about them. A few years ago I had experience of NCVS playing, as I saw it, a very positive role acting as lifeboat for some activities when Nottingham MIND imploded. I have a personal reason to be thankful to CVS. However in the last two years I have felt frustration at its failure to take up these matters.

I suppose one may get a position where "senior staff in the voluntary sector" tag along with, and play a role commenting on the endless new "improvements" and policy initiatives of the bigger players in governance, local care and development policy. This can, I suppose become the almost exclusive role of the senior voluntary sector representatives, responding to the big ideas of our betters - while there is simultaneously a neglect of the real problems of smaller grass roots organisations who are doing the tangible and real work of the voluntary sector "at the coal face".

There is here a real danger that one ends up with an out of touch kind of "strategic leadership" at the top of the large voluntary organisations that has no living connection or relation to the grass roots problems and activities because the leaders of the big organisations (like NCVS) have not had (sufficient) recent exposure to the range of practical problems and issues for groups, are not really in living contact with them and are not really trying to find common solutions for these problems. This has, I believe, been largely true of the NCVS in recent years. The role of organisations like the NCVS is to make strategic initiatives to take up the common problems of the voluntary sector - not to be a bit player commenting on the agendas of the statutory and private sectors.

Without its ability to pioneer new approaches and act as watchdog there is nothing distinctive left about the voluntary sector and it becomes merely a cheaper way of subcontracting public services. There is a danger that at the senior level the reps of the voluntary sector no longer actually push forward anything very distinctive and they become absorbed into the way of thinking of their business peers. In time, as I have suggested, the voluntary sector will become pressured to become a part of the market for care and environmental services - dominated by national and even international players. At the moment I have seen no sign that the people who are running NCVS seem to recognise these issues as problems. In the literature that has recently been sent out to candidates about the vacant chief executive post the language of business permeates the description of the role - a language of "customers" and the "pursuit of excellence".

The Passion for Excellence - or a capitulation to PR Bullshit?

The people and organisations that use the services of NCVS are not in my view best conceived of as customers. There has been a relentless trend in recent years to adopt ideas and methods of working from the private sector which are not appropriate, to present citizen decisions and issues as if they were consumer decisions and issues. The two are not at all the same thing. When we act as customers and consumers we act in our private and personal interest - when we act as citizens we are concerned with a wider view than our own personal interest. A citizens we take decisions based on judgements of what is important for the health of the community. Issues like social justice, equality and environment motivate us which may transcend and conflict with our private interest. The NCVS is a council for voluntary service and in service one accepts that there is a higher purpose that one is pursuing. Most of the groups that use NCVS are also in service. They are not customers they are fellow citizens who deserve an effective service - as well as sharper thinking from the NCVS about what it is there for.

Nor should we swallow "the pursuit of excellence" slogan. Of course we are in the business to improve things and rectify problems when things go wrong but I believe strongly that this fashionable phrase is PR hype and has done nothing to make the voluntary sector a pleasant place to work in or to improve its effectiveness. What it does instead is promotes a culture of expensive and glossy multicoloured appearance, discourages us being able to openly discuss the inevitable problems that will always arise in any human endeavour, and creates a culture of hypocrisy and pretence.

The pressures that I have described has created a trend towards managerialism in the voluntary sector - the pressure to adopt paper based spuriously "objective" methods from large organisations imposed upon smaller ones. Many of the problems of the voluntary sector arise through 'partnerships' in which the large organisations and their ways of thinking and working based on multiple specialised departments are expected and imposed on our very tiny ones where our tiny groups of staff and core volunteers simply cannot cope with the expectation that they should be expert specialists in everything. It is a tribute to the flexibility and breadth of many voluntary sector staff that they can run tiny organisations given these diseconomies of small scale operation - and sometimes we should recognise that they cannot and are failing.

Problems in the voluntary sector that haven't gone away - despite "improved monitoring"

It is also necessary to acknowledge that there is in the voluntary sector much that needs putting right. We like to pride ourselves on being a not for profit sector motivated by high ideals but the reality is often far more mundane and in places incompetence and even corruption prevails. It is time we spoke the simple trust about the voluntary sector instead of PR spin. Only in this way can we actually hope to improve it. There is a problem of many small organisations floundering in hopelessly stressful situations with impossible workloads because they are trying to be all things to their users and are overwhelmed by the paperwork. There is a problem of tiny organisations who over the years have got staff who have grown weary and lost their original idealism who are marking time and achieving very little. There is a continual tendency in the voluntary and community sector for organisations to evolve to have an important consultative role who, after many years, have staff regularly meeting the statutory sector and who are part of a power club but who no longer have a living relationship to any constituency of users behind them.

There are no simple ways of dealing with these many problem areas. But they are issues that need airing, bringing into the light and discussing if the voluntary sector is to be renovated and not to become a musty museum of hypocrisies. One of the main problems in the voluntary sector is organisations where the best people get the paid jobs so that one ends with management committees that are very staff led - and little real or practical support from the volunteer managers. The goal to empower users who have no prior managerial experience has to be held in balance with the need for decisions to be taken by people who know what they are doing. However it is often the case that the experienced managers have not had the practical, emotion and other problems that the organisation exists to solve.

There are organisations where simply too much is going on for volunteer managers to oversee and there really needs to be a paid manager to do the co-ordination but no money to pay for one. There are cases where volunteer managers based outside an organisation can have the wool pulled over their eyes by those in the office every day.

It has to be said that it is my impression that the new fashions in performance monitoring and control by the city council have done nothing to put these things right because one needs monitoring and supervision that is either on the spot and/or made by people who actually have enough living experience of the voluntary sector, know how it works and know what it is like. In the arms length model the funders have lots of paper but they do not really know what is going on - and if they did would not have the orientation to know what might be done. The true futility of the new monitoring arrangements is best of all demonstrated in the fact that is a group is favoured by officials and politicians then the monitoring and performance regulations make no difference whatsoever to whether it promoted or not. (The county have a different and better record on actually taking their performance control seriously. Ironically the county does not use SLAs and nor 3 monthly output monitoring. County social services monitor by insisting on certain contents in annual reports, which have to be written anyway, which include annual quantitative figures. Perhaps it is significant in a case that I know of, where the county did cut off money to an organisation, that the official concerned had actually served on the management of the organisation that was not performing well and knew what it was like.)

The NCVS - neglecting its constituency ?

So there is plenty to be getting on with. CVS needs to urgently address matters internal to the voluntary sector and its relations to the funders and authorities. I have not seen CVS in recent years involved in a deep dialogue with the rest of the voluntary sector on these crucial matters of joint concern - service level agreements, practical resource strategy, the future for the social economy, ineffectiveness and corruption in our own ranks, the city-county double burden and so on. Was this was because I was not looking? Instead I get the impression that CVS has been involved in regional wide forum's and with the private and public sector. I wonder if my impression is right and whether the cost of putting the emphasis on working with these organisations "above it" is less time and attention to the needs of organisations "below" it ( I use the terms above and below not to denote implied status but merely size and resources). Do others share this impression that there has been a neglect of the issues of the constituency that CVS should be representing and supporting - I suppose it could be an illusion because I have spent much time working in my own corner and not paid enough attention to what CVS has been doing. Another interpretation might be that problems have to accumulate to a critical mass before they can be described and dealt with. It might perhaps be wrong to issue backward looking condemnations - the important thing is to deal with the situation now.

The proper role for CVS is not to substitute itself for the many voices and initiatives that the voluntary and community sector represents, still less to poach activities and resources from them, but rather to encourage and defend that multiplicity of voices. Its role is then to take up only those things which are common to all or a large majority of groups. It is the role of CVS to detect early and explore the emerging common areas of concern and find solutions for them. As I hope I have shown there are quite enough of such things to be getting on with.

The way in which the NCVS then gains a proper influence over the larger organisations of city governance like the local authorities and health authority is by a general recognition of the thoroughness with which its dialogue with own internal stakeholders and external constituency of Nottingham Voluntary sector organisations is conducted.

Good relationships arise out a consultative style of working that strives for consensus and which involves the right amount of delegation - so that one respects the skills and ability of one's colleagues. Good working relationships are based on trust but sometimes, unfortunately trust breaks down - that is, after all, why the voluntary sector was recently asked about the matter of whistle blowing. It is sometimes necessary to blow the whistle on the public sector and on the private sector and sometimes too what is happening inside the voluntary sector itself when its "leadership" is doing the job inadequately. "Good working relationships" should not be based on shabby consensuses that bury differences in the interests of expediency.

In conclusion

Quantifiability in funding application processes and performance measuring has led to a host of problems which need looking at. So to have service level agreements. There are not simple blanket responses and we should not deny that it is often useful to render things more tangible by quantifying them. But there are problems that have been neglected and we need a research and discussion process to produce improvements.

As the slogan "partnership working" has become an unchallengeable shibboleth not enough recognition is being given to the fact that partnerships between unequal partners can be detrimental to the smaller participants. There are now examples of what are called partnership working which are actually large organisations bullying small ones, with no regard for their needs and no respect for the voluntary and community sector.

In particular getting the city council to understand partnership working is now one of the principle problems facing the voluntary sector and the NCVS - especially as the City, following the national expectation from the Home Office, the NCVO and the Local Government Association is just about to launch a local compact on relationships between the voluntary sector and the local authority. I have felt for some time that the NCVS has been failing in not responding to the appalling way in which the city council is now operating.

It does not have to be like that. There are impressive counter examples in Nottingham where there is genuinely good practice - often led by officials who have long experience brought in from the voluntary sector. The sensitive way in which the Department of Public Health Medicine in the Health Authority has worked through the Health in Your Environment Group and the FEAT seminars using multi agency working has created a holistic approach to strategy in health, environment and local social and community economy matters.

Getting a common response from the voluntary sector would itself be a major exercise in partnership working. It is not the job of NCVS to formulate a response on the hoof on such complicated and fundamental matters. It is its job to organise the process so that the sector as a whole finds its voice. There is a need for a proper well prepared and researched discussion in which different experiences and viewpoints of working with the city can be brought to light and then aired publicly - including of course the many positives - and then formulated as a set of practical proposals for change. Such a debate should draw in the main voluntary sector trade unions, which are, of course, themselves, voluntary organisations, like MSF, the T and G and UNISON.

Brian Davey

October 2000 - writing in a personal capacity.

The conclusions of this paper can be practically summarised

by the following suggested principles:

A draft programme for the reform of Service Level Agreements

Principle One

Service Level Agreements and Monitoring Returns should be publicly available documents. This is so that what is happening with public money become transparent.

Principle Two

Service level agreements should be negotiable in their standard features as well as in their particular features (e.g. outputs and targets). Negotiations should be open to accountable representatives of the voluntary sector in regard to general features - as well as trade union representatives whose job is to protect the employment and volunteer rights of voluntary sector employees and volunteers.

Principle Three

Organisations that have a service level agreement, as well as the employees and volunteers of those organisations holding positions (e.g. elected management members) should be recognised as stakeholders with certain rights to consultation in dealings with the funders.

Principle Four

Stakeholder rights to consultation should include being told of policy developments and reviews effecting the stakeholders at the earliest feasible exploratory stage. No drafting of policy should occur before the way stakeholders will be effected is first worked through. The purpose of such consultations shall be to work towards agreed impact assessment statements for all organisations with which they have service level agreements who will be affected by their decisions. Regrettably the way public service bureaucracies and local government work often makes already drafted policy virtually a forgone conclusion at later "decision making" stages - drafted policy becomes the basis of other interlocking plans and changing it is then ruled out by politicians and officials alike.

Principle Five

Consultation means that all stakeholders have access to an equal level of seniority in discussions about things effecting them - this is to prevent senior officials and politicians forming clubs with their favourites and excluding non- favoured organisations with whom they nevertheless have a service level agreement.

Principle Six

Consultation should be for minimum periods of 8 weeks. Many voluntary organisations work on a monthly committee cycle a minimum of 8 weeks is needed to have a discussed response.

Principle Seven

SLA's will recognise that organisations take time to get established, sometimes take time to reorganise to face new challenges, and must sometimes be wound up in orderly conditions. Different standards are required for organisations in their capacity building phase, in reorganisation periods and adequate periods are needed for wind up.

Principle Eight

SLA's for reorganisation or wind up periods must be tailored to allow organisations to allow adequate time to help their staff and volunteers face the transition of redundancy and/or a different role. This should match the statutory rights of employees in regard to employment.

Principle Nine

SLA's will recognise that some organisations exist to pioneer new activities and act as watchdogs. These activities are not forecast able in the same way as with organisations that are providing and routine and predictable service and such work should be supervised and monitored differently.

Principle Ten

Funding should provide as a matter of course for the build up of reserves for redundancy pay and be adequate to meet other statutory employment rights.

Principle Eleven

As a general rule funding for continuous projects should be for a minimum of three years. If funding after the three years is not ruled out at the beginning of the process the first 6 months of the third year should be a review over the possibility of continued funding. The last 6 months can then be used as a lead in to new arrangements/reorganisation on continuation or a time for wind down.

Principle Twelve

The funders should be subject to minimum standards in regard to the processing of funding applications and prompt payment with the right of redress.

Principle Thirteen

Where public services grant giving organisations commonly give grant aid or commission contracts to many of the same organisations (say 20 commonly funded organisations) as do, for example, Nottingham City Council, Notts. County Council and Nottingham Health Authority, then they should adopt common contractual ad monitoring arrangements so that the funded organisation does not have to administer the monitoring and evaluation of the same funded activity with several different methods and processes. This is now putting a crushing burden on some voluntary sector organisations to the point of being unable to actually get on with the work.

Principle Fourteen

Where possible monitoring arrangements should be organised to be integrated into what voluntary organisations have to do anyway - or, put in reverse, the extent to which they are additional work should be minimised. A good example of a methodology for doing this is the Notts. county council social service practice of monitoring through setting standards and requirements for the contents of annual reports and accounts. Annual Reports and accounts have to be done anyway and a good annual report and accounts should be a good enough way of monitoring an organisation.

Principle Fifteen

An appropriate balance should be made between a paper based monitoring based on measured targets and person to person monitoring by officials. In most cases years quantitative monitoring to go in yearly annual reports should be enough. The time released from quarterly paper based monitoring should go into officials becoming more familiar with funded groups and their operational problems and potential through face to face contact.

Principle Sixteen

Complaint procedures should be streamlined to ease access. Notts. County Social Services guiding standards for the voluntary sector argues that "Complaints serve a useful purpose and should be welcomed and this should be clear at all levels of the organisation and built into the policy and procedures for dealing with them." This should apply also in relations with grant givers.

Principle Seventeen

It should be possible to refer complaints about breaches of service level agreements to courts. (NCVS and the Trade Unions should provide a service to assist in the pursuit of complaints).

Principle Eighteen

A special clause shall be written into service level agreements for circumstances where there has been a breach of trust. It should be explicitly acknowledged that a ground for complaint should include where the actions of the partner are such as likely to cause a general unwillingness or reluctance by citizens to get involved in community activity.

Principle Nineteen

It should be recognised that there is a place for the voluntary sector to help the voluntary sector sort out its own problems - often the expertise is more to be found in our own ranks than in the city council. Where possible public authority funders should acknowledge the value of employing officials with experience and knowledge of the voluntary sector to work with it.

Brian Davey
 

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©   BRIAN DAVEY