Birmingham Be Heard Consultation Response: Grants (For the Third Sector) People Directorate

Birmingham Be Heard Consultation Response:
Grants (for the third sector) People Directorate Budget Consultation 2017/18

INTRODUCTION

This document is compiled at the request of providers involved in the delivery of services under Birmingham City Council’s Grants for The Third Sector funding stream. As you are aware consultation is underway for a 100% cut to this funding which currently supports over 20,000 of Birmingham’s most vulnerable citizens. BVSC has been involved in the co-ordination of a sector-wide response to this, the details of which are provided in this letter.

This document outlines our response to the aforementioned consultation, following extensive consultation with our membership and primarily with those organisations in receipt of Grants (for the third sector) and Supporting People grants.

Given the range and complexity of the organisations concerned, it is difficult to summarise the range of sectoral responses into a single homogenous whole, and we have therefore set out a range of sectoral views followed by our own points and analysis.

SECTORAL RESPONSES

Members consulted have made the following points (presented here as direct quotations). These comments related to the likely outcomes should the consultation proposals go ahead, the conduct of the consultation process itself and the Council’s management of the Third Sector Grants programme.

Impact on service users

• “This will reap huge damage on our communities now and for years to come.”
• “This undermines the Council’s approach to safeguarding. These services keep vulnerable people safe. There’s no indication of what will replace them and no sensible impact assessment has been carried out.”
• “These services have stepped in when people have no one, not everyone can fall back on family. It will only take a few cases to greatly exceed the amount saved by this, it’s obvious that this is going to cost money. We are currently supporting 22,000 people for £2.7 million – where is the impact assessment of what losing this will mean?”
• “The message isn’t getting across the way the Council has behaved over the last few years has confused our service users; they don’t believe this is really it.”
• “By linking Third Sector Grants and Supporting People, the Council is ensuring the most vulnerable people will bear the brunt of these cuts. It’s disgusting.”
• “We need to go public with this, people expect these services to be there. It’s not until you or a family member gets ill that you realise what a problem this causes.”

Impact on organisations, services, and city finances

• “There’s going to be a huge investment cost when they have to put this right. Currently there is a lot of activity undertaken on a voluntary basis that has built up over the years, that will all disappear.”
• “The grant and trust funding we pull into the city is dependent on this activity, as well as our capacity to function as an organisation. The consultation seems to have taken no account of this. This isn’t just about the loss of this money – it’s about the loss of all the additional money it generates to support vulnerable people.”
• “This process is completely incoherent, because it’s treating these services as though they exist in a bubble. The Council leads on the STP, all that is going to happen is that the people we support are going to be bed blocking, or end up in A&E!”
• “There are clear alternatives to the proposed activity, some budget lines within the People Directorate appear to have increased and additional resources were allocated for adult social care in the budget.”

Consultation process

• “The Council doesn’t seem to know how it is meeting its responsibilities under the Care Act through these services. Prevention is now a legal responsibility and this moves the Council entirely out of this area.”
• “Why have they artificially linked 3rd Sector Grants and Supporting People? This sets third sector organisations up in competition with each other, and targets cuts specifically at the most vulnerable people in the city. Even given the Council’s financial challenges, their approach to this is unbelievably short-sighted. Who on earth is advising them?”

Grants management and risk to City Council

• “The Council is behind in its payments to some of us. Because of BCC’s failure to pay us for the work we have already done or are continuing to do, we are having to pay staff doing Council work out of our reserves. It’s out of order.”
• “A senior commissioning officer assured us our contracts would be rolled forward during the consultation process, yet we haven’t been paid, and we’ve had no written confirmation. They are basically failing to do what they say they are going to do, and we’re going to challenge this.”
• “How are small organisations expected to cope with the council not paying us, when they said they would? They are in breach of their own agreement with us.”
• “Commissioning managers do not understand the services they are cutting, there is no way that they could communicate the impact of this to elected members. We have to make them aware of the decision they are being asked to make.”
• “This whole process puts the Council at huge risk of legal challenge. They’ve already failed to meet their own contractual obligations, what is there to lose in holding them to account?”
• “It is staggering that some senior officers have claimed not to know what UPS – Universal Preventative Services – was. Yet it was supposed to be the exit strategy for this stream of funding!”

BVSC’S ANALYSIS

BVSC shares many of the concerns outlined above. We acknowledge and understand the pressing need for the Council to balance its budget in the face of disproportionately severe cuts from Westminster. We also acknowledge – as do many organisations in receipt of these grants – that there is a continuing need for change and transformation of the affected services in order to meet the emerging needs of Birmingham’s citizens.
However, the structure of the current proposals mean that cuts are specifically targeted at the most vulnerable members of our society. We can only hope this is an oversight, as it is clear from a cursory examination of the City’s publicly available financial data that other options are available (although the structure of the consultation precludes access to these).

It is our contention that achieving the proposed savings at the cost of so many lives put at risk, is neither necessary nor desirable, and that the consultation as it is currently structured is actively driving cuts towards those who can least afford to shoulder this burden.

Our concerns centre around the following issues:

1) The structure of the consultation targets the most vulnerable people in Birmingham.

The Council has arbitrarily “linked” the proposed cuts to two funding streams (Grants for the Third Sector and Supporting People). The Council’s own consultation documentation indicates that the two streams are therefore interdependent and that the results of each consultation will have an impact on the other - yet the consultations themselves are being conducted separately. The only proposed option for consideration under the Third Sector Grants stream is a proposed 100% cut.

This creates three undesirable and unnecessary effects.
Firstly, it pre-determines that a smaller cut to one stream automatically necessitates a larger cut to the other; and so it effectively sets third sector organisations up in competition with each other.
More worryingly, a significant consequence – presumably unintended – is that cuts are now being targeted specifically at the most vulnerable groups in the city: the elderly, the disabled, young homeless families, women and children fleeing domestic violence, and people suffering from mental ill-health.

Thirdly, by pre-determining that a cut should be made across these two streams, the Council has effectively prevented a position being put forward by consultees where no cut to vulnerable people can be advocated. This is particularly alarming given that there are other much larger streams in Birmingham’s overall budget, which could – presumably - sustain an individual or acollective cut. It is not clear why such options are not available within this consultation process.

2) The consultation process is not citizen friendly.

The consultation is presented as a cut to “funding streams” rather than a cut to “services”. No information about the services affected or the number of people likely to be affected is detailed within the consultation documentation. This makes it virtually impossible for individual citizens to determine what impact this will have on their lives, or on the lives of other people in the city.
Not only is the current set up likely to discourage responses, it automatically facilitates necessarily “uninformed” responses. Our concern here is that this effectively renders the consultation – and any results it may generate – as “unsafe”. Not only could this be highly detrimental to the service users of the organisations likely to be affected, it also leaves the Council open to significant legal challenge.

In addition, the current requirement for all responses to go through an online entry point could be actively disadvantaging those who are less able to use such media, and/or those who do not have easy access to IT equipment. The service users served by the funding streams concerned are likely to be the most IT-impoverished in the city, and this should be taken into account.

3) Lack of strategic coherence.

The services likely to be affected by the proposed cuts arguably provide significant cost savings to the city, yet these potential savings – or the impact of their loss - have not been clearly identified and presented within the consultation information. Apart from this, the delivery of these services form part of the Integrated Social Care Strategy, as well as the safeguarding strategy for the city. To remove them would undermine these strategies, undermine safeguarding andcreate increased costs for the City. Again, this element is not presented for consideration within the consultation process, making it difficult for citizens, service users, or organisations to make an informed response.

The consultation itself suggests that the funding concerned supports activity ‘in-line with the Care Act’. If the City believes some of its statutory responsibilities are being met under these grants, the details of this are relevant to the consultation and yet have not been presented.

4) Value for money

The £2.7 million to be saved by cutting the Third Sector grants will prove a false economy. Firstly, there is the loss to the City of the external funding that is levered through these grants, and the loss of volunteer input built up over many years, but even greater will be the impact of the loss of prevention services on the cost of adult social care.

In November 2016, the Council carried out an activity audit of Third Sector Grant-Services. All 41 organisations in receipt of grants were asked for a brief description of their service, user group, the number of service users, and the number that would require an Adult Social Care Assessment if they did not access support from this service. This showed that this investment is supporting over 20 000 people each year, drawn almost exclusively from vulnerable groups. Additionally, it is keeping a potential 3324 people from needing high cost care.

Putting alternative arrangements in place for assessment and delivery of these service users will be a mammoth task at high cost. Yet the Consultation Document states that the Implementation costs will be zero. This implies that the Council will simply walk away, but we know that legally they cannot do that, and the impact will be moved into a different budget, and probably at an increased overall value.

5) Impact on equality.

The cuts as a whole – centred as they are on Third Sector Grants and Supporting People - disproportionately target the most vulnerable compared to other areas where savings could be made. As far as we can determine, no adequate Equalities Impact Assessment has been undertaken by the Council, yet such an assessment could have provided useful – and arguably essential – information within the consultation process. Officers of the council have indicated that an equalities impact assessment will be carried out after the consultation is complete, but we would argue that this renders the consultation itself lacking in necessary information.

6) Miscellaneous issues.

We have had reports that current contracts under the Third Sector Grants programme are not being honoured. The Council verbally informed organisations that their grants would be extended pending the outcome of the consultation, yet several organisations report that the Council is now in arrears with its grant payments, and no written confirmation of grant extensions have been issued.

We understand that organisations have been sent a form by the Council indicating that they (the organisations) are expected to undertake direct consultation with 100% of their service users as part of this consultation process. Not only was this not discussed with organisations before the document was issued, it indicates a lack of understanding on the part of the Council as to the work that these organisations are doing. Some organisations would find it impossible to consult with 100% of service users as they don’t necessarily have ongoing contact with them beyond the intervention; others work with far too many to consult adequately with all of them in the allotted time. In addition, this would consist of significant extra work – work which is not, presumably, going to funded by the Council.

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTED ACTIONS

We believe there are alternatives to the current proposals. The Council could:

• Remove the arbitrary financial link between cuts to the Third Sector Grants and Supporting People funding streams. This would diffuse the sense of “competition” between third sector providers, and would nullify the current unintended consequence of cuts being targeted at the most vulnerable in the city.
• Empower citizens, service users and organisations to make informed consultation responses by providing a list of all services affected, including numbers of people and their needs.
• Empower citizens, service users and organisations to contribute by accepting all forms of communication, including written and verbal.
• Bolster the consultation data by releasing information on the estimated cost savings these services provide to the city.

• Publish information on whether these services assist the City in its legal obligations under the Care Act, and hold off on making proposed cuts until the impact the closure of these services would have on the wider system of adult social care can be properly analysed and presented as part of the consultation.
• Carry out an Equalities Impact Assessment to identify if the planned cuts disproportionately impact those with protected characteristics in comparison to alternative areas for savings. Such an assessmentshould be publicised prior to any decision being made.

A final – but highly significant – point. Under the aborted Universal Preventative Services procurement exercise, which was initiated twice and ceased twice (firstly due to a lack of expected responses and secondly due to an error in procurement practice on the part of the City Council), funding was seemingly being restructured to create community resilience as a way of mitigating the financial challenges faced by the city in the coming years.

The planned cessation of funding set out in this current consultation process seems to abandon all attempt at restructuring services around the needs of citizens, and the entire focus has become the administrative and budgetary requirements of the city. It is our contention that this results in a focus on short-term cuts at the expense of longer-term outcomes, and that the proposed reductions in funding will in fact create costs for the city – and its citizens – in the longer term.

As the consultation is time limited, we would ask that for responses to the above to be available within a week of receipt so that further consultation can be undertaken.

ENDS.

5th May 2017