Agenda item

(1)       Mr N J D Chard informed the Select Committee that his son received support from the KCC Disability Team.  This was not an Other Significant Interest, and he was therefore able to participate fully in the consideration of this item.

(2)       Mr Heckel introduced himself as the Director of Project Salus (Latin for “Wellbeing”). This had previously been part of KCC under the heading “Kent Safe Schools (KSS).”  In 2011 his proposal for KSS to become a social enterprise was accepted. KCC had provided Project Salus (as it was now known) with a three year grant and 23 staff TUPE transferred from KCC to Project Salus in June 2011.  

(3)       Project Salus had a turnover of £800k and it had lead responsibility for anti-bullying, drugs and alcohol education, restorative justice.  It received £1.2m from KCC to undertake work in Children’s Services, Justice, Youth Work (running youth clubs in Hythe and Maidstone) and Domestic Abuse. 

(4)       Questions - can you provide further details on the submission that “KCC and the services it commissions may benefit from a unified and corporate approach to commissioning?”

(5)       Project Salus has always been dealt with fairly and professionally by all commissioning directorates and units within KCC.  There are, however, marked differences in approach between them in other respects. For example, Children’s Services always provide TUPE information to all the bidders at the very start of the process.  Other teams, on the other hand, only provide this information after the contract had been won.  This usually leads to a renegotiation of the contract and can lead some contractors to withdraw altogether. 

(6)       Question - Can you explain what the barriers are to small organisations entering the market? 

(7)       KCC tends to split those services it wishes to outsource into Area lots, making it difficult for small providers to put in a bid.  The result tends to be the creation of consortia (which are by their nature difficult to quality assure) or that the risk is passed on to the provider who consequently needs to sub-contract. However, .when the Youth Service offer was broken down into 47 lots, smaller Youth organisations were able to participate and win contracts.

(8)       The answer lies in either reducing the area size of the lots that can be bid for or in making the criteria far more specific.  The overall current position is that small, local organisations are often effectively prevented from bidding because of the size of the contracts. Some contracts are for provision over half the county, so enormous amounts of work are needed to put a bid together.  Project Salus, for example, needed three staff to work fulltime for a week and a half preparing one bid.  Such a concentration of resources would have been completely beyond the smaller organisations’ capacity or would have been to the detriment of service provision.

(9)       Question – Can you tell us more about the “disappointment” discussed in the first paragraph of your submission?

(10)     Some of the KCC Teams are more adversarial than others.  Better results are achieved through a good working relationship, with flexibility on both sides.  If the Team and the supplier are able to work flexibly together they can overcome unexpected barriers such as changes in legislation.  The adversarial system leads to polarisation and a determination on both sides to stick rigidly to the contract.   This approach benefits no one.   When, on the other hand, both parties are committed to working together, it becomes possible to vary the contract in creative ways to reduce costs. 

(11)     Question – You talk about potential suppliers becoming involved in drafting specifications - do you want to have your cake and eat it?

(12)     Project Salus is very conscious of its previous history as Kent Safe Schools, but it has never made the mistake of considering itself as part of KCC.   The County Council is Project Salus’ largest and most important customer, so there is every reason for both parties to find better ways to work together.  We want a team-like relationship, but we can and will challenge KCC if we need to..

(13)     Organisations have to be more efficient. All profits made by Project Salus are ploughed back into its services.  At the point when the Project left KCC, 65% of its resources were concentrated on front line services. That figure now stands at over 80% as an outsourced company.

(14)     Question - What do you mean by “prescriptive tender specifications.”?

(15)     One of the reasons for prescriptive tender specifications is central government policy. Nevertheless, many of KCC’s tender specifications are more prescriptive in terms of service build than they need to be, asking for a certain number of hours with quantifiable outcomes.  It might be preferable if Specifications were to state the outcomes and seek suggestions for innovation in the services to achieve those outcomes. Currently, the tenders specify the number of social workers who need to be employed in specific areas to target specific family types.  If, instead, the tender were to set a target of reducing anti-social behaviour, the bids would become more varied and lead to higher quality of service.

(16)     There are organisations that do not deliver or are uncompetitive. Such organisations do not have the right to exist. KCC should be able to decommission those Voluntary Organisations that are unable to compete and deliver. But, by the same token, organisations should be able to hold KCC to account.  

(17)     Question – Your two main areas of concern appear to be the adversarial nature of some of the commissioning processes and the Quality Assurance regime.  Can you elaborate?

(18)     There is a culture in certain parts of KCC that leads to adversarial commissioning. The selection process usually involves scoring or marking a bid and then interviewing the top two or three bidders.  Some commissioning teams look for the strengths and positives whilst others search for flaws.  The less adversarial commissioners offer valuable feedback whilst their counterparts provide nothing more than a scorecard.  You can feel as though you have gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, and this does not help us to help you!

(19)     The QA approach tends to be more focussed on outputs than outcomes.  This means that numbers rather than quality become the way in which the success of a project is judged.  Project Salus runs the Shepway Youth Club in Maidstone where some 90 young people attend. This figure is above the target set. However, there is no measurement of what should be done for this number of young people.   Likewise, KCC specifies that the Youth Club should engage with the young people, whilst also requiring that the youngsters should gain accredited outcomes such as First Aid qualifications.  These targets can be in direct conflict, young People are at school all day learning, in the evening they also want a bit of fun and may not want to talk part in formal learning. Setting a target of this nature prevents Project Salus from achieving something of genuine value with young people – an outcome such as a decrease in antisocial behaviour.

(20)     Question - Could KCC enable its staff to develop innovation and make the savings i.e. 20p in the £1?

(21)     This would be possible but very difficult due to its culture.  Businesses need to look at profit and loss whereas KCC managers generically judge themselves based on the number of staff in their teams, the size of their budgets and their areas of control.  This leads to protectionism and the creation of a silo mentality.  For example - it would have been highly unlikely that my Team could have run a youth club during the period they were employed by KCC.  This is because as Education Directorate officers we would have been stepping on the Communities Directorate ’s patch.  

(22)     Culture is the hardest thing to change. It is changing at KCC but not fast enough. KCC’s frontline staff are skilled and innovative because KCC is very good at fostering personal development.   Its weakness is that it is very hierarchical across the Directorates. It is very difficult to achieve development or innovation in a hierarchical structure.

(23)     Question – Is it not true that targets come when outcomes are achieved?

(24)     Targets are important and should be qualified by the outcome.  There needs to be a purpose to the work undertaken. This means that work should be judged in terms of its overall effectiveness rather than on the number of nice things that have been provided for young people. Projects need to be quantified by outcome, purpose and achievements.  You can work with a family for two years but the question to ask is what difference has been made. Has anti-social behaviour gone down, and have the families’ employment and other prospects increased?

(25)     The volume of resources required to complete submissions could lead to the loss of good service deliverers.  Are these levels of service requirements achievable for small businesses?  There is evidence that some of them have viewed KCC specifications as unachievable and have therefore not tendered. Organisations have to ensure that they can continue to meet their own ethos.  No-one wants to do anything badly, and contractually everyone wants to do as well if not better that everyone else. All our reputations are at stake.

(26)     Question – Please comment on these two statements. Firstly, for certain services it would be better if local KCC managers, who know their patch, were to actually negotiate directly with the potential supplier.  The second statement is that the job and personal specification ought to be changed for commissioning managers so that they become less risk-averse?

(27)     The Munro Report on Child Protection called for local authorities to be risk-aware rather than risk-averse.  It is important to look at the quality of the decisions made rather than at the risk of taking the decision in the first place.

(28)     If a small voluntary organisation receives large amounts of money, this can actually result in its demise due to problems of cash flow, systems and staff numbers.

(29)     Question - Youth Clubs’ targets are set out in terms of numbers. Is this not because it is hugely difficult to quantify quality?

(30)     Project Salus has worked with Christchurch College on developing means to measure softer outcomes.  There would be cost implications and tensions if different, more comprehensive evaluation methods were to be installed beyond those traditionally used. For example 40% of KCC contracts are based primarily on price (which cuts out competition based on added value).

(31)     Question - Can you compare your experiences of Kent County Council with other local authorities?

(32)     All the local authorities tend to be on a par regarding the difficulties. Project Salus and KCC have the advantage of being familiar with one another. This means that it is less likely that a number of the Project’s staff will be asked to travel long distances for a thirty second meeting (as has recently happened with a nearby county council).  

(33)     KCC as a commissioning authority should not be seen as a “broken system.” But it could perform better – as all systems can.