I find it disappointing that our local Conservative party has picked an outsider as its candidate for Solihull constituency in the next General Election.

Julian Knight, northern lad and a senior editor specialising in money and property for the Independent newspaper, is spending spare time now trying to make a splash in Solihull. He is looking to get his name known, with letters to the local papers and crash campaigns on hot topics cum soft issues like the ‘Walk In Centre’ controversy, but there will inevitably be a significant proportion of spin in this.

Those who work in our Sector know just how long it takes to get under the skin of issues in our communities. A decade into my own work around the patch, seven of those years full time, and I am still learning. Looking back it took a good few of those years to get the pitch markings in focus let alone see the goalposts clearly.

Julian’s predecessor, Maggie Throup, had the advantage of knowing Solihull and its challenges well. As a long term and very active volunteer In our Sector and Chair of one of our charities working with a challenging client base, she remains very connected on the ground and versed in the local reality.

Like our two sitting MPs (who between them worked in agriculture and the prison service), Maggie has worked at the coalface of life in the commercial sphere. These are, to my mind, the sort of electoral candidates we need. One of the severest problems our current Parliament faces is that too many of the prominent faces are career politicians who stepped straight from University to Westminster and have observed that coalface from the lifthead ever since without getting their hands blackened. I regret to say that, in my personal view, being a career journalist at the national level is but one step removed, another observational role, that gets one versed in the theory but short on the gritty practice.

I am sure that Julian Knight is a thoroughly nice bloke and it is evident that he will throw his energy wholeheartedly into the role if he is elected. But, his selection, to my mind, shows the parties are not fully in tune with the way the electorate views Parliament. We surely want an MP who gives us a respected, local voice in the Chamber. To me, that is far more important, actually, than what party they belong to.

An article in the Solihull News came as a bit of a surprise the week before last. It announced the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) was putting its two ambulance stations in the borough up for sale. It appeared as if a Press Release had been pushed out so that the sale could be promoted in the hope of attracting potential interest.

The article also explained that new, smaller community stations would be set up in Chelmsley Wood, Shirley, Olton, Dorridge and at Solihull Fire Station instead and that Solihull Council had looked at the plan and were content that it would lead to a better service, but that the Solihull Independent Ratepayers were not happy about the proposal. The full article can be read here.

A bit of further exploration, particularly in meeting minutes on the Council web site, showed that WMAS had been in dialogue with the Council for some time, consulting them on the proposal. I found indications that a ‘community ambulance station’ will house two vehicles and round the clock crews but that not all the sites that will be used might yet have been identified.

However, I was surprised that no details could be found on the WMAS web site.

No doubt, as with all of us in current times, WMAS is under pressure to improve financial efficiency. No doubt it has invested a good deal of effort into modelling an improved approach, demonstrating where smaller ambulance stations would need to be to achieve the target response time to every part of the borough. It actually makes an encouraging change to see an organisation think decentralisation and localisation, a hub and spoke approach, as a route of service improvement.

However, what WMAS does not appear to have done yet, is put an emphasis on public reassurance, trust and confidence. There are outstanding questions in my mind that I hoped to put to bed by reading the background material I expected to find on the web. Plans for response to a major incident on the M42 and any impact on service to the rural east of the borough, apparently not served by a community station, are among them  Others who read the newspaper article will probably also have questions of their own.

To my mind, a major change in service provision like this needs a completely open and transparent approach to sustain public assurance. An FAQs page on a web site, for instance, would make a significant difference, as would publication of background papers, such as reports to the WMAS Board

There is nothing wrong with change, but a public service should be looking to take the public along with it, when it plans change. So it is to be hoped that WMAS will publish more details about their plan soon..

There have been a number of reminders in the past couple of weeks of what ails our society, none more so than the disgraceful response to the death of Margaret Thatcher. No matter what we believe about the damage she did to Britain and the extent to which she made Britain great again, two things stand out:

• she was a long serving and high achieving Prime Minister
• she was a ‘statesman’ who played a notable role in the ending on the Cold War and apartheid

And it beggars belief that so many have lacked the taste and decency not to respect her passing, but instead to celebrate both openly in the street and with a terrible song from The Wizard of Oz.

Where are the role models in our society to show youngster how to behave? Instead we have object lessons in living off the state and his women folk from Mick Phillpott, we have Tiger Woods parading imperiously down the Augusta fairways when he should have been disqualified, but no-one was brave enough to do it, we have Millwall fans spoiling a great sporting occasion at Wembley, we have the Police Federation encouraging coppers to sue crime victims if they get injured when they turn out.

What has happened to our basic values, of integrity, of respect, of decency, of having interests that go beyond self and onto thoughts of others.

Fortunately, they are alive and well in the Voluntary Sector, where our work to help and support others in need has not been so critical for many years. But, there is also a job for us all to do, to find a way of re-educating society back into a little altruism.

When Beveridge forged the welfare state, he was building on the model of the mutual aid society, in which others would help out a chap who was down on his luck. It was never intended to be a grab what you can, entitlement system. But, until we reverse attitudes, what is the likelihood of success for reformed processes?

It was a Monday afternoon when our Management team sat down and discussed a challenge we had been set for the first time. We were called upon to run some events in North Solihull to engage the local community with a new government funded initiative. Just one problem, they had to be planned, advertised and staged within just four weeks.

By the same time of day on Thursday, we had four events booked in four different venues, several partners committed to support them and a special two page edition of the Colebridge News prepared, laid out and off the printers. Not bad for 72 hours work!

I share this not to blow our own trumpet, but because it is such a great illustration of the value of involving the VCS in public sector projects. We are not restricted by red tape or bureaucracy and were able to run the work from one desk.We did not need to involve several departments and take them along with us. Our people are empowered.

We were able to hammer out a plan within the Monday meeting, start running with it immediately and deliver the first phase of work in a timescale that barely seemed possible as we first talked it over.

So, to VCS colleagues, we say, be sure that you can be fleet footed in getting new opportunities under steam and make sure your stakeholders are aware of this. To potential customers, we say, when you want something to shoot quickly out of the blocks, consider whether the VCS can help.

Meanwhile, the Colebridge News special and details of those events can be found here.

Across the VCS, and also most of the public sector, there is an emphasis on supporting those in need at whatever stage of their lives, and whatever holds them back. We look to deliver support, to break through barriers, to provide companionship, to open up new horizons, to fulfil the potential of other people’s lives.

Two events in the last week have focused attention on the hardest to help, where hope is at its most remote, where the conditions of life are at their most extreme.

On Monday night, 3 December, a host of volunteers, including Solihull’s Mayor and Police Commander, along with SUSTAiN’s June Mole, spent a freezing cold night in cardboard boxes on the pavement outside the John Lewis store. They did so to draw attention to plight of the homeless, as well as to raise money for the excellent work undertaken at Stonham’s hostel in Kingshurst, supporting young people with nowhere else to go.

Last Friday, Make a Better Life Trust Solihull, with support from the Adavu Project, staged a Conference about Human Trafficking, which opened delegates eyes to a reality that in all likelihood more people live in slavery today than in the days of the plantations. It is not widely understood that in modern Britain, people, and not just immigrants, have a totally miserable existence, in domestic servitude, in ‘gangs’ of rural workers and in enforced prostitution, with no personal freedom whatsoever.

SUSTAiN has been delighted to support both of these important events in small ways. John Lewis, Stonham, MABLTS and the Adavu Project all demand our thanks for tackling these vital matters, along with those who braved the elements to sleep out on Monday and those who attended Friday’s conference and came away determined to help in whatever small ways they could.

Above all, any of us who feel compassion for humankind, ought to commit ourselves to understand these complex subjects and seek the spirit of William Wilberforce, who three hundred years ago led the fight against the transportation of people from the third world into slavery. We need a new fight on behalf of those enslaved at the hands of modern day gangmasters and those enslaved into a life of exclusion on the streets. They, in 21st century Britain, are surely those in greatest need.

Seven years ago, when SUSTAiN was set up initially as a consortium of local infrastructure providers, the message was all about how things were going to change in the years ahead. The programme that central government were funding was then called ChangeUp.

Well, most of this has come true and more changes are on the horizon.

So, how are we at the Colebridge Trust & SUSTAiN responding to these new challenges and how are we supporting you?  We look back over the first half of this year and reflect on how we are getting on.

Funding

We now have Alan Crawford as our Funding Officer who has helped dozens of organisations improve the quality and success rate of funding bids. In little over a year, Alan has helped VCO’s bring in over three quarter of million pounds so far and has something like £3 million’s worth waiting for a decision.

Business Support & Fundraising

June Mole is probably the voluntary sectors best friend. June helps illicit support from and make connections with the private sector. When she is not doing that, she is busy organising fundraising events under the Solihull Together banner. The last two events June organised raised just over £10,000. All of this money goes back out in small grants to voluntary and community groups in Solihull. Around 60 groups have benefited so far. Another round of Solihull Together grants has just been announced.

Volunteering

Our Volunteer Centres are starting to make a difference to the number of people volunteering and the quality of both the volunteers and volunteering roles.  In addition to advertising volunteering opportunities and finding volunteers, they support organisations improve the management of volunteers. They have also started outreach sessions across the borough as way of improving the service within a limited budget.

Representation

The Voluntary & Community Sector Reference group provides a forum where your sector reps can meet, compare notes and get information out to you. This also provides a forum to discuss what we at SUSTAiN and The Colebridge Trust are doing and invite input.

Communication

Our SUSTAiN Alerts circulation continues to grow and we receive very positive feedback from you on their value.

Community Enterprise

For the past 7 months or so, we have been working in partnership with Development in Social Enterprise, BEST and Business in the Community to provide one to one support and workshops for VCO’s who are thinking about running a community or social enterprise. The feedback on the support has been very positive but the level of take up has been very low.  Even organisations running social enterprises have not taken up the offer of free support. All for good reasons no doubt but a missed opportunity for some.

Social Value & Commissioning

The Social Value Act is a significant piece of legislation which could benefit the VCS and Social or Community Enterprises and change procurement of public services in a way that benefits the local community more.  How it is applied is down to each local area. We have secured the support of the man who designed and tabled the bill in the first place to run a workshop on 23 November to help shape how it is applied in Solihull.

Income & Social Enterprise

One of the messages 7 years ago was the need to diversify income streams and the trend towards social enterprises. Our own social enterprises continue to forge ahead. Waterloo Woodwork and Colebridge Communications will now come under the single banner of Colebridge Enterprises. We have also now diversified into a new area of component assembly with the car industry which has created 10 part time jobs for people with a learning disability and others who are long term unemployed.  Our new venture has attracted regional and national press interest with both the Birmingham Post and Sunday Telegraph. The latter carried an article featuring us last weekend (4 November).

Our community projects Skills For Jobs and Solihull Health Trainers continue to deliver impressive results in helping people back into work or to lead healthier lifestyles.

Employment Support

Many of the clients that Skills For Jobs supports have never worked. Against an initial target of getting 5% of clients into paid employment, they have supported 48% of their clients to get jobs.

Health & Well-being

Solihull Health Trainers have recently established the Health Trainer Champions. There are 11 volunteer champions from the local community. They are be trained to level 2 RSPH ( Royal Society of Public Health) certificates which are nationally recognised. The champions will be an added resource to the core team to help promote the service  and provide health and well-being advice. They will work out in the community and refer those who need specialist support to the best place.

Training & Development

We are also working with Solihull College and Solihull MBC to establish Solihull’s Community Learning Trust (CLT). Solihull’s CLT has two themes. The development of more ‘enterprising communities’ and ‘improved health and well-being’ using learning as a tool.

Helping You

We continue to look at ways of improving our service to you and the local community plus our own sustainability.

Are you equipped to deal with change? Our own experiences and the services we offer may be of benefit to you.

SUSTAiN and the Colebridge Trust are here to help you. Please take advantage of that.

Two very concerning figures attracted my attention last weekend.

The first was that over a decade the percentage of non-retired households taking more money from the state in benefits, allowances, health and education services than giving to it via taxes and national insurance had increased from 29% to 39%. These findings came from an Office for National Statistics study. Retired households, of course, by definition, are net consumers rather than net contributors to ‘the system’ and they are increasing in number as well. Small wonder a few papers were screaming ‘less than half of us paying our way’ or similar!

The second was that the number of antidepressant prescriptions issued in England had also shot up dramatically over a decade, from 24.3 million to 46.7 million per year. That number is not much different to the adult population, so, given that repeat prescriptions are issued about 6 times a year, does that mean 1 in 6 of us are regularly taking antidepressants?

Both are strong indications that all is not so well in today’s society. The pressures on those who are in work seem to be like never before, but matched with the pressures on those trying but failing to obtain work. And what of the coming pressures on those who will lose benefits under welfare reforms?

We know that the pressures on our advice and support charities are increasing significantly from debt advice through to mental health support. There are understandable fears that the demand will continue to spiral upwards.

We must add into the mix that the high profile cases of Sir Jimmy Saville and Justin Lee Collins have exposed once again the extent to which victims at the hands of others are hidden in our society, that instances of a modern form of slavery are regularly being exposed, that cyberbullying is becoming endemic.

People need help. Only a modest percentage are getting it in time. The long term cost is being borne by us all, or, more accurately, by fewer of us.

But, no room for doom and gloom, there is a job to be done.The call is out, not only for us to continue stepping up and providing our high quality support services, but to lobby for effective change and contribute to the development of preventative approaches, so that more people live lives that they can cope with. The fundamental of social justice, that all people should be physically and psychologically safe and secure, seem lost in the mist and its quest should be reclaimed.

I have learned a new term, Transport Poverty. It may have been around for a while, for all I know, but I first came across it last week.

Put simply, as I now understand it, it’s about the impact on people’s lives of not being able to get about on the one hand, and on the other, the impact of the rising cost of ready travel on those who are financially struggling.

I found the term in a report on the subject, just published by Sustrans, the national smarter travel charity. You can find it here:

http://www.sustrans.org.uk/assets/files/Press/Transport%20Poverty%20England%20FINAL%20web.pdf

Travel Poverty suggests that:

• a lack of access to reliable and affordable transport has a very restrictive effect on the lives of poorer families and disconnects whole communities
• the rising cost of motoring and the necessity of car ownership is pushing others into debt
• a lack of adequate and safe alternatives to car ownership is depressing the whole economy.

Personally, I am not convinced that I buy the whole concept, but there is much substance to it and it reflects a couple of significant issues that we face in Solihull, in that:

• the public transport network has seen radical improvements in the past 20 years, but there remain woeful gaps in it, particularly in connecting people with jobs, and reliability is a serious weak spot.
• there has been some good investment in cycle routes and a project just started in Chelmsley Wood will add to that, but we are a long way from having a safe and well connected cycle network. That may, in part, be due to a lack of public support and (as evidenced by a current spat in Knowle that has spilled out into the local papers) a level of prejudice against cyclists.

Thinking around Transport Poverty brought me to cast my mind back.

Firstly to about fifteen years ago. These were boom years, but perhaps the cracks were beginning to show, I was working in a Solihull office in the private sector. Colleagues at various levels in the organisation were commuting huge distances daily from Gloucester, Cambridge, Liverpool and other far flung places and thought nothing of it, it was a side effect of getting the sort of job they wanted that paid to their aspirations. The cost of travel stacked up well against the cost of moving house, particularly in a increasingly uncertain jobs market. Since then employment has become much more volatile and the cost of motorway travel increased significantly. Commuting is economically stressful now, as well as physically stressful.

Then, much further back, to fifty years ago. I was growing up in a naval port, and the first service bus along every major route, at an unholy hour of the morning, was the ‘Dockyard Special’. Other ‘Works Specials’ followed. Workforces were collected and taken to the employment centres, and matching services brought them back at night. In between the same vehicles became ‘Schools Specials’. There were bus company employees who worked split shifts to man these services. They got lost as demand reduced, and independent travel took off in the growing affluence of the intervening years, and who wanted to work split shifts by the turn of the ‘70s anyway?

We should ask ourselves, have we gone too far away from this picture of half a century past? Have we geared our infrastructure too much towards the motor car? Have we allowed other modes of transport to decline too far? Is the transport network we have got totally fit to sustain our national health and wealth? Can our economy afford to pour as much fuel into the national drain as it does through our net daily commute? Can we return to local jobs for local people, and get them to those jobs readily, safely and affordably?

Perhaps we need to invest more in pursuing ideas to marginalise the car, like those of Ralph Cook (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-19503933), who has been inspired by Vauban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg). What we do not need, though, is millions being wasted pursuing ideas to make the long commute even more expensive if less painful, like Volvo’s Road Train (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18248841).

Meanwhile, we will hear more of Transport Poverty.

There is significant debate on the national stage at present about whether the provision of VCS infrastructure services, ie support services to frontline charities, communities and social enterprises etc, should be ‘demand led’ and if so how and whether provision of such services should be a ‘free market’. So, here is a local contribution to that discussion.

At face value the answer to both questions is ‘of course it should be’. There is no point in providing any service for which there is no demand and highest priorities should be given to greatest demand. If there is no competition in the marketplace then there is no motivation to deliver a responsive, high quality service. A good few of us are long enough in the tooth to know what infrastructure service which is neither ‘demand led’ nor subject to ‘market forces’ looks like and we do not want to go there.

However, that is a bit superficial because there is much more subtlety in the debate. The fundamental question of the moment whether grant funders should cease putting money into VCS infrastructure organisations altogether and give all funding to frontline organisations who will then be free to spend money on the infrastructure services they need but with a free market approach. There is talk of ‘voucher schemes’ for infrastructure services in place of funding, where vouchers can be ‘spent’ with a any infrastructure service on a qualified provider list.

This sounds like a good idea and up to a point it is. If a funder gives a charity a grant to undertake a project and that organisation needs a pre-planned element of infrastructure support as part of the project’s planning and set up phases, then it must be free to go to the ‘best value qualified provider’ to use that money effectively and responsibly.

As a key infrastructure service supplier in Solihull, we neither expect nor seek a monopoly and we expect to compete and have sufficient confidence in the quality of support that we give and the level of outcomes that we achieve to hold our heads up in the marketplace.

The ‘voucher scheme’ idea, though, is a bit of a side show. It is clearly being proposed to keep ‘cowboy providers’ at bay. If anyone, long on talk and short on relevant experience, can pitch up and provide an infrastructure service, take the money and be over the hill before the dust settles, that would not be a sound use of precious grant funds. But a ‘voucher scheme’ will be an additional administrative burden. There are established standards in the industry and recognised national bodies and this infrastructure could readily be formalised a bit more to solve the problem without ‘vouchers’. At home, you cannot spend money to have your gas pipes tinkered with by any old hack, CORGI registration is demanded. Similar principles could apply here.

The question then is could all infrastructure service be handled this way and all direct funding from infrastructure be withdrawn. Our answer is no.

The reality is that the provision discussed above is just one element of the total infrastructure provision. There is a question mark over whether this particular approach is compatible with the remainder, which includes Workforce Development, Capacity Building, Network Development, Communications, Brokering, Promotion, Representation and Consultation.

So, take out of this services which SUSTAiN currently delivers as part of our Service level Agreement with the Council on behalf of our local VCS, such as compiling and distributing the SUSTAiN Alerts and maintaining the network through which it is distributed, organising and staging the annual VCS Conference, running the Volunteer Centre, running development Workshops in response to demand, brokering Private Sector support and providing a representative voice to the Strategic Partnership. Could any of these be efficiently and effectively provided on a competitive basis?

Then a few further questions:

- Without a core infrastructure provision, how many emerging groups would actually get off the ground and would infrastructure provision be fair and equitable, consistent with the principles of equality and diversity?

- Without a core infrastructure provision, how many opportunities to connect groups with common interests together would be realised?

- Without a core infrastructure provision, how many hours would organisations waste dealing with speculative phone calls from competing providers and other attempts to sell unwanted sevices?

Finally, I want to focus on what for me is key concern about a potential move away from core provision, illustrating it with the work Alan Crawford has done since he joined SUSTAiN to provide specialist funding support. So far, Alan has supported community groups and charities to make 171 funding applications of which 101 have been successful so far. With 47 still pending that is an 81% success rate which has brought £627,936 in funding in total to those organisations.

Would the same achievement level be accrued by a range of different providers, some from out of borough, on a voucher scheme. Given that local knowledge and a grasp of who else is looking for funds, for what and from whom are key elements of the task, we somehow doubt it.

We believe that the current approach of having a core service and tendering it periodically on a competitive basis is the right one. However, what do you think?

If the riots and looting in the streets weren’t bad enough, there were two items in my Sunday paper this week that also depressed me.

Firstly there was a front page column explaining that some Councils were planning to use the Localism Bill to ban smoking in parks lest children see adults smoking.

Three things struck me as wrong about this:

• this is not what the Localism Bill is for.
• this is the Nanny State gone mad, the last thing we want to do is drive smoking underground, prohibition never works.
• there are far more urgent matters for Councils to spend their precious time and money on.

Which brings me to the second matter from this Sunday’s paper, a series of case studies in the glossy mag about professionals who had lost it all and were now or have recently been homeless:

• a female entrepreneur who the bank pulled the rug from, who ‘was given a mattress on the floor by a woman she hardly knew’ in place of the executive home she lost.
• a former stockbroker, homeless for three years, who found a bed at a YMCA.
• a chap who sleeps rough and keeps his shaver, suit and tie in a station locker and smartens up there every morning before going to the office, wondering when he will pay off his debts.

Is this where our current economic plight has led us? Young people riting and looting and people with ability, enthusiasm and a sound work ethic allowed to drop through the cracks.

I am delighted to have not yet  heard of moves to ban smoking in Solihull parks, may that remain the case. And we live in a borough where there is positive cross agency working to address homelessness, and give it an appropriate level of priority.

We need to do everything that we all can to ensure the horrors experienced in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Wolverhampton and elsewhere in the UK dont spread to anywhere in Solihull and the victims of recession and cuts are minimised and supported.

In the current climate it will probably get worse before it gets better.
Dave Pinwell, CEO of Colebridge Trust & SUSTAiN