The Government’s recently launched Procurement Pledge has not been well received. The Local Government Association (LGA), on behalf of local Councils, rapidly came out with an alternative and a number of VCS voices have come out in favour of that one and highlighted flaws in the original.

That the LGA felt the Pledge was too geared towards national private sector interests at the expense of local economies is very telling. Its own version of the Pledge puts more of an emphasis on local engagement and on bringing SMEs and VCS players into the picture.

SUSTAiN has an affiliate membership of the national infrastructure body, NAVCA. Their CEO was unequivocal in his view:

“The government’s pledge is a good idea that has been executed badly. The LGA’s pledge is much more voluntary sector friendly which is why NAVCA is happy to support it. We really welcome the recognition from the LGA that there is currently a risk-averse approach to public sector procurement that requires a change in culture at local government level. We believe that the voluntary sector and the LGA have many shared interests and look forward to others in the voluntary sector getting behind this pledge.”

I would encourage everyone in our sector to look at both Pledges, which can be compared here.

Whilst the Cabinet Office version looks good for Britain, the LGA looks good for Solihull as well. We should look for Solihull to adopt the LGA Pledge.

One of the themes we will be touching on at next week’s VCS Conference will be Skills and, to my mind, it is a topic that we may have neglected within our Sector in recent years. If we have, then we might take an opportunity to reflect about that. We should perhaps be asking ourselves whether we have the management and commercial skills in depth that we may need to meet the changing demands of a future era of commissioned services, personalised budget holders, social entrepreneurship and community rights.

The private and public sectors put an emphasis on continuous personal development, the identification and development of future leaders and the maintenance of development strategies that anticipate changes in demand for skills amongst staff. Such activity appears less prominent across at least some of our sector. There is a concern that, if our local organisations do not have the skills that may be necessary to compete in the marketplace, they may lose out as a  move away from traditional grant funding progresses.

SUSTAiN is currently in dialogue with Solihull College and Solihull Council to identify what skills development opportunities are available. We will then want to get a clearer handle on what the sector wants and work out the best way of matching the two together.

Meanwhile, Solihull College will be at the Conference, so that will provide a great opportunity for us all to talk to them about the skills development options that are available for our people and move our thinking forward.

In the meantime, we have set up an online questionnaire to get your views on what skills and apprenticeship schemes might be of importance to you. More details here 

Sometimes, we become aware of instances where either individual residents or a group of residents lobby the Council or the Police for change, often on environmental or highways matters, ie issues like parks, open spaces, speeding, parking and similar. Often they will say that they are speaking for a neighbourhood, perhaps a clutch of houses or even a whole road. Sometimes they will want to work alongside the public officers to achieve change.

On the one hand this is really encouraging. It is Localism in action, people feeling sufficiently empowered to take action. We need people to stand up and do their bit in the community. Society needs to recover an element of local ownership and this will only happen if some folk are prepared to get stuck in.

But there are challenges and concerns here as well. We need to ask whether the man in the street will be equipped to ‘do Localism’, to ‘be empowered’. I would not wish to decry or disparage the genuine efforts of that minority of passionate folk who are prepared to put their energies into improving their communities and neighbourhoods, but too common an outcome is a failure to take their neighbours with them, another is to fail to convince public officials or councillors that they are dealing with anything more than a single issue lobbying group.

Effective community action demands transparency, accountability, structure and a minimum set of standards. If Local Action does not operate this way, it will quickly fall into disrepute. Statutory authorities will not want to find themselves in the mire of a community squabble, because one group purported to represent a community and another group claims it did not, because one group wanted the landscaping of an open space changed and wanted to do it, but others wanted the status quo to prevail. Groups claiming to act on behalf of a neighbourhood need a mandate to do so.

For a group to go beyond single issue ‘not in my back yard’ campaigning, and to act for change and improvement on behalf of the residents of an area, then I believe that the following should be the case:

• all relevant residents should have been invited into a membership
• that membership as a whole should have agreed the objectives of the group and formalised a basic constitution
• that membership should have formally elected those representatives that give voice to the agenda and given them a mandate to speak on behalf of the whole group.

Regrettably, this frequently does not happen. Not because of a lack of will but because enthusiastic folk do not recognise how far the lack of such structure weakens their position and risks a ‘more harm than good’ outcome when residents do not recognise the group as their voice and nor do public officers, because there is no tangible mandate.

In promoting community empowerment, we will need to be clearer about the standards that will be required for neighbourhoods to be successful in stepping up, taking a degree of ownership and leading the quest for change. Emerging groups will need help and support to get started and that has yet to be thought through.

There appears to be a policy developing within the Cabinet Office that Local Infrastructure support is a lesser priority and/or should be market driven. That is fine up to a point, but emeging groups need to actually know that they need assistance to get started in an appropriate way in order to generate that market.

If Community Empowerment as an element of the Localism agenda is to succeed then national VCS infrastructure should be establishing better, more informative Starter Packs for those who step out to pick up the baton of 2012 style Community Empowerment and run with it. Local infrastructure support must be available to help with assimilating that advice and getting started.

The former is not yet happening, as far as we know, but as for the latter, SUSTAiN is here and ready to help.

A  top Government advisor has quit her role amongst a turmoil of allegations, a national newspaper observed that she ‘was last month criticised for taking an £8.6 million dividend from the company, even though it is entirely reliant on funding of around £200 million a year from the Government.’

Her company, from which she has also stepped down, is contracted by Government to support the long term unemployed and is a Prime Contractor for the DWP in 5 of the 9 UK regions. One may presume, then, that the company is finding their work pretty profitable if Ms Harrison was able to trouser such a huge bonus.

Meanwhile, charities working in the field that were unable to become Prime Contractors but signed up to work for the Primes as sub-contractors are struggling to make ends meet on the project.

After Devon based charity Westward Pathfinder found it had caught a cold with the over tight margins available from their Prime Contractor, it raised its concerns with local MP, Nick Harvey. A leaked letter which he wrote to the employment minister, Chris Grayling, urged the Government to review the programme and the way the funding operates.

Certainly, when Colebridge Trust considered engaging with the scheme and bidding for a sub-contracting role, we decided against it. We are proud of our record with our Skills for Jobs project and knew that the work could not be done properly for the sums available.

The Emma Harrison story raises significant questions about whether the Prime Contractors are passing enough of the available funding on. It also rings alarm bells that this may be a glimpse of a future pattern, with more and more publicly funded social action work being consolidated into large private sector contracts, VCS organisations being squeezed out or left to survive on scraps, whilst entrepreneurs slice off slathers of public money for personal profit without compunction.

However, unlike Westward Pathfinder, I do not believe calling foul will get us anywhere in those circumstances. The answer must be to act now and gear up to win on points. If companies for pure private profit are winning out over charities that put every penny into social action there will be a reason for it. They tell a better story, present a more business like face to the purse string holders or have a clearer focus.

Our sector will probably need to compete on a broader front with the profit makers. Commissioners need to more aware of the benefits of non-profits and more willing to trust in us. If they aren’t, it will not be their fault but ours.

I have been an avid viewer of a sedate travelogue on BBC2, now in its third series, called ‘Great British Railway Journeys’. In it, arguably the best PM we never had, Michael Portillo, proves an affable and informative presenter as he follows Britain’s railways from place to place and examines the impact that the coming of the railway had. He uses the railway guide published annually in the Victorian era by George Bradshaw as a reference source and meets local historians wherever he pitches up.

The programme is on too early to watch live so I have watched each series using iPlayer. This week I have followed Michael  through East Anglia where he has expounded the massive explosion of the Norfolk turkey industry when the railway brought it a route to wider markets, the way that the arrival of the railway created the largest freight gateway to our islands on the estuary of the Orwell and Stour rivers at Felixstowe and Harwich and how Southend boomed by attracting daytrippers by rail after it built a pier so long it carried it own railway, still operating today, to take folk out to its end.

With the railway, came prosperity. Towns and villages not on the rail network shrank. Which brings us to the Government’s approval of HS2 and the battle lines drawn around it. Each week seemingly sees new missives in our local newspaper fired off from H T Harvey representing the pro lobby and Richard Lloyd for the campaign against the project. Is it the expensive project we cannot afford or the project investment we cannot afford not to make?

Personally, I come unequivocally into the latter camp. This project is vital, essential to the economic health of both the West Midlands region and the UK. We cannot afford to fall behind the rest of world in our ability to move people and goods about. Before the present Government scrapped the Regions, the West Midlands was eighth of the nine English regions in the economic league table, despite our location at the central hob of the national infrastructure. The connections that HS2 would bring could make a significant transformation to that position, generating employment and bringing inward investment.

It is argued that that there is no demand for HS2. I am old enough to recall when there was no demand for the M1 and the M5. I remember being driven from Worcester to Ross on the M5 and M50 in the mid sixties, before the M5 extended north of Longbridge or south of Tewkesbury. We pretty much had the two lanes to ourselves all the way. Look at them now. As ‘Great Railway Journeys’ shows, infrastructure creates its own demand.

Now, we need to get people and goods back onto the railways. Rail is comfortably the most fuel efficient means of travel and in the era of climate change and global warming, we need to improve fuel efficiency. The Birmingham to Euston line is relatively saturated. It could take longer trains but few more trains and will not take freight slowing up the works. The Snow Hill to Marylebone has seen massive growth in passenger numbers since in reopened in 1993. It has always struggled to compete with the Euston line for speed but has won favour through reliability, which would be affected significantly by a growth in freight. A new, faster line would generate capacity for freight on these older tracks.

Given that most of the Euston line opened in 1838 when it was served by the Curzon Street terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway Company, now planned for re-use by HS2, and Snow Hill was connected to London by the Great Western Railway in 1852, it is perhaps no shock that these are routes that have exhausted their limitations. Like a tired early central heating system in a home, you can only keep it going for so many decades before you need a more modern solution.

However, to come back to where we started, and take a local perspective, the nearest station to my home is Dorridge. Around 1850, the Great Western Railway wanted to build the line across the Umberslade estate, but there was local resistance. George Fredrick Muntz of Umberslade Hall, MP for Birmingham, finally agreed to the railway, provided a station was provided on the estate for his convenience. The station was built, in the middle of nowhere, down the hill from Knowle, and called Knowle Station.

The railway offered the opportunity for homes to be built by those eager to commute into Birmingham’s commercial district and Dorridge came into being, setting the foundations for what is a relatively prosperous part of our borough today.

If the Solihull of the second quarter of this century has an economic heartbeat that radiates from Bickenhill with a rejuvenated NEC, an expanded international airport, a high speed rail connection to the north and to the south and vibrant surrounding business parks then our town will be competitive. And on that competitiveness the long term wellbeing of our community and its people will depend.

As in 1850, local resistance is understandable, but must be overcome for the greater good.

A short and simple Blog entry to start 2012. Please read the New Year message of Steve Wyler from Locality, which can be found at http://locality.org.uk/comment/years-resolution-expose-incompetence-failing-communities/.

It tells of the roots of the Legal Aid Service and the Citizens Advice Bureau and other advice work, a full 120 years ago, through the work of Frank Tillyard. However, it also how a national charity with no track record has undercut a Birmingham based specialist in the money advice field which has an excellent reputation.

It could happen anywhere, including here. One of our top priorities for 2012 will be to work with the VCS Reference Group and with our Partners to connect our local sector with the strategies that can keep local voluntary action in the hands of local organisations, run by local people who understand the local need.

The novelist, TV Exec and journalist, Daisy Goodwin, published a provoking poem in her Sunday Times column a fortnight ago that bears reproduction here, after some reflections, for it set me on a quest to find out more.

Its background lay back in 1720s London, where children were dying with an alarming frequency, especially the offspring of the poor. A staggering 74 per cent of all children born in the capital were dead before they were five years old.

A successful merchant, who had spent years in the colonies, returned to London and was appalled to find a host of abandoned children lying dead and dying in the street and determined that he would do something about it. He met a lot of opposition, for many of these ‘foundlings’ were presumed to be the result of immorality and it was thought that intervention would only encourage wantonness, illegitimacy and prostitution.

Yet Thomas Coram was a determined man and in 1741 the first children were admitted to ‘The Foundling Hospital’ (Hospital in a wider ‘hospitality’ sense of the word, not a place for the ill), taken there by their mothers as an alternative to being abandoned in the street. It was the custom of the Foundling that a mother would leave a unique ‘token’ with the child for identification purposes, in case she should ever have the means to return and collect the child, even years later, and take responsibility for it again.

The poem in question was written by such a mother, faced with the heart wrenching necessity to leave her child and is a key exhibit in The Foundling Museum today:

Hard is my Lot in deep Distress
To have no help where Most should find.
Sure Nature meant her sacred Laws
Should men as strong as Women bind.
Regardless he, unable I,
To keep this image of my Heart.
Tis vile to Murder! hard to Starve
And Death almost to me to part.
If Fortune should her favours give
That I in Better plight may Live,
I’d try to have my boy again
And train him up the best of Men.

The Foundling Hospital was a strictly not for profit operation and it had major support from big players, not least William Hogarth and George Frederic Handel. Its legacy lives on today, not just through the museum. The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children turned over £8.3M in charity funds last year and reflecting that the plight and blighted lives of some children remains a priority in our society and can be as poignant and tear jerking as the story above. Their approach has changed radically over the years but an emphasis has remained on pioneering change for the benefit of children.

A willingness to change and adapt and improve, and a recognition that the interests of the client group are paramount, may well be the secret to the longevity of this charity. Not many organisations have clocked up almost three hundred years of making a huge difference to a host of lives. They have faced tough times, made it through and gone on stronger. An encouraging thought in the challenging times we all face today. What it takes is the grit and determination trailblazed by Thomas Coram.

How many people face the same hopelessness as that mother. How many are dependent upon having a charity or community group to turn to, run by people who will not accept the status quo and are determined to change things for the better.

As we face a challenging New Year, we could do worse than recall the grit, determination and trailblazing spirit of Thomas Coram, and the willingness to get stuck in, to improve and to adapt for survival and growth, that have left his Foundation the strong force it is still today, almost 300 years on.

Our sector is built on such spirit, taking hope into desperation (even if times are no longer as desperate as they were in Thomas Coram’s time). Long may it be so. A prosperous 2012 to all.

Dave Pinwell, CEO

The pension age is rising and the economy is shrinking. In these tough times, there are numerous over 60s who in receipt of final salary pensions who continue to work at least until their DWP pension kicks in, The jobs market is so much less ageist than it was a decade ago as the experience of the mature worker is better valued. The end result, our youngster are being squeezed out of the employment market.

Youth unemployment has rocketed, at both ends of the education spectrum. Those leaving college with degrees and massive debts are waiting in the job centres shoulder to shoulder with the unqualified. Young people find themselves in the classic ‘Catch 22’ situation, employers want to take on people with experience, with no job that experience cannot be acquired.

At the same time, there is a feeling out there that young people do not help themselves. Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times a fortnight ago dedicated her column to exhorting young people to be more willing to graft and work unsocial hours. She pointed out how many jobs remain unfilled because no-one wants them, how predominantly it is foreign workers who are willing to service the hospitality industry or to work in the fields.

She touched a nerve that filled the next edition’s letters with general support column when she suggested that many an illustrious career has been launched by making tea. Our ‘X Factor’ generation, though, expects it on a plate, instant success, straight in as a full blown ‘suit’.

We need a new deal with our younger people (and the ‘New Deals’ successive governments come up with do not cut it). They need to be more willing to kick off with lower steps on ladders and we need to find ways of making those steps available, or we will end up with a disenfranchised generation.

This week’s official opening of our new Volunteer Centre reminds us of the important role that volunteering can play in giving young people work experience and steps onto the employment ladder. However, two things need to happen, young people themselves need to understand the value of volunteering to them and the volunteering opportunities need to be there.

That will be the hard bit. Young volunteers are a drain on capacity. They need supervision and mentoring. It takes time. But, if our sector is serious about building social capital, trustee boards will need to rise to the challenge, and find innovative ways of finding space for investing in our youngsters alongside their other work.

Dave Pinwell, CEO

Last week, June Mole and I from SUSTAiN were privileged to join a party of residents from North Solihull and a few council officers on a trip to the Beacon Project in Falmouth and a sister project in nearby Redruth. It was a very long way at over 500 miles for the round trip, but particularly valuable and inspiring.

We do not associate Cornish resorts with ‘sink estates’, yet here but a few miles from glorious beaches and tourist honey pots, we visited two areas that had suffered badly with economic depression before a community led regeneration effort had commenced.

With fabulous views over the enormous harbour on which Falmouth’ s past success was founded to the windswept cliffs beyond, was an estate which hit rock bottom in the 1990s. No-one wanted to live there. For those who did the quality of life was desperate. Illness and social disorder prevailed hand in hand.

Then a few people, led by a couple of health workers, tiring of the disproportionate amount of the their time the estate demanded, decided to do something about it. Over about the next five years:

• The overall crime rate had dropped by 50%,
• Affordable central heating and external cladding had been installed in over 60% of the properties,
• Childhood asthma rates decreased 40% and schooldays lost reduced,
• Child Protection Registrations had dropped by 42%,
• Post-natal depression was down by 70%,
• Breast feeding rates increased by 30%,
• The educational attainment of 10-11 year old boys – i.e., level 4, key stage 2 – was up by 100%,
• The level of teenage pregnancies was decimated,
• Unemployment rate fell by 71% amongst both males and females.

It was all achieved because some strong leaders emerged amongst the community and statutory agencies were willing to work in partnership with them. The residents were allowed to determine the priorities, a community spirit was developed, a level of pride restored.

Today, walking around the estate, yes, some of the housing stock is a bit tired, but there was fresh paint, there were colourful gardens, there was no prevailing atmosphere of depression, as there would have been fifteen years ago.

These are the results we want in our regeneration area and that is why some of those involved in our own community development work went to learn from this Cornish exemplar. The residents who made the trip came back inspired by their new friends in Falmouth and brought back with them a glimmer of new hope for the future.

Hazel Stuteley, one of the pioneers of this work, who has visited Solihull several times to support and inspire change here says:

‘Truly sustainable regeneration does not happen in boardrooms, but is all about people and relationships.’

The Falmouth and Redruth experience tells us that change demands a common vision and a partnership quest, but must be led by what the local people want.

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