Alliance of voluntary groups attacks commissioning process

The approach taken by local authorities and other statutory agencies to commissioning services is damaging relationships with local voluntary and community sectors and undermining the independence of voluntary action, it has been claimed.

A report by the National Coalition for Independent Action (NCIA), an alliance of voluntary and community sector groups, and Adur Voluntary Action said the growing central government focus on the role of voluntary organisations as providers of public services was having a significant impact.

Based on interviews with 16 voluntary agencies in West Sussex, the report highlighted “the tension between exhortations on the voluntary sector to co-operate and ‘work in partnership’, yet simultaneously to compete aggressively for contracts”.

It said particular damage was being done by commissioning policies and processes, which turn independent voluntary and community organisations into sub-contractors working to tight specifications within performance management frameworks.

The NCIA said: “Commissioning encourages the view that organisations have to be big to survive, and forces voluntary agencies through wasteful and ineffective processes in the fight for funding.”

The report warned councillors and officers at local authorities that the practices were “killing the goose that lays the golden egg”. It added: “Within the statutory sector, there are those who make the effort to listen and understand, avoiding the assumption that the voluntary sector should always follow statutory interests and intentions. This perspective needs to become the norm.”

The report also called on councils to:

• Assess the broad impact of their decisions explicitly, by building a voluntary and community action ‘impact assessment’ into all policy and funding decisions. This would, amongst other things, cover procedures for procurement, commissioning and grant aid
• Make ‘real partnership’ a practical reality, by delegating real power and financial responsibility “even when the results may conflict with the intentions of government policy”, and
• Recognise the true value of local community action. The report said: “Policies which may be appropriate to commission very large-scale services or items are not suitable means for strengthening community life, locally-rooted services, and cohesion.”

Andy Benson, joint convenor of the NCIA, said: “In their attempts to bring voluntary agencies firmly under their control, to deliver out-sourced public services and to operate in prescriptive and inappropriate ways, statutory sector agencies are destroying the very things they say they value about voluntary action – flexibility, accessibility, experimentation, independence of action and the capacity to improve policy and practice.”