A case study of a council and place that scores higher in this aspect
We’ve tried to play it clever in commissioning, since social care here used to be very traditional and siloed – we have built alliances, supported services in crisis (even when timescales meant we couldn’t really follow the process we would have liked), done mini-training for everyone in the directorate, and even ensured that we win a few awards for innovations, sharing credit with the services. We work closely with the team that used to be our Health and Care Observatory, and with the teams supporting governance at council and ICS level. We also work closely with the Finance Business Partners, who are critical to what gets approved, or not, in the annual budget.
We have run dedicated external and in-house capability-building, most of it based on action learning and pulling in mixed teams from across different council services and partners to work on real problems and build relationships. We also made co-commissioning with user and citizen voice groups part of our journey from the start, and have affinity groups, citizen commissioners, and we’re about to engage with our first Citizen Jury – this one is on the climate crisis so there’s some important overlaps, but we want to learn the process before running one on learning disabilities and transitions from children’s social care, as both are major issues in our borough.
We have also found that community groups and providers are some of our biggest allies – we recently let a home care contract in a way that both invited innovative bids and encouraged ongoing innovation in service delivery, designed by users and care staff, and we have found even some losing providers have been in touch, keen to share the model elsewhere.
A case study of a council and place that scores lower in this aspect
We have had a few false starts with ‘commissioning’ – on one extreme we went to a whole-council commissioning model, but there was not enough clarity about how that worked, and commissioners and providers reported to the same line managers. There also was not much recognition of how adult social care was different. Then we went to the other extreme and for a while the main team with the ‘commissioner’ job title was the team processing direct payments. We now have a team in social care with the job title ‘strategic commissioner’, but they have to go to services for most of their data, and Members and our partnership boards have expressed the opinion that ‘commissioning is over’ (it’s still associated with the ‘purchaser/provider split’). At the moment, most of their skills are around important technical areas such as the legal requirements for market shaping, but we are planning some development work and actually commissioning plays a big role in our service planning, due to some major contracts coming up where big savings are earmarked.
Equality and equity considerations with this aspect
Without good information, the opportunity to innovate and change, and the skill to do so, the cause of equality and equity cannot be effectively advanced. Care must be taken not to make insights a reflection of our own prejudices. Engaging excluded voices and welcoming active challenge is one powerful tool to guard against this. It is important to establish and stick to agreed values in this space. The inequality in power dynamics between commissioners and populations becomes starker when commissioners are more powerful and more effective, but effective commissioners can also be the most direct route towards redressing this balance. Empowering communities as commissioners empower themselves is a powerful way to address this paradox.