The government has published Transforming Rehabilitation a Strategy for Reform, their response to the recent consultation on reforms to the criminal justice service and the policy of reducing reoffending. With it the Ministry of Justice has started the ball rolling on a huge piece of upcoming tendering.

A PIN (Prior Information Notice) has been published alerting ‘the market’ to the future tendering of offender services in 21 geographic lots across the country. The PIN puts the indicative value at £5-£20billion and announces the formal competition will be announced in full in August this year.

Reoffending rates have remained static for ten years and prisoners can face a huge range of health and wider social issues when reintegrating back into society. The government is keen to reform the system; as well as social benefits there are clear economic advantages to improving reoffending rates.

Whilst that is un-contentious enough, the methods proposed will raise more eyebrows and are in line with the Government’s continuing open public service agenda. It promises to ‘open up the market to a diverse range of new rehabilitation providers’ and ‘new payment incentives for market providers’, broadly speaking competitive tendering, payment by results and using a prime contractor model.

The government is apparently aware of many voluntary sector concerns from the Work Programme, the last use of the prime contractor model which has caused much sector anguish.

The positives that have come out of the consultation are an increase in the number of lots (from 16 to 21), review of the payment mechanism and a commissioning system that aims to link into the local Police and Crime Commissioners. The action plan outlines support to VCSE providers such as the Cabinet Office Commercial Skills Masterclasses, £500,000 investment in a VCSE action plan, a database of VCSE organisations working in the sector, greater use of social investment, use of Compact (remember that?!) principles, greater ‘market stewardship principles’ and something that will please many bidders – a single expression of interest form to different primes.

It remains to be seen whether these will be enough to avoid similar headlines to the work programme and achieve the reduction in reoffending rates. At least this time around, voluntary sector expectations will not be so high, and bidders should be more savvy about the potential drawbacks of these bidding models.

What is clear is that interested VCS providers of these services, if they haven’t already, will need to prepare carefully for these upcoming tenders. This will likely mean building relationships with potential prime contractors, building partnerships and finessing their financial models. Even with the reduced lot geographic sizes, and the tweaked payment by results model it is likely that only the largest charities and usual suspects of private sector bidders will be able to lead bids, meaning smaller organisations will need to feed into supply chains.

NAVCA is working with CLINKS providing collaboration training and we will be looking at how we can help members and interested VCS providers to best navigate this upcoming minefield. We are also currently running social value seminars and this will be an excellent opportunity for MoJ to adopt social value into their commissioning model.

Headline findings

1. Pessimistic about prospects for local charities and community groups. For the first time, this survey shows that more members feel that the prospects for the local voluntary and community sector will get slightly worse over the next three months. In all previous surveys the prevailing view was that the outlook was broadly stable.
2. Nearly half are reducing staff levels. In response to the question are changes to paid staff are planned in the next three months, the percentage of respondents saying that staffing would stay the same fell to its lowest figure (32%) yet. However, this was due to both the figure increasing for NAVCA members planning to increase (24%) and decrease (44%) staff numbers.
3. Collaboration still seen as way forward. NAVCA members continue to say that increased collaboration with other local support organisations is likely over the next twelve months. Over half (54%) of respondents expect to see more collaboration and only 8% expect to see less.
4. Changes in policing may be improving relationships with the voluntary sector. Over a quarter of respondents (27%) say that their relationship with the local police has improved over the past 12 months (and just 4% say it has got worse). This may be in part due to the greater emphasis on working with local charities and community groups the elected PCCs have introduced.
5. Relationships with local authorities under pressure. For the first time the survey has more respondents saying the local authority will have a negative rather than positive effect on their success over the coming year.
6. Other Charities remain key to success. The majority of respondents (54%) felt that other charities will have a positive impact on their success over the coming year and no-one thought they would have a negative effect.
7. Cuts are creating increased workload. For the fourth time, increased workload remains the biggest issue for respondents. Increasing earned income is second.

The Cup Trust scandal broke earlier this year when it emerged that the charity raised £176 million in two years but only gave out £55,000 to good causes. Despite the Cup Trust doing little charitable work, donors were able to avoid £46 million of tax using Gift Aid incentives. The Charity Commission has been criticised for failing to take action and Parliament has asked the National Audit Office to study the Commission's regulatory conduct.

Joe Irvin, Chief Executive of NAVCA said,

“I agree with Sir Stuart's concern about the charity commission's apparently timid handling of the Cup Trust case. Charities enjoy an enormous level of public support. But reputations can be trashed quite quickly by a few high profile cases.”

“For small local community organisations having a charity registration number is a vital mark of confidence when asking for public donations or funding from public bodies or foundations. We rely on the independent charity commission to root out questionable behaviour in order to maintain public trust.”

We now find ourselves moving from all the talk of what social value means to how it can be put into practice and working out the realms of the possible. Not always a simple task given procurement regulations!

We know a lot of NAVCA members are working with local government to explore how they can make the most of the Act. Yet the common questions we hear from our members are ‘what is everyone else doing? And ’what can we do that is within the scope of the law’.

This is why NAVCA is leading the series of Maximising Social Value seminars for local government this month with the Local Government Aassociation (LGA) and Anthony Collins solicitors. Working with public sector colleagues implementing the Act, we will be exploring the practicalities and finding out what is working on the ground from the very people leading locally on the Act.

We are already aware of a couple of some good progress. For instance Croydon has produced a practical looking social value toolkit with examples of social value and pointers at each stage of the process. Liverpool has established a Social Value Taskforce linked to their Fairness Commission with one area of focus being pay differentials between contractors’ staff.

Sunderland has stated they will apply the Act to all contracts above £50k (a more generous interpretation that the Act actually requires) while encouragingly Birmingham has produced an ambitious Business Charter for Social Responsibility which is well worth a look. It covers grants and contracts and includes requirements on the supply chain measuring carbon emissions, paying a fair share of taxes and the Living Wage and supporting community organisations.

These all sound great in theory, but establishing and sharing what works in practice will be vital for the voluntary sector and local communities to proactively maximise the Social Value Act.

Watch this space for a write up from this series and practical tips for the voluntary sector to use locally.

Robert Beard (NAVCA) with David Simmonds and Jayne Pascoe (College of Policing), Terry Wilkins (Citizens in Policing) and Lee Kerslake (Avon & Somerset Police) at the Citizens in Policing road show in Surrey. Photograph ©Fiona Jones, used by permission.

In each police force area or group of areas, police senior leadership teams (SLTs) met representatives of local NAVCA members, to share local knowledge of volunteering and explore ideas for working together. Each meeting planned a roadshow at which the knowledge and ideas were presented to and discussed by a larger gathering of police officers and staff and voluntary and community sector (VCS) delegates.

Volunteering with the police force has long been an indispensable part of police service delivery. At the start of 2013, there were over 10,000 Police Support Volunteers (PSVs) across England, with a 52%/48% male/female membership; this reflects a 158% increase since 2010. Over 90% of police forces have a PSV programme involving volunteers who may participate as Special Constables or Police Cadets, members of Crimestoppers, Neighbourhood and Rural Watch schemes, or experts providing skilled support addressing, for instance, internet crime or fraud. Police forces liaise with women's, young people's and older people's groups, Black and Minority Ethnic and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender organisations and Street Pastors. PSVs provide an estimated total of 800,000 hours' service a year.

People seeking to volunteer with the police are more likely to approach local forces directly than via local CVS or volunteer centres. Police forces report that there is no shortage of volunteer applications and they have not needed to cast their net more widely. Consequently, there has been little attempt to join up PSV programmes with wider local volunteering.

Now, however, thinking within the police service is shifting. "We need to Police 'with' the public not 'to' the public", a statement made at a recent roadshow by a senior officer in charge of Community Safety, indicates how attitudes are changing in response to the current economic and social climate. Moreover, public service funding cuts are driving police forces, like other providers, to deliver services more cost-effectively.

The Community Development Foundation, which managed the Home Office's Community action against crime: Innovation fund, has posted twelve case studies demonstrating the role of the VCS in tackling crime prevention and community safety priorities.

Police forces recognise that services provided by themselves, the wider public sector and the VCS often target the same vulnerable people. Now is the time, therefore, to establish and develop partnerships between police forces and local CVS and volunteer centres. Benefits may include the cross-referral of volunteer applicants and the sharing of intelligence around services addressing community safety, crime reduction and support for victims and offenders.

For further information on NAVCA's work around Citizens in Policing, please contact Angela Barnes, Training and Development Consultant, or Robert Beard, Policy Officer.

People join organisations for many reasons and once inside will make all sorts of judgements about the value of their membership. There are generally two broad approaches to thinking about delivering member value. In this blog I’ll explain how each of these work and how to combine them to create a clear and compelling offer for groups.

We call the first approach transaction-based membership, which focuses on delivering tangible benefits through support and services, which won’t always relate directly to helping groups fulfil their missions, but helps them create the platform from which they can advance their work. A market exists for these types of services so you likely are to face competition and it’s reasonable to assume groups will shop around, especially if the service charges a fee.

The second approach is called relationship-centred membership which tends to be more intangible and focus on the leadership and representation side of your work. It’s harder to demonstrate tangible benefits but can often be the reason groups join and stay. Members are looking for experiences that give them a sense of belonging. Success here comes from focussing on doing things members care about but they cannot have a big impact on by working alone. It’s highly mission-related but difficult to charge for so relies on public sector investment, fee income and cross-subsidy from charged-for services.

Most NAVCA members will blend both approaches and it’s important to think about how they interrelate and can strengthen each other, especially if your future business model is relying on generating more fee income from products and services to cross-subsidise your leadership role. You will probably know of organisations that see you as the first place to go for influencing local commissioning practices but will shop around for someone to facilitate something like a Board away day.

To get ahead you need to use the relationship-centred approach to create a continuous dialogue with members to understand how they define and prioritise their needs and aspirations. You need to think about how your offer adds value to their work and feels like more than a simple basket of products and services.

You need to use the belonging people feel to stimulate uptake of charged for services. Even if they are free or discounted for members you need to treat them members like a smart company would treat a fee-paying customer in the way that you create, communicate and deliver member value. You need to match the quality and price of others in the market place but add extra value by demonstrating that members’ affinity has led to products created with nothing but their needs and aspirations in mind.

Another approach which we have seen some Transforming Local Infrastructure projects exploring is moving from being a provider of services to being the body that makes the system of support work in your patch. Here you get to manage the market rather than be a competitor within it and it could offer you a great way of managing the variety and uncertainty of demands and draw on a wider pool of talent to help your groups be successful and sustainable in the future.

How can NAVCA help?

We have created a framework to help you identify how to make more of your membership schemes. We can help you generate ideas and create the building blocks of a new business plan for your membership scheme that positions it within the broad formula of income generation activities.

bill.freeman@navca.org.uk

Direct line: 0114 289 3967 

The programme provides a way for policy makers to reach hundreds of thousands of small charities and community groups. NAVCA being a strategic partner shows that the Department of Health values the reach of NAVCA members. It also reflects the fact that health and care is an increasingly important part of many NAVCA members work. NAVCA members are play a key role in almost a third of the new local Healthwatch organisations, set up to give local people a say over local health services.

Joe Irvin, Chief Executive of NAVCA, said;

“We’re delighted that NAVCA has been chosen to be a health and care strategic partner. This is recognition of the reach of NAVCA members and the role they play to get people involved in the design and delivery of local health and social care services.”

“Our members make sure the voices of local charities and community groups are heard. As a strategic partner, NAVCA will bring the local intelligence they gather to bear on the national debate. Our members are a bridge between local groups and statutory health bodies and will give DH, NHSE and PHE a unique perspective on the relationship between local public bodies and charities and community groups.”

Read the announcement from DH

Every year we run a residential event for chief officers and senior managers from local support and development organisations. 

NAVCA's 2013 Chief Officers' Residential Event (CORE) will take place on 17 -18 September at the Park Inn by Radisson in York. The venue is a five minute walk from the railway station and overlooks the river.

This events focuses on how we support our members, and particularly those people with the challenging role of leading support and development organisations and the local sector.

We will shortly have booking information available. Email events@navca.org.uk and we will send you booking details as soon as they are ready.

The principle was first laid out by John Major’s Government in the 1992 White Paper that paved the way for the creation of the National Lottery. John Major recognised that Sport, Arts and Heritage play a vital part in the daily lives of most people but they would struggle to compete with the demands of health, education and defence for Government funds. In 1994 the year of the very first lottery grant, John Major said that “the money raised by the Lottery will not replace public expenditure.”

The National Lottery Act 2006 wrote the additionality principle into legislation. Lottery Distributors are currently required to outline the ways in which they ensure that Lottery funding does not act as a replacement for government funds.

Joe Irvin, NAVCA’s Chief Executive, said;

“This was a highly contentious issue when the Lottery was established, and the legislation only got though once the government promised that Lottery money would go to ‘good causes’, not to prop up government spending on public services. The principle was established in the 1992 White Paper and later enshrined in statute.”

“The failure so far to pay back as promised the millions of pounds Government ‘borrowed’ from the Lottery to pay for the Olympics (highlighted by the Public Accounts Committee today) only adds to concerns.”

 “Lottery money comes from the people who buy tickets. There is a general understanding that the money raised will go to good causes that the state won’t fund. If there is to be a rethink this should be done by asking both the public who buy lottery tickets and the thousands of small charities and community groups who benefit from lottery funding what they think.”

The EIF will

• Assess what programmes work to determine both the best Early Interventions available and their relative value for money
• Advise local commissioners, service providers and potential investors to enable them to make the best choices for supporting children and families
• Advocate for Early Intervention as a serious alternative to expensive and ineffective late intervention

Early Intervention identifies the early symptoms of social problems and then tackles the root causes - such as drink and drug abuse, teen pregnancy, low educational attainment, poor parenting and unemployment – by giving every baby, child and young person the social and emotional skills necessary to enable them to fulfil their potential. Tackling the cause of the problem breaks the intergenerational cycles of dysfunction and reduces later costs to the taxpayer as well as non-financial costs to society as a whole.

Further information:

• Early Intervention Foundation's website
• Follow EIF on twitter
• NAVCA’s EIF webpage

Bristol

Voscur has been working in partnership with Bristol City Council to ensure that voluntary, community and charity sector organisations has the opportunity to influence and be part of the development of the West of England Community Learning Trust pilot. Vocur believe it to be crucial that member organisations working with the most vulnerable communities and those furthest away from learning have a voice in ensuring that local learning opportunities are accessible, relevant, exciting and of a high standard. Three events and a wide-ranging survey have ensured the involvement of the broadest possible range of Voscur's membership through its network of contacts.

"We have been pleased to work with Bristol City Council and voluntary sector support and development agencies across the West of England to ensure that our members can influence community learning provision so that it really reflects and meets the needs of local people, especially now that we are working towards becoming a Community Learning Trust . We recently ran a joint event for partners across the West of England, where community learning providers showcased their work and we shared ideas on how the proposed Trust might work" - Wendy Stephenson, Chief Executive, Voscur

"Thanks very much for an excellent event last week. I'm really grateful for your very effective organisation and contributions on the day. I had positive and enthusiastic feedback from many people there. I think this puts down a real marker for the future of collaborative planning for outstanding community learning provision in our area" - Jane Taylor, Service Manager, Communities and Adult Skills, Bristol City Council

Calderdale

Voluntary Action Calderdale reports that a local individual, who was integral to getting the community together to provide a response to last year’s floods, continues to get involved in perpetuating this initiative. His own private sector IT business had suffered flooding over ten years earlier; when the floods returned, he used his professional skills and knowledge to support three communities. He put his own business interests on the back burner for nearly three months and concentrated on supporting others through internet-based social media (facebook). When the council response kicked in after the first flood, on the Monday following a flood on a Friday, he was already "ahead of the game".

Harrogate

Harrogate and Area Council for Voluntary Services reports that local and county councillor John Fox, a strong supporter of the local voluntary and community sector, chose Volunteering as his theme during his year of office as Mayor 2008-9 and together with Ackrill Media Group and Harrogate and Ripon Councils for Voluntary Service, established the annual local volunteering ‘Oscars’ awards which celebrate their fifth year in 2012.

Councillor Fox is also an active supporter of Harrogate at Christmas (a Chamber of Trade project), worked with local businesses to get funding for Christmas lights and helped develop the town’s first Christmas Market in 2012. He also chairs Harrogate Borough Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Commission.

Liverpool

Liverpool Charity and Voluntary Services | United Way works closely with Liverpool Chamber of Commerce in facilitating a Corporate Social Responsibility Forum where businesses exchange good practice and develop shared projects to support non-profits.  The focus of the forum is to

• Encourage greater take-up of corporate social responsibility in other Liverpool-based businesses
• Identify the most successful corporate social responsibility activities taking place and share good practice
• Identify which areas of corporate social responsibility are most prevalent in business and how businesses are choosing which causes to support
• Network with peers and look at potential ways of working together
• Create an engaging and sustainable corporate social responsibility programme to suit local businesses
• Create opportunity for discussion about how business can work with the community in meeting local needs

"Coming together in a forum centred on corporate social responsibility helps define the possibilities around this agenda, and when a group of driven individuals share their knowledge and expertise in this way, the positive impact on the wider community truly amplifies" – Caroline Clark, Group Marketing Manager, Bibby Line Group

London

London Voluntary Service Council regularly engages London's voluntary and community sector with their work to develop and implement the London Health Inequalities Strategy. This work has included a number of different projects (including myhealthlondon, which aims to provide better information on, and engagement with, GP practices in London) as well as representation on a number of cross-sector health boards and steering groups and networking and consultation events.

“London Voluntary Service Council has been very helpful in several ways including:

• Providing third sector input, views and expertise to projects
• Cascading updates and invitations to the London voluntary and community sector
• Working as a strategic partner to support joining up initiatives happening across London
• Helping to identify opportunities to engage with the sector and identifying individuals and organisations to involve.

“It’s really helped the stakeholder engagement and outreach work for the myhealthlondon project. LVSC’s involvement in the myhealthlondon project has helped generate ideas for the noticeboard feature and encouraged voluntary and community groups to engage with the project. We’ll continue to engage and work with London’s VCS on the myhealthlondon project and use LVSC’s support to refine the product to benefit the widest range of Londoners” – Greater London Authority health team

Stoke on Trent

Voluntary Action Stoke on Trent manages The Dudson Centre, a 200-year-old Grade 2 listed former pottery factory, preserved as a community resource centre and museum, which has now become a hub of local voluntary action and community activity in Hanley.

It was donated as a bequest by Dudson Ltd in 1996, and after a major refurbishment was opened by Her Majesty the Queen in 1999.It is a highly successful social enterprise, meeting all its own operational costs, including those of the museum, without any recourse to public funds.

Over 700 community groups use one or more of the facilities at the centre, which has 100% occupancy and a waiting list for office space. It's the only hub of its kind in Staffordshire and last year drew 3,600 overseas tourists to the museum and thousands of local people to the centre.

Worcestershire

Community Action Wyre Forest (CAWF), based in Kidderminster, has successfully launched two social firms:

• Community Support Initiatives which seeks to level the employment playing field for people with mental health issues; all of its employees have mental health issues themselves
• Forgotten Favourites, which helps people with mental health issues set up their own micro-enterprises

CAWF also ran a project called Helping Others Understand Self Employment (HOUSE) which supported the development of ten micro-enterprises. They are looking at developing conditions favourable to creating enterprises for unemployed and economically inactive people, especially female lone parents, to explore self employment through business planning, marketing, funding, taxation etc. It will be delivered locally in neighbourhoods using a creative industry/co-operative approach.

We have created a framework to help you identify how to make more of your membership schemes and can use this to help you generate ideas and create the building blocks of a new business plan for your scheme.

If you received BIG Assist vouchers then this might be the perfect way to spend them. We understand that another 40 organisations have been awarded vouchers from the Big Assist programme. We are one of the approved suppliers, so if you are one of those organisations please invite us to make a proposal on how we can help you get the most value from your voucher.

Read Bill's blog

How high membership sits within the overall mix of activities varies from NAVCA member to NAVCA member, for example, some will have a link to membership in the top level menu on their homepage and others won’t; some charge, some don’t. Whatever your local approach, membership has always been at the heart of our movement and there are many benefits of this:

• Many organisations want to be part of something bigger than their own organisation. You offer this by helping organisations work with each other to achieve a collective impact on issues that no one organisation can solve alone.
• It enables things to be done efficiently and at scale, so your members can access services that are more affordable and relevant to their needs.
• It creates legitimacy in voice work by having an identifiable group who have said “count us in” and often provides the only chance to generate fee income for this type of work.
• It builds affinity with potential customers for charged-for services, making the most of longer-term trust based relationships so you don’t have to rely on hard selling.

There are some challenges though. Many organisations place little emphasis on their membership schemes to a) define their relationship with local groups and b) generate income. Fees represent a fraction of total income and the return on investment can seem poor when you add up the time spent collecting them.

Membership can be perceived as a barrier to participation for new groups and those with the greatest needs. Funders often require you to work with a broader group of beneficiaries. As a result NAVCA members often need to harmonise being a membership association with delivering support to a broader range of stakeholders, so it doesn’t look like they have multiple identities and conflicting priorities.

I would advise that organisations do this by considering whether membership feels independent from or integrated into daily work. NAVCA members can follow two basic frameworks:

• Offering services to members plus anyone else (i.e. offer primarily aimed at members with premiums/penalties paid by non-members).
• Offering services to everyone plus members (i.e. offer primarily aimed at everyone with exclusivity/discounts for members).

Once you know how you are going to come at it, you can then begin to work out your offer and how to differentiate it. We have created a framework to help you identify how to make more of your membership schemes. We can help you generate ideas and create the building blocks of a new business plan for your membership scheme that positions it within the broad formula of income generation activities.

If you received BIG Assist vouchers then this might be the perfect way to spend them.

If you want to know more about BIG Assist and see if you can get some vouchers to support your development go to the Big Assist website or email NAVCA to get in touch.

Read the second membership blog

A year long programme of two day masterclasses to build the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector’s (VCSE) commercial skills for public service delivery.

Designed and delivered by a cross-sector partnership, ACEVO, AVANTA, Capita, Ingeus, NAVCA, NCVO, Serco and Social Enterprise UK, these masterclasses are the first in a national programme funded by Office for Civil Society, Cabinet Office with pro-bono support from our private sector partners.

Find out more

I attended a conference the other week run by the folk at Vanguard. With the novel title Kittens are Evil. The event wasn’t filled with delegates annoyed at the neighbour’s cat crapping on the lawn; it was about unpicking the belief system that has grown around outcomes. Working to outcomes is good right; saying otherwise would be like saying kittens are evil.

Based on his research paper, Dr Toby Lowe outlined the issues around outcomes based performance management and evaluation. His research findings covered the complexity of measuring the impact that services have on people’s lives and that outcomes cannot be attributed to a particular service. So instead the focus is on setting simplified, comparable targets that simply cannot measure impact. The focus of the organisation then becomes hitting the targets, which distorts organisations’ priorities and inevitably leads to gaming. We’ve seen it with the work programme and we’ve seen the devastating effects of this with the Mid Staffs health scandal. But are these isolated, extreme incidents?

I know from previous working roles how easy it is to miss the point, to lose sight of your purpose because you are so narrowly focused on hitting set targets. As was pointed out at the conference, you get value from achieving purpose, not from hitting targets. As voluntary sector organisations deliver public service contracts, it can become even more difficult to juggle when the targets are not totally aligned with the purpose of the organisation.

Everything that was said at the conference made sense, but as commissioning adviser at NAVCA I’ve long been promoting the merits of outcome based commissioning and whether output or outcome based, the commissioning of public services continues to move towards more tightly defined targets. Is this a bad thing? I think we need to continue to promote outcomes based commissioning. It has got to be better to attempt to measure achievement of purpose rather than volume of activity, but it needs to be acknowledged that sometimes the only way to do this is in a vague kind of fuzzy manner. We need to accept that it cannot always be an exact science and that by trying to make it one we are actually destroying the purpose of the measurement.

The most important thing is that popular word ‘partnership’. To successfully achieve purpose in public service delivery, the different sectors must view it more as a partnership. Relational contracting, where the contract manager and the provider are free to agree changes and adapt targets. Not simply because the provider isn’t up to scratch, but because the targets are not supporting achievement of purpose. There has to be freedom to adapt targets because the achievement of outcomes is determined by a complex set of interactions from a wide range of sources. A significant change in the external environment is likely to lead to a need for change. A typical example being the Work Programme, when targets were set based on an employment market that looked dramatically different to the one today. Unfortunately, typical procurement processes do not support this way of working. Providers are chosen on promised performance and held to these targets, however much the situation changes over the life of the contract. Previous achievement, or lack of, receives little consideration.

As I work on the Social Value Act, I have a strong hope that the voluntary sector will be given the opportunity to work alongside the public sector to maximise community benefit through procurement processes. Some areas are embracing this approach and coming up with fresh thinking on how this can be achieved. But I fear that too many areas are focusing on the end of the process, how to set rigid, inflexible targets to measure social value before they’ve grasped what it means and how to harness it.

So whether you’re managing performance in your own workplace, or managing provider’s performance as a commissioner, don’t forget to take your eye off the target and look at the big picture. If the targets are being met, but aren’t helping to achieve the overall purpose, something’s gone wrong.

NAVCA, in collaboration with the LGA, are holding Social Value events in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle throughout May.

These events are not chalk and talk information sessions, but the opportunity to get together and share issues and learning with those in the same position as you. Therefore, to maximise the value of these events, they are aimed at local government, CCG and housing association staff who are involved in the generation of social value in local commissioning.

Download a booking form

What delegates will gain from attending:

• Learn from those who are implementing the Social Value Act in other areas, across local government and health and gain valuable contacts
• The opportunity to debate different approaches and explore possibilities
• The opportunity to explore legal considerations with Mark Cook and Gayle Monk of Anthony Collins Solicitors who hold extensive experience in sustainable procurement and have been at the forefront of bringing legal clarity in this area
• Access to resources developed following the events sharing good practice and current thinking

 What participants should bring to the day:

• A knowledge of how social value is being considered or implemented in your organisation
• A willingness to imagine the aims and possibilities of social value and learn from other participants

The events will be facilitated by John Tizard, an independent consultant, adviser and commentator, previously Director at Centre for Public Service Partnerships. John has vast experience on public service reform, strategic commissioning and social investment issues.

The events will run from 11am to 3.30pm, with lunch provided. There is no charge to attend and reasonable travel expenses will be reimbursed. They will be held in Birmingham (1 May), London (2 May), Newcastle (9 May), Manchester (10 May), Bristol (17 May) and Leeds (30 May)

Download a booking form

NAVCA (National Association for Voluntary and Community Action) is the national voice of local support and development organizations in England. We are a charity that champions and strengthens voluntary and community action by supporting our members in their work with over 160,000 local charities and community groups. NAVCA has worked to support the Social value Act since its inception and believes a partnership approach across sectors invaluable to maximising community benefit through public procurement.

The LGA is the national voice of local government. We work with councils to support, promote and improve local government.

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Read a NAVCA blogpost about the learning events.