Large national charities should develop a more collaborative approach to working with the smaller, local end of the sector, urges Stephen Woollett.

Predatory, destructive, disconnected from local groups and communities, and too focused on the financial bottom line.

These are just some of the comments we have been hearing from voluntary groups in the South West about those bidding for public service contracts. But they aren’t referring to the behaviour of the big commercial service providers, such as Serco or G4S.

No, they are talking about other voluntary organisations – and, more specifically, big nationals swooping into areas to pick up contracts at what are perceived to be unrealistically low prices.

Local charities are crucial

The result is that the local voluntary sector ecosystem, which is so crucial to meeting the needs of local people and communities, is fatally undermined and struggles to survive – let alone pick up the pieces when the ‘big national’ fails to deliver.

However, the blame cannot all be laid at the door of those bidding for contracts, although there are definitely things they can do to make use of the skills and expertise of the local voluntary sector rather than undermine it.

In Gloucestershire, a single £6m drug and alcohol services contract was created out of a rolling together of several smaller community-based contracts. This was won by a major national organisation, with no track record in the county, which narrowly beat a consortium of well-established local organisations and an NHS Mental Health Trust.

No doubt the winner met all the requirements of the contract specification and was properly scored. But this situation highlights a commissioning process which (literally) may have not put any price on strong local community connections, consistency or longterm sustainability.

This is particularly ironic given that the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 is now law.

Sally Pickering, chief executive of the Gloucestershire Association for Voluntary and Community Action (Gavca), which supports voluntary groups in the county, is worried that the provision of other local services will go the same way. Gavca and the people of Gloucestershire are right to be concerned.

Bitter experience

Headway, the brain injury association, also has some bitter experience in this area.

Ali Bazley, Headway’s South West coordinator, reports that in one area a large, generic day-care provider tendered for all the day-care provision for the county. All the smaller, local and specialist providers said that the service could not possibly be delivered at that price, but this was ignored.

Views from the frontline Ali Bazley, Headway’s South West Coordinator, comments on a large provider which won a county-wide project but was unable to deliver: “The frustrating thing is there is no comeback on either the provider – who could not deliver at the price quoted – or on the commissioner who agreed the tender and cannot have considered best value as required by the Social Value Act when awarding the contract to this bidder.” Sally Pickering, chief executive of Gavca, is more optimistic about the future. She believes commissioners are increasingly understanding the value that smaller charities can deliver: “Most commissioners really do understand the added value that the local voluntary sector can bring and there is a real will among many of them to use the Social Value Act to recognise this in the services they commission.”

The contract was agreed by the local authority commissioner, and nine months down the line the provider cannot now deliver the service at the price quoted. The local authority has been forced to ask the smaller, more specialist providers to pick up the pieces.

Bazley’s views on this sequence of events is summarised in the boxed text. She highlights the fact that a local authority contracting with a large national charity to deliver a service can then ‘tick the box’ that it is engaging with the charity sector and, as a consequence, does not feel the need to then work with the smaller organisations that, Bazley feels, “truly reflect the sector”.

The reality, of course, is that the voluntary and charitable sector is a massively broad church embracing very large multi-million-pound national (and international) charities as well as small, entirely volunteerled community groups.

Small voluntary groups probably now have as much in common with small and micro commercial businesses as they do with large voluntary agencies.

Not all doom and gloom

At a recent workshop organised by South West Forum, in conjunction with the Commission on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector, there was such passion about the differences within the voluntary sector that several called for a fourth – as opposed to third – sector of small community groups to be recognised and championed.

But all is not doom and gloom; there is real evidence of attitudes and approaches changing.

Gloucestershire County Council, for example, is now developing a new social value accreditation framework against which it will score service providers. Sally Pickering believes that Gavca, like infrastructure organisations elsewhere, has a critical role to play in enabling community groups and commissioners to work together to make this work.

Besides fully implementing the spirit and the letter of the Public Services (Social Value) Act, what else can be done to ensure that commissioners get good financial and social value out of their contracts, but don’t at the same time damage the very fabric of civil society on which so many of us depend?

Here are my suggestions:

• Commissioners should require every bidder to demonstrate how they will use, work with and help build the capacity of local civil society organisations;
• Commissioners, ideally working collaboratively, should support local organisations to measure and demonstrate their impact;
• Big national providers need to realise that it is in their long-term interests to work with and engage local organisations in contract delivery, and of course in the bidding process; and finally
• Small and medium-sized local providers need to be thinking and planning for collaborative and consortium approaches well before a contract opportunity becomes formally available.

Responsibility of big charities

It would be very good if the next time we seek feedback from local groups on their relationships with national voluntary organisations they use positive terms such as collaborative, engaged and sensitive.

Securing this major shift in behaviour is the responsibility of everyone engaged in leading our largest charities.

Stephen Woollett is chief executive of South West Forum, which also works at national level through Regional Voices.