Agenda item

The Director of Finance submits a report providing an overview of social welfare advice and outlining options for future procurement of social welfare advice.  The Commission is recommended to note the report and consider how it would wish to be engaged in the procurement review.

The Director of Finance submitted a report providing an overview of social welfare advice and outlining options for the future procurement of this. 

The Head of Revenues and Customer Support introduced the report, reminding the Commission that a number of social welfare advice contracts were due for re-procurement in March 2017.  This provided an opportunity to review and rationalise the Council’s approach to procuring advice services.

The Social Welfare Advice contract awarded to Citizens Advice Leicestershire already had been extended by one year, so work was underway on plans to re-procure the provision from 2017 onwards.  The Head of Revenues and Customer Support stressed that the Council did not have a duty to ensure an advice provision was available beyond statutory services such as homelessness and community care.  However, in undertaking this exercise it was assumed that the current areas of advice would remain the same.  In addition, other contracts which mainly included advice had been considered and provisionally included in this planning exercise, as set out in the report

It was proposed to procure good quality general and specialist advice, with some outreach provision, with the aim of removing contract specification duplication that would deliver efficiency savings to the Council.  The advice contract would include welfare benefits, community care, debt, personal budgeting support, housing and employment.  Contract specifications potentially would include a three tier model of provision and providers currently were being consulted on these tiers.

To help understand the sector, the Social Welfare Advice Project Manager currently was undertaking an engagement programme.  This launched on 1 August 2016, with a well-attended event open to all organisations providing information, advice and guidance services, (regardless of whether they were funded by the Council), and other interested key stakeholders.  This event had been facilitated by Voluntary Action LeicesterShire.

The key messages from the event were that advice needed to be affordable and accredited, a holistic service was needed that met client needs, outreach services should be placed where they were needed most, a co-ordinated referral system and client journey was needed and commitment to partnership and collaborative working was required from advice providers.

Meetings were now being held with organisations in the city to map demand and need and to explore what good advice outcomes looked like.  It was anticipated that this work would be completed in late September 2016 and would inform the procurement recommendations put forward to the Executive in early October 2016.  Following this, the invitation to tender was likely to be published in mid-February 2017, with the commissioned service starting in the summer of 2017.

The Social Welfare Advice Project Manager advised the Commission that the agencies she had met with had identified an element of double counting of service users, as some people visited various agencies to seek help, or stopped engaging with one agency and sought advice from another.  Despite this, all agencies had indicated that demand for social welfare advice was high and agreed that they needed to work in partnership with others in order to provide the advice services being sought.

Councillor Waddington, (Assistant City Mayor with responsibility for Jobs and Skills), stressed the intention to encourage agencies providing social welfare advice to work together.  This would not preclude the identification of specialisms within individual organisations. 

Councillor Waddington further stressed that the Executive had not made a decision yet on future arrangements for the provision of this advice and invited the Commission to comment on the options proposed.

The Commission expressed some concern that the contracts identified for possible inclusion in the scope of the new contract had significantly different rates.  In reply, Councillor Waddington explained that this was largely due to these services having been procured by various parts of the Council.  This had meant that different organisations had been contracted to provide different levels of service.

The Social Welfare Advice Project Manager confirmed this, noting that the service required was not clearly defined in a significant proportion of the contracts.  In addition, the contracts often did not contain sufficient provision for the monitoring of performance.  For the purpose of this exercise, the value of each contract therefore had been calculated by dividing its value by the number of clients seen.  This situation would be addressed in the new contract being considered.

In reply to Members’ questions, it was noted that:

·           It was intended that specialist services that would not be provided by all organisations would be specified within the contract.  The market would then determine how best to provide these within the consortium model being proposed, if adopted;

·           Experience showed that clients using advice organisations did not object to being referred to other organisations when specialist advice was needed;

·           The current lack of uniformly robust outcome monitoring of advice contracts let by the Council meant that it was difficult to identify how organisations currently assessed the complexity of clients’ cases.  This would be addressed through the partnership approach being proposed; and

·           The current review of Welfare Rights services would not affect the delivery of these services, so the services would remain unchanged.

Councillor Waddington suggested that, whichever option for re-procurement was adopted, a requirement needed to be included in the contract for the organisations providing the advice to have local knowledge and contacts.  The Commission agreed that the value that would be added to the contract by this was very important. 

Councillor Waddington left the meeting at this point (6.40 pm).

It also was agreed that it was important that the advice providers should be suitably qualified and appropriate, (for example, having community language skills).  However, Councillor Sood, (Assistant City Mayor with responsibility for Communities and Equalities), felt that the aim included in the report relating to managing language and defining what level language should be provided was confusing. 

In reply, the Social Welfare Advice Project Manager advised that this aim had been included as many organisations had highlighted that people were arriving in the city from a range of new countries.  This was seen by those organisations as a risk to the services they provided, as the language needs of the city could change more quickly than the organisations could respond to those changes.  It was suggested that this aim could be reworded, to make the meaning clearer.

AGREED:

1)    That the report be received and welcomed;

2)    That the Executive be asked to note that this Commission recommends the adoption of Option 2 of those set out in the report for the re-procurement of Social Welfare Advice, subject to it being ensured that:

a)     the procurement exercise is weighted towards ensuring that the organisations providing the advice services have local knowledge and contacts;

b)     the organisations providing advice services under this contract meet the existing and emerging multi-cultural needs of the city, especially in relation to language;

c)     all advice providers are suitably qualified and appropriate; and

d)      a clear framework is introduced for the monitoring of the contract;

3)    That the Director of Finance be asked to reword aim number 8 of the Statement of Aims for the 2016/17 Advice Procurement (relating to meeting multi-cultural needs of the city by being responsive to existing and emerging communities, including managing language as a risk) to make its intention clearer; and

4)    That all Councillors be asked to encourage any agencies providing social welfare advice with which they have contact to contribute evidence for the re-procurement exercise currently being undertaken.