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Making Advice a Local Priority

 “We will promote the radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups.” Coalition Programme, May 2010

The last decade saw the growth of partnership working at local level through Local Strategic Partnerships, Sustainable Community Strategies, Local Area Agreements and Total Place pilots. Whilst we are waiting for the detail of the Coalition Government’s programme to be clarified, it is clear that joint working at local level is here to stay, but without the centrally-driven government targets For more information on the government’s plans for local devolution, go to IDeA Partnerships Update.

The one thing we know for certain is that localism - the shifting of responsibility to local areas – is happening at a time of unprecedented public spending cuts. Councils and other public bodies are looking for ways to make huge savings to meet the spending targets for the coming few years.

In this context, as more services are planned at local level and public bodies pool more of their resources, it is more important than ever for advice organisations to understand, measure and explain how their services contribute to wider priorities such as social and financial inclusion, reducing health inequalities, or tackling worklessness.

The coalition government's Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) assessed spending against a set of published challenges.

  • Is the activity essential to meet government priorities?
  • Does the government need to fund this activity?
  • Does the activity provide substantial economic value?
  • Can the activity be targeted to those most in need?
  • How can the activity be provided at lower cost?
  • How can the activity be provided more effectively?
  • Can the activity be provided by a non-state provider or by citizens, wholly or in partnership?
  • Can non-state providers be paid to carry out the activity according to the results they achieve?
  • Can local bodies as opposed to central government provide the activity?

You could use these questions as a template to assess what you currently do and how you could do things differently, and to identify new opportunities. Advice organisations will need to collaborate more closely to address these issues, map their work against key local strategies and put in place systems to measure the ways in which they make a difference. Look outside the advice sector as well.

  • How could independent advice support effective hospital discharge and personal care services?
  • Could your services work alongside substance misuse organisations to increase the chances of successful outcomes?
  • Advice services that support prisoner release have a long track record of easing the path to life on the outside. This is an area in which the government is interested in payment by results and other new funding mechanisms.
  • Could you offer debt advice, benefits checks and 'better-off calculations' alongside employment programmes, to ease the transition from benefits to work?

For advice services to survive in the current climate, we will need to be more creative about the partnerships we build. Use AdviceUK’s LAA Toolkit (see below) to see where you could make a difference and talk to your local CVS about potential partners. Although LAAs' days are numbered, the principles of themed approaches to priority setting and resource allocation will still apply. The toolkit also contains references to independent research you could use to support your case.

BOLD has been working with new economics foundation and Advice Services Coventry to analyse the ways in which advice makes a difference. Our research uses a Social Return on Investment (SROI) approach to four case studies to show how independent advice creates value – for the people who use the services and for the state – and offsets this against the costs that build up when public services fail to get things right for citizens. The report also maps the ways that Coventry advice services contribute to wider local priorities, such as homelessness prevention, health, community safety, employment and children's services. Click on the link below to access the report.

 

Attached documents