Whenever Vicky McDermott is tempted to think in terms of the narrow interests of her own disability charity, she reminds herself: “Wouldn’t it be terrible if someone else changed the world for disabled people before we did?”
It’s a neat corrective for the rivalry and duplication that blights the voluntary sector. And it’s a fitting maxim for someone who chairs the Care and Support Alliance (CSA), a grouping of 80 charities including many household names that campaigns to raise the profile of social care and to fight for increased public funding.
McDermott’s emergence in this role has raised eyebrows. For one thing, she is just 36. For another, she had been employed in the sector only 12 months when she was elected chair in June this year, winning a contested ballot.
The future of social care, she thinks, must reflect a mixture of better funding, innovation and increasing integration of services. The alliance will continue to campaign on funding and the gaping holes in the chancellor’s supposed £3.5bn package for the sector, unveiled in last month’s government spending review, which crumbles under scrutiny. There is widespread scepticism that the optional 2% council tax levy for social care will raise anything like the “almost £2bn” he promised, she says (analysis by the King’s Fund thinktank suggests the measure is likely to raise £800m at best), and she points out that the £1.5bn increase in the Better Care Fund – designed to help bring together health and social services – will not kick in largely until 2018 and 2019.
McDermott is also taking the opportunity to refocus the alliance. The arrival of a majority Conservative government and the spending review present a natural pause for thought, she says. “We probably need to engage in different ways.” Should the alliance consider shifting its campaign for social care more to the local level, where funding decisions will increasingly rest, given the planned rundown of central grant for councils? “It’s one of the things we need to tackle,” she says. “Some members think we should be doing that; some vehemently think we shouldn’t. How do we most effectively use the resources we have to make the most impact?”
McDermott’s career path has been unconventional. Obsessed with horses as a child, she had a burning ambition to be an equine vet until she was disabled in a car accident at 17. She walks with crutches. Unwilling to compromise – “the thought of looking after people’s gerbils would have rotted my soul” – sShe turned her back on a veterinary life, and university, and instead went to work at a BT call centre in her home town of Lancaster.
“I was a bit gobby, not great at being compliant. They had two choices,” she recalls. “They could either get rid of me or nurture me; luckily, they chose to do the latter. I had some great mentors.” A rapid rise up the BT ladder, specialising in organisational and project management, led to a growing interest and involvement in the company’s corporate social responsibility work and a BT-sponsored MBA – though she had no first degree – with a dissertation on the interface of the corporate and voluntary sectors.
Her expertise in business planning and back-office efficiency took her, for five years, into the NHS, where she ended by overseeing pension reform. Last year, she made a second sectoral switch to become the first female chief executive of the Papworth Trust, a disability charity working mainly in the east of England that is preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2017.
When she was interviewed for the job, she says, she told the trustees that if they wanted someone just to keep things ticking over, she was “not their girl”. She is fiercely committed to transforming support for disabled people – “changing the world” crops up frequently in her conversation – and she wants Papworth to develop what she calls exemplars of services, products and systems.
One example is housing. Growing numbers of younger disabled adults have been to mainstream schools, gone on to university and secured good, mainstream jobs on merit, she says. But because of the chronic shortage of suitable housing, they end up living in the homes they grew up in that were adapted with grants when they were children. Papworth has developed two exemplar bungalows to demonstrate to the construction industry, which is wary about the cost and profitability, what needs to be done; it has engaged industry leaders on the commercial case and commissioned research by the London School of Economics to evaluate the market potential; and it is setting up a commission on accessible housing in partnership with the specialist housing association Habinteg.
“How, over the next 18 months, not through nagging, not through telling people that we need more legislation, but through creating a clear, entrepreneurial business model around this, do we ensure that people want to build more accessible housing?” McDermott says. “That’s the kind of thing I am really interested in doing.”Austerity is inevitably casting a dark cloud over Papworth’s £22m-a-year operation. Later in the day of this interview, McDermott was due to meet parents of disabled teenagers using a youth service run by the charity to tell them it was to close. Earlier, she had done a round of local radio interviews on behalf of the Care and Support Alliance warning that the bleak outlook for social care funding meant there would be listeners in future left unable to get out of bed in the morning.
“There are services that we are having to make some really tough decisions around at the moment,” she says. “The way we are doing that is on the basis of the amount we are subsidising a service, the value we are giving to individuals and the wider social value we are adding – and therefore where we should apply that subsidy.
“That is a reality of this sector at the moment. But it’s also driving innovation, I think. How do we take this as an opportunity to think about how we provide services: what services look like and how might we be able to provide services that really do support people to increased independence and choice?
“In lots of instances, services out there today are a result of our thinking over the last 50 years. If we were starting with a blank sheet of paper, is that what we would design?”
McDermott served four years as a trustee and ultimately vice-chair of the disability charity Scope until she stood down earlier this year amid its internal ructions, about which she is uncharacteristically tight-lipped. Yet, some of the longer-serving chief executives will inevitably question her youth and sectoral inexperience. What’s her response: “I suppose there are people saying: ‘We’ve already tried all of this; she’s a bit young and naive. When she gets a bit older she’ll stop being so unrealistic.’
“But people have been saying that my whole life. I just hope I never get there. Idealism comes as standard, I’m afraid.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 36.
Lives Widdrington, Northumberland.
Family Divorced.
Education Lancaster girls’ grammar school; Lancaster and Morecambe College; Newcastle University, MBA.
Career June 2015-present: chair, Care and Support Alliance; 2014-present: chief executive, Papworth Trust; 2009-14: head of professional services, then head of operations, NHS Business Services Authority; 1997-2009: BT, rising from call centre worker to head of planning and analysis.
Interests Horses, outdoor swimming.
