The government says it wants to get more third sector organisations involved in delivering public services. Yet a new report by charity managers' organisation Acevo shows how the voluntary sector has been replaced by private operators in large parts of the country.
Acevo's independent inquiry looked into how the Department of Work and Pensions contracted its Pathways to Work programme, which enables people on incapacity benefits to move into work. It found that only two third sector organisations had been given contracts by the department.
To understand how this has happened, it is important to understand how the DWP approaches its responsibilities for effective public procurement. My 30 years experience in public sector contracting have taught me that truly effective contracting relies on a real two-way relationship between the purchaser and the provider, where the provider is involved in all stages of strategy and policy development, commissioning, procurement and contract management. Incidentally, my experience has been gained equally from 15 years as a contractor and 15 years as a procurer of services.
In contrast, the DWP seems to think that these processes are completely distinct from one another and must be managed separately. So supplier relationship management happens in one corner and procurement takes place in another, with little or no involvement of contractors in strategy and policy development or commissioning. In this world procurement masquerades as a pseudo-scientific process; contracts are evaluated by people who have no knowledge of the service they are procuring and no knowledge of the performance records of any of the potential delivery partners. In thirty years of public service contracting I have never seen anything like it and cannot see the rationale behind it.
This process has been responsible for producing some extraordinary results which are unlikely to give best value for procurer, taxpayer or, most importantly, the clients. As illustration of the chaos caused by this farce: one of the country's best and most effective providers has become so disillusioned by the situation that it has decided not to participate directly in further DWP procurement processes.
Shaw Trust has won contracts to deliver Pathways to Work and we have been further frustrated by the lack of direction DWP has given regarding the impact of Tupe legislation [designed to protect staff who transfer to a new employer]. DWP could have given a clear direction that Tupe applied. It didn't and instead left each organisation to take its own legal advice. Apart from costing money and, once again, acting against the small provider, this caused problems at the tender stage when it is questionable whether the evaluators were comparing apples with apples or apples with oranges.
It has also caused problems for our wonderful staff who should have transferred seamlessly from our New Deal for Disabled People service into the organisations who had won Pathways to Work in that area. Some, like us, believed that Tupe applied. Others didn't. We had to take legal action against one provider to ensure that our staff were protected but we could only take an individual action, not one which other organisations could benefit from. It is morally reprehensible that a government department should abdicate all responsibility in the way that DWP has done, and again, this has been particularly prejudicial against the small and specialist voluntary organisations.
In the meantime, there are people on incapacity benefits who desperately need the right help and support from a whole range of organisations in order to find and keep work. We all, ministers, DWP and contractors, must work together to make sure this is what they get. Let's hope this report will mark the point where this begins to happen.
· Ian Charlesworth is chief executive of the Shaw Trust
