Information, advice and advocacy services for adults

Proposal

Shropshire Council currently works with many different organisations who provide information, advice or advocacy services for people. The council pays for these services through a range of grants and contracts and, in return, the organisations tell us what work they have done, who for and what difference it has made. We plan to change the way that we work with organisations who carry out this work from October 2014.

All the organisations that Shropshire Council works with are charitable, community or voluntary sector organisations – some specialise in working with particular groups of people such as adults with learning disabilities, some operate in a particular part of the county and others work with a wide range of people across Shropshire. The council values this mix of smaller, larger and specialist organisations, who between them are able to offer what their clients want.

All councils, including Shropshire Council, are having to make financial savings which means that we have to find ways of making sure that the money we spend goes as far as possible and makes as big a difference as possible.
The amount of money that Shropshire Council is able to spend on information, advice and advocacy services for adults is reducing from October 2014. However, because of the importance of these services and the contribution they make to keeping costs down elsewhere, the amount of savings required from these services is much lower than that required from many other services that the council either provides or pays other organisations to provide.

Shropshire Council is working very closely with the organisations who currently provide information, advice and advocacy services in Shropshire to look at what works well, how things could look different or work better and how we can ensure that these services continue to be available to those people who need it, when and where they need it and in what format. We also want to ensure through this process that information, advice and advocacy services feel really joined up and that people can access any of this from a wide range of places.
This will involve looking at the new Care Bill which sets out what information must be made available. We will also look at what needs to be, or can be done, straight away and what can develop over time. This will mean that customers won’t see a big change immediately from October 2014, but we want there to be time to develop new ways of working which will benefit customers in the long term.

We do recognise that many people who come into contact with organisations providing information, advice or advocacy will only need to make contact once or twice and won’t know that any changes have been made at all. We also recognise that some people have a longer term relationship, particularly those that are supported through some of the advocacy organisations and we will work with those organisations to make sure that people understand what is being planned.

We also recognise that this is likely to be a bigger change for the organisations who provide information, advice and advocacy than it is for many customers so we have been talking with these organisations about our plans for some time. In return, we propose to put in place longer term agreements for paying these organisations to do this work, rather than working from one year to the next. This should help to give some certainty and also mean that the hard work put in now to develop these services will be able to pay off over a much
longer period of time.

Shropshire Council will apply the following principles when planning how we can make the necessary changes:

• We want these services to focus on positive outcomes, or impacts, for the customer
• We value the broad range of organisations currently involved in providing these
  services and want to retain a wide choice for the customer
• We want these services to get even better over time and will work with the
  organisations involved to make the best use of their own and other community
  resources. This will also help to ensure that the taxpayer gets good value for money
• We also recognise that there are other social and economic benefits to be gained, such as the social and economic value of volunteering in the organisations we work with
• We want to build flexibility into the way that organisations work with us and work together, so that we can respond to any future changes in a planned way

We see this as a great opportunity to change the way that people are provided with information, advice and advocacy, so that services are joined-up and giving people what they need, whilst providing some long-term certainty for providers in a time of difficult financial decisions.