Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the ACPO Conference, in a session entitled "Making Sense of Commissioning" on the PCC day of the event. Given the close links with community safety, I thought it may be useful to share some of my thoughts from that session.
Commissioning is "the cycle of assessing the needs of people in an area, designing and then achieving appropriate outcomes" - it is NOT the same as procurement, which is the buying of services and awarding of contracts. Many people get this area confused. Every Community Safety Partnership undertakes commissioning every year; they just don't always call it that. Think of commissioning as deciding what you want to buy, and procurement as shopping for it! Procurement does not always need to be external, either; as part of the commissioning process consideration should be given to "make or buy" - is it more effective for us to do this service ourselves, or should we outsource it?
All commissioning organisations use the commissioning cycle. PCCs will be no different.
This is the Commissioning Cycle. Community Safety practitioners should recognise it as the way they already do their business. Every partnership undertakes an annual Strategic Needs Assessment, which then informs a Partnership Plan ["Commissioning Decisions"]. The plan contains individual action plans for each priority ["Procurement Processes"], and is constantly monitored for performance before being reviewed at the end of the year ["Monitoring and Review"]. So for a Community Safety practitioner, commissioning is nothing to be afraid of; in fact, it's just "business as usual".
I mentioned in last week's blog that CSPs would need to consider how they changed their commissioning processes to link better to an incoming PCC. Their hand will be forced by the ending of the Community Safety Fund and other funding streams on March 31 2013. Added to the general nature of cuts, partnerships are going to have to decommission a range of services; they will not be able to sustain all the activity they currently provide, unless they can encourage additional funding from elsewhere.
This should not be a new process for partnerships. The point of having an annual priority-setting process is to allow resources to be moved to areas of emerging need; which means that services should be regularly decommissioned as they are no longer priorities. Sadly, partnerships will also be used to decommissioning services in recent years due to contractions in funding. But partnerships should also have been decommissioning services due to a lack of tangible outcomes or poor performance; perhaps this has not been quite as prominent over the years as it may have been.
But the introduction of PCCs brings a different agenda. Instead of funding simply stopping, there will be funding available from the PCC. That means that decommissioned services have, in effect, a second chance. Some areas are creating "risk registers" of services which may be decommissioned, in order to inform an incoming PCC of the risks of harm, vulnerability, crime levels and political reputation linked to decommissioning each particular service. This should then allow a PCC to make an informed decision on what to invest in.
CSPs should also be thinking about how they can work with a PCC to provide a more efficient and effective commissioning structure. A PCC will inherit a raft of Police Authority staff, who may have no experience of commissioning and procurement. Therefore they may find themselves in the unwelcome position of having to recruit commissioners and procurement officers as one of their earliest acts; and building a larger back office is unlikely to be a ticket they stand for election upon. This gives an opportunity for CSPs and other partners to offer access to commissioning and procurement services to PCCs in exchange for closer partnership working and the sharing of priorities.
For example, a PCC could choose to simply passport their new "community safety fund" to CSPs on a formula basis in order for them to continue with the good work they have previously been undertaking. However, this may mean that the more radical, flexible approaches to force-wide initiatives - which achieve efficiencies through economies of scale - may be inhibited. This model may look like this:
This model allows the CSP to commission the services on behalf of the PCC, and report into the PCC on performance of those services. But CSPs are not the only game in town so far as a PCC is concerned. If a PCC is serious about reducing crime, they will want access into every body charged with the responsibility to commission services which may impact on crime and disorder. For example, effective offender management makes use of the "seven pathways" - a holistic range of services addressing the total needs of the offender, which belong to a huge variety of different services. The intelligent PCC will want to engage with those providers and commission jointly with them. It may well be more efficient for other agencies to commission on behalf of the PCC where they share priorities - for example, using health commissioners to procure drug intervention services, which will impact on acquisitive crime levels. It may look something like this:
Local commissioning partnerships should now be thinking about aligning their landscapes to enable a PCC to slot in neatly and bring to the table their priorities and their resources. This will require a level of trust - particularly if budgets are aligned, let alone pooled - and it is the responsibilities of those bodies to sell themselves to an incoming PCC. Getting this right will mean more efficient commissioning, resulting in more resources available to be directed at the needs of communities.
