Just this cryptic graphic for now, but more - much more - to come.
I suppose I should start by explaining the cryptic graphic above.
Last Thursday, as expected, Sandwell Community Empowerment Network (SCEN) finally decided that is was time for it to sever its ties with Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) having concluded that is failed to deliver the project in a manner ‘fit for purpose’. Sometime in the next few weeks the project will therefore be put out to tender in the expectation that another local organisation will take over the delivery of the project and the role of ‘Responsible Body’ from April next year.
The immediate upshot of all this is that something like six or seven employees will be getting redundancy notices during the next three months as direct result of SCVO losing the funding that goes with SCEN with up to another six looking dicey as part of their salaries were being met from hosting fees that SCVO derived from SCEN.
Just to clarify quickly who’s who in this scenario, SCVO is Sandwell’s Council for Voluntary Services which exists, ostensibly, to provide support to a wide range of charities and voluntary organisations. SCEN is project set up about four years with funding from the Government’s Neighbourhood Renewal Unit that was supposed to enable local charities and voluntary organisations to play a part in the strategic planning of local services, alongside the Local Authority, various NHS bodies, the Police and other, including representative of the local business community – a task it has consistently failed to do over this time, hence the current ‘divorce’ that SCEN has initiated.
In total, SCEN has received over £2 million in taxpayers’ money over four years, some of which was to pay for the development of SCEN as a network which would give the local voluntary sector a collective voice, the rest being distributed through a couple of small grants programmes to support local community activities.
This whole situation interests me for several reasons.
Yes, I did work for SCVO up until the early part of this year (2005) and, indeed, was heavily involved at various times over the preceding three years in trying to make the SCEN project work. As such I have a very clear and detailed perspective on the reasons for its failure.
It’s also the case that I know several of those current SCVO employees whose jobs will be disappearing, personally, and know of others who joined the organisation after I’d left by reputation. I think it fair to say that in the case of most of those now staring down the barrel of a P45 they really don’t deserve to be put in that position.
And, of course, having worked in Sandwell’s Voluntary Sector for more than five years up to the beginning of this year I also got to know a lot of very good and committed people in and around the sector, people who should be benefiting from the project right now, if only it had delivered what it was supposed to deliver.
Although the project will move on in April and, hopefully, the organisation which takes it on make a much better job of delivering its work, that fact remains that a hell of a lot of people in Sandwell have very good reason to feel badly let down by SCEN’s failing over these four years, not to mention every right to be pissed off at seeing so much public money wasted when it could have made a real difference to the lives of local people.
This is, therefore, to my mind, a matter of accountability.
The decision to pull SCEN out of SCVO has followed a well-worn public sector route.
A task group of SCEN’s own representatives has, over the last 2-3 months, evaluated SCVO’s recent work in delivering the project as a whole and arrived at the conclusion that after four years the project is simply not fit for purpose, producing a report which highlights the problems/issues, looks at options and which, ultimately, recommends the project be put out to tender.
From here on in, I’m sure the expectation is that everything will be managed out quietly. Staff will be made quietly redundant. Tenders will be quietly solicited and evaluated and a new Responsible Body quietly chosen. There’ll be a smooth, quiet, period of transition followed by a re-launch of the new
Improved SCEN - whatever they choose to call it - and the failures of the last four years will be quietly put away out of sight, and out of mind, existing only in a couple of official reports safely stashed away from the public gaze.
Such, I’m afraid, is the way of bureaucracy and the public sector when this fail and public money is poured down the drain of incompetence.
Except that this time around, that isn’t going to happen.
When an organisation, any organisation, is handed more than £2 million of public money over four years and fails to deliver anything of real consequence, when the project it has delivered has been found to be unfit for the purpose for which it was set up then there is, I would contend, a legitimate public interest in knowing why this happened.
Why did this project fail?
What happened to all this public money?
Who, exactly, is responsible?
Ordinarily these are questions to which only the privileged few would receive answers, but not on this occasion. This time around, I’m determined that the story is going to be told and people are going to get to see why the project failed, where the money went and who was responsible for it all.
It’s a matter of public interest.
Over the weekend, I’ve had chance to review the ‘fit for purpose’ report which finally nailed down the lid of SCVO’s tenure as SCEN’s responsible body – it makes for interesting reading.
To be honest there’s really nothing in it that I found surprising; for the most part it simply confirms what I already knew about the state of the project; and it provides a pretty accurate depiction of the state of SCEN and its failings as they stand today.
If I have any minor personal criticisms of the report itself its that it really doesn’t unpick in full the historical reasons why SCEN has wound up in the state it is currently in; but then to be fair not only was that not really the remit of report but its also clear that those tasked with producing it were somewhat limited in their access to background information which would have fleshed out the account of what has gone wrong with more detail about the how and why of SCEN’s failure. There are a couple of points in the report where it is, shall we say, overgenerous towards certain individuals and at least a couple of points I’ve noted where it is overly harsh due to what are entirely correct and valid conclusions being presented in the absence of background information to explain why certain situations have arisen.
Still, with those limitations in mind – one’s for which the author(s) of the report cannot be held responsible due to limitations imposed by the report’s remit and on access to background and, in particular, historical information about the project – it is a pretty fair and very honest report, a fact that for me is confirmed by my understanding that SCVO asked for something of the order of four pages of amendments to the final draft to correct what it claimed were ‘factual errors’ in an effort to limit the damage that the report would cause. Having worked for SCVO and knowing the culture of the organisation, I would have to say that in general the more it protests unfairness in others, the more likely it is that they’ve got rather too close to the truth for comfort and as I understand it, in the end only three minor amendments were made, none it which, it would appear to me, has done anything to diminish or limit the report’s conclusions.
The report answers many questions, but also leaves many unanswered; which for someone (me) who has been a bundle of curiosity since birth (at least that’s what my Mom says) has to be an open invitation to indulge in a little digging after the truth.
After all, amongst the deficiencies that the report identifies we find that:
“It has been difficult, both historically and during the process of scoping this report, for the panel to get appropriate and/or timely information on the financial resources available to SCEN. Financial information has either been absent or presented in an unclear format. It is not clear who has the authority to authorise expenditure.�
“The experience of SCEN representatives is that expenditure has been made without any representative being involved in the decision e.g. the decision to spend £20,000 on our contribution to the Sandwell show. SCVO point out that this decision was not endorsed by them being solely a project management decision.�
“…from the attached accounts, SCVO appears to be charging SCEN 14.06% of the total SCEN budget (including Grants) as its apportioned costs [£85,259 out of a total budget of £606,316. This is a system that is used quite widely and is a method, with accepted financial probity, by which full cost recovery can be achieved…
…this arrangement bears no relation to the amount of work or activities undertaken in the administration and delivery of the SCEN project. For example the budget line for postage is £1000; the apportionment of this cost is £2292. SCEN therefore could be seen by a member of the general population to be paying £3292 (comprising of direct and indirect expenditure) for an item that is only valued at £1000. Similarly 28.6% of SCVO’s Chief Executive’s Salary comes from the SCEN budget when she does not devote a proportionate amount of her time to the project.�
“3.2 Equipment
Requested inventory not supplied�
“Strategic and operational planning; if it has taken place it has not been communicated. There is a delivery plan in existence which we understand was approved by previous members and Chair of the panel but this in our view does not constitute an operational strategic plan�
“SCVO however point out that “GOWM specifically told SCVO as responsible body not to be involved (in the performance management framework) nearly two years ago� (name redacted). We are therefore at a loss to understand who controls this process, what its objectives are and how it is implemented.�
“In the place of any operational strategic plan, the agenda that we as panel members have experienced is the creation of policy. This policy in the main focuses on details rather than direction. It is debateable whether some of these details are even the right details to consider. There is a feeling that the panel merely rubber stamps something that someone else has done�
“There is no evidence from the submitted responses that informs the Task group as to the structuring of training and development for staff.�
“This notion of performance management does throw up some concerns though in that half of the staff who responded to the questionnaire stated that there was no current or up to date job description available to them despite these documents being submitted to the task group.�
When faced with comments like that in a formal evaluation of a four year-old project which has had £2 million+ of public money during its lifetime – comments which would barely be acceptable after the first 6-12 months – then who wouldn’t be curious to understand quite how and why this has all come about?
Over the next couple of months I’m going to try to fill in the blanks and provide answers to some of the as yet unanswered questions that arise from the failure of the SCEN project, to date and, in particular to address many of the background issues that aren’t immediately apparent from the ‘fit for purpose’ report – the how, why and who’s responsible for some of these failings.
It’s going to take a little while to tell the full story, there being some additional information I require to give a full picture of events which will, by the end of this week, be subject to a number of FOI requests – after all it’s important to get the facts straight – which explains why I’ve set up a new category ‘The SCEN Files’ to house this information.
…
Reading back what I’ve just written, I suppose the last thing to clear up for now is the question of why should I do this at all? What’s the motive here?
Earlier one I sort of explained something of why this whole issue interests me without really being clear as to why it interests me enough to go digging for more information and try to tell the full story of SCEN.
To some extent I’m motivated by a clear knowledge from experience of how certain people within SCVO will react to the report which has found SCEN to be unfit for purpose – which is basically to try and find someone else to blame. We can see something of this in the quotations from the fit for purpose report (above), both where its claimed, in relation to the £20,000 expended on the Sandwell Show where the report’s author(s) could find no clear evidence of who had authorised this expenditure that:
“SCVO point out that this decision was not endorsed by them being solely a project management decision.�
And equally where it notes the claim that:
“SCVO however point out that “GOWM specifically told SCVO as responsible body not to be involved (in the performance management framework) nearly two years ago.�
Before noting that if that is the case then it would appear that no one has been performance managing SCEN for the last couple of years.
In a future piece I will be looking closely at the detail of some of these claims to try to assess their veracity in full but for time being its worth noting that, from personal experience, it comes as no real surprise to find SCVO’s management making excuses and trying to shift the blame elsewhere when things go wrong – the organisation has operated under a culture for some considerable time in which anything that goes wrong is always – according to its management – someone else’s fault even to the point that when the Black Country Global Grants programme was withdrawn due to its steering/working group having lost confidence in SCVO ability to administer the fund to the required standard, the SCVO’s Chief Executive did little but complain to the SCVO Board that they’d not been given the chance to explain themselves on the day the decision was taken.
I’ll be interested to see just how SCVO’s Board reacts to this report. If you read the quotations above then, despite one of two attempts at introducing self-exculpatory comments into the overall narrative of the report, the catalogue of failings it reveals all point back to one thing – a string of abject failures in the management of the project.
What the report reveals is an organisation which could not provide members of a task group evaluating the project’s fitness for purpose – a task group made up of members of the project’s governing body, I should add- with clear, accurate and timely financial information.
It could not provide the task group with an asset register of equipment purchased using project funding.
It apparently failed to monitor and approve the expenditure of £20,000 by one of its own employees (all those working on SCEN are employed by SCVO, although it should noted that the manager who appears to have authorised this expenditure without, allegedly, obtaining authorisation from either SCEN’s Community Panel or though, so the claim, SCVO’s own procedures, is a joint funded post), even though monitoring expenditure is one of SCVO’s key roles as SCEN’s responsible body*.
*The Neighbourhood Renewal Unit defines the four basic functions for the Responsible Body in its programme guidance for the Single Community Programme as follows: legal liability, recruitment/employment, financial management and evaluation and monitoring.
In addition the task group appears not to be able to find any solid evidence of ‘strategic and operational planning’, structured training and development for staff, nor even that certain staff are aware of the contents of their job description.
These are all failures in the management of the project so who else could be responsible but SCVO’s own management.
Let’s put this in its full perspective.
Not only is half the organisation’s turnover due to head out of the door come April - along with six or seven employees whose posts are fully or jointly funded directly by SCEN - but, according to the management accounts included in the report, another six employee rely for part of their salary on the hosting fees SCVO has been charging SCEN – and that’s without getting into possible meaning of curios like the £1,000 budget for postage that actually appears to cost SCEN more than £3,000.
By my, admittedly, rough reckoning, on the charitable side of SCVO there are only six current employees whose salary funding doesn’t appear to rely, in some part, on SCEN – SCVO does operate a New Deal programme but that is self contained and run through a subsidiary trading company not the main charity, and is, therefore, not affected.
Quite what may be left after SCEN – and its funding which appears to comprise about half of SCVO’s annual turnover* – is anyone’s guess – hypothetically, the knock on effect of losing SCEN and the impact this may have indirectly on other current funders in addition to its direct effect on SCVO could result in the closure of the charity side in its entirety.
*It’s also worth noting that a fairly sizable increase in SCVO’s on-paper turnover that coincides with it becoming SCEN’s Responsible Body was used, earlier this year, to justify its management staff being awarded a whopping 19.2% pay rise.
As mentioned in previous comments, the majority of other staffwould have got thr public sector pay aware of 2.9% this year
There are a lot of potential losers from this whole situation; not just those front-line employees who have been doing their best to provide much needed services to the local Voluntary Sector but a sizable number of, in particular, small to medium-sized local organisations who have come to rely on SCVO – or rather its staff, as their personal reputation is often far better than that of the organisation itself – for many basic support services including information and advice, fundraising and developmental support.
There are, in my estimation, a hell of a lot of people in and around this whole situation who have a right to be asking some pretty searching questions right now, and a right, in my view, to have those questions answered and to be told openly and honestly just what the hell has really gone wrong here and why – especially when a little ferreting around amongst the many and varied reports submitted to local councillors by officers of the local authority appear to show significant concerns about how SCVO has been managed and its capacity to deliver its services going back at least 2-3 years*.
This, I expect, explains why a local authority scrutiny committee is currently looking into SCVO’s activities and its capacity to deliver services, one which, if it stays on schedule, is due to report sometime toward the end of January or beginning of February.
Just for starters, there are SCVO’s own employees – some of whom have effectively lost their jobs with last week’s decision, while others face an uncertain future which currently offers few guarantees that their jobs are safe, no matter how well they, personally, have been doing their job.
Then there are the 200+ local organisations that make up SCVO’s membership, some of whom will undoubtedly have attended the organisation’s AGM less than two months ago and most probably given a rosy picture of the organisation and its prospects for the future. I doubt very much that they, for all that they are members of SCVO, will have been told anything that might suggest that only a few weeks later the organisation might look as if its now heading up shit creek and wondering where the hell it put the paddle.
Then there’s all the other local organisations that rely on SCVO for basic services, what support will they get if everything disappears down the pan come April? I wonder how many have even an inkling of the situation as it appears to stand.
Then there’s the many thousands of ordinary local people whose views on local services should have been represented in local strategic bodies by SCEN over the last four years – although its doubtful that most of them are even aware of how they’ve been let down so poor has been SCEN’s impact on the life of the borough.
The frustrating part of all this is that it’s not as if this has come of the blue or represents a sudden and unexpected crisis - the warning signs have been there for a long time if only you knew where to look.
They were there when near enough open warfare broke out between SCVO’s management and several of its most experienced employees – me included – over everything from contracts to the attitude and conduct of certain managers. Of course, it was the staff that got the blame for that, even to the point of being more or less accused of losing sight of the work we should have been doing for local communities in the foreword to SCVO’s annual report (2003/4, if you want to look it up).
The fact is that the staff in question never did lose sight of the importance of supporting local communities. How could we when we were the one’s working in and with local communities on a daily basis - sometimes even to the extent, on some occasions, of going up against our own employer to get them a fair deal – but that’s a story for another day.
This were certainly there when the local authority decided that, unlike the majority of local organisations it funds, SCVO would be required to provide monthly monitoring reports and be paid its grant quarterly in arrears*.
*One of the more interesting points about this is that the report on which this decision appears to have been based has not been put into the public domain – on the local authority’s online Committee Management Information System there appears only a one page note stating that it cannot be release under ‘current’ access to information legislation. However as this note was publish before FOIA 200 came into effect, I think it worth testing whether the non-publication of this report stands up under the law as it is now.
And they were certainly there when the Global Grants programme was withdrawn from SCVO after a mere twelve months and handed over to the Black Country Knowledge Society on the stated grounds that its steering ground had lost confidence in SCVO’s capacity to deliver the programme.
Even reading the current fit for purpose report has been like taking a trip back in time and listening all over again to the concerns of SCEN’s two previous representatives groups – different day, different report, same old shit. No access to financial reports. No strategic/operational planning. No real idea where the money’s being spent, by whom, what on and on whose authority. As someone who was up close and personal with the SCEN project for just over three of the last four years all it really says is the same things I was hearing from reps the whole time I was at SCVO.
And through all this, with everything that’s happened pointing squarely at problems in the management of the organisation, what have the only people who could take action and do something about this whole sorry mess – SCVO’s Board of Trustees – actually done?
Publicly, at least, they’ve backed their managers all the way – although to be fair I’m hearing that this backing may by no means be unanimous these days.
On the off-chance that any of SCVO’s current board do happen across this piece, let me just remind them of one thing…
Failure is not just a seven-letter word it’s also, in the context of employment law, just the kind of ‘some other substantial reason’ that makes a dismissal perfectly legal if handled correctly. It about time someone realised that.
…
Last’s thought for now, I think I’ll end on a faintly poetic bit of musing.
If, at the end of all this, SCVO does go under next April, I wonder which of its Board Members will utter the only fitting epitaph…
“Pass me the violin… I feel a tune coming on…â€?
