Issue - meetings

S Baker introduced Claire Lynch, who is the Community Partnership Team Lead and is heavily involved in the project and the author of the report.

Later this month, Cabinet will be receiving a report seeking their approval to replace the current core funding arrangements. The new processes are what we call outcome based commissioning. We currently have 10 locally based Strategic Partners these are listed in the report and receive annual grant funding to deliver a range of services for Dacorum residents.

The agreements don’t focus on what the outcomes or benefits are for the residents of Dacorum or the Council and the agreements themselves are not contracts and therefore are not enforceable.

This Council has agreed that the grant funding for the Strategic Partners would cease after this financial year and from 1^st April 2016 it will be replaced by an outcome based commissioning model.

Members should note that the advantage of the commissioning approach is that the actual needs of Dacorum residents are assessed using the best available evidence. The Finance and Resources Overview and Scrutiny received a similar report to this last week and their comments have been incorporated in the Cabinet report. Clearly it’s too late for your comments to be incorporated in the Cabinet report so we will record any comments made and verbally relay them to the Cabinet Meeting so Cabinet can take into account your views when they make their decision.

Cllr Hearn asked if this had been discussed with the voluntary sector and what was their feedback?

S Baker said yes there has been two rounds of consultations with the Strategic Partners Claire has been to the consultation meetings and she will brief you on it.

C Lynch presented the report explaining they are moving to an outcome based commissioning model. This is in line with Cabinet office good practice. It is a four stage process, analyse, plan, do and review, and at the minute they have gone through the analyse stage. There have been two stages of consultation; the first stage was a survey that went out to users and face to face meetings with Strategic Partners, a survey and conversations with internal staff was also carried out. Once they had a better understanding they then moved onto stage two consultation where they started to develop some of the outcomes that they wanted to see for each service.

There have been  two CMT and Cabinet Member joint workshops to set the direction, group the services into contracts and shape outcomes.

What we are proposing is that the funding from the existing ten organisations that are funded through the Strategic Partner Programme is used to fund seven services that are based on evidence.

We are now in stage two consultations until 6^th November and we have had requests from two services to have an additional stage three consultation (Living Stable Live – previously the Druglink and DENS grant funding/ Preventing Relationship Breakdown – previously Mediation Hertfordshire and Relate Dacorum, Watford  ...  view the full minutes text for item 36