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Southwark Supporting People Southwark Supporting People Getting a Green Light from Getting a Green Light from

Commissioners? Commissioners?

Slide one

www.southwark.gov.ukJonathan Lillistone - SP Manager

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Overview• Context for SP now

• Strategy, partnerships and service users

• Southwark's experience and provider feedback

• Challenges

Secondary information Slide two

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Supporting People in Context• Almost 6 years on, what's changed?

– Less guidance and prescription from CLG– Grant Conditions: 80% subject to “excellent” authority conditions

and greater “freedom and flexibility”– Commissioning for outcomes?– Greater focus on service users?

• What this should mean is:– Strategy and leadership that supports creativity and innovation– Greater scope for partnerships– Commissioning services that meet identified need and matter to

the end user

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Making it happen: Strategy, Partnerships & Service users

• Strategy and Leadership

– SP as the strategic enabler

– Providing the framework for commissioning

– Dialogue and consultation with providers and stakeholders

– Clear priorities and expectations

– Flexibility – what not how

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Making it happen: Strategy, Partnerships & Service users

• Partnerships – Partners can demonstrate real results through collaboration– Common interest supersedes partner interest – Partners use "we" when talking about partner matters – Partners are mutually accountable for tasks and outcomes – Partners share responsibilities and rewards – Partners strive to develop and maintain trust – Partners are willing to change what they do and how they do it – Partners seek to improve how the partnership performs

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Making it happen: Strategy, Partnerships & Service users

• Service Users– Providers attitude to involvement and learning from

their own practice– Understanding choice, positive user outcomes and

what works– Creating and encouraging user and organisational

aspirations– Involvement not just consultation

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Southwark’s Experience and provider feedback

• Programme performance and contract management based on risk

• Setting strategic direction in consultation with providers and other stakeholders

• Trusting providers to develop and innovate around models of service delivery

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Practical Examples• Thames Reach, Southwark Reach Service – innovation

and creativity to reach out to excluded groups– “Southwark’s Supporting People commissioners largely left us to

develop the service as we felt it needed to be developed…allowing Thames Reach to come up with ideas and try out new and different ways of working. Just getting strategic advice and direction was quite different to previous ways of working”

• Lookahead Gateway – Reshaping a large younger peoples project to respond to changing needs – – “I think the most important thing at Gateway was partnership working

and trusting Look Ahead to come up with solution/s. Often commissioners decide service design rather than providers and in our case it was very much joint working. Taking calculated risk or chance allowed innovation at Gateway”

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Challenges• Key factors for success:

– Leadership– Trust– Learning – successes and mistakes– Jointly managing for performance and outcomes– Contract stability for services to ‘grow’ and

innovate– Balancing the ‘glossy innovation’ with service

sustainability and success