The Third Sector magazine published its shortlist of prize-winners in its annual awards. This is also a business-oriented thing because they believe that the most important thing about being a voluntary organisation (sorry ‘third sector’) is things like ‘brand development’ instead of what you’re doing. ‘Well it’s our job to help you while your husband is dying and I’m sure you appreciate that our brand development is second to none’.

And a lot of prize schemes like this cannot afford to assess the quality of the work that an organisation does, so they can only look at efficiency according to some business view. Business does not do caring, it does making money. It is not the same thing and being efficient at it is not what you should be looking for in a voluntary organisation.

But never mind, they’ve got one category of ‘at work’ with a few minor awards, and they’ve got a psychotherapist as one of the assessors for this – it looks from her organisation and the fact that she majors on being a ‘coach’ as if she psychotheraps in the city, alongside many of the other judges, most of whom are policy wonks and businessmen (and I say men advisedly), although some of them have escaped to the voluntary sector (which they probably like to call the third sector). In case you care, I can identify one social worker among the judges, the soon-to-retire Robin Currrie of PSS (you might not know this from the information, PSS stands for Personal Service Society and is a famous old Liverpool charitable institution, now expanding across the country on the back of NHS and social services contracts).

Of course, most of the shortlist are fundraising teams or ‘corporate partnership’ jobs. Organisations related to palliative care and even one hospice are competing strongly in corporate partnership (i.e. extracting money from big businesses by trying to look as much as possible like big business), you’ll be pleased to know they are: Macmillan Cancer Support; Marie Curie Cancer Care; Teenage Cancer Trust; Treetops Hospice. And Julia’s House, a children’s hospice in Dorset, is in the running for best employer.

That’s all right then, no need to worry about whether any of these organizations are actually doing a good job with people who need care because they’re partnering corporately and employing well. Not that I mind that they’re doing so well at this, but I’d like to see an award that put doing a proper caring job at the top of the list and spent time and money assessing that.

Look at the shortlist here: http://www.thirdsectorexcellenceawards.com/sites/default/files/shortlist_pdf.pdf

In among all the fuss about MPs’ expenses, an MP involved in the creation of the voluntary sector compact presented one of those Bills to Parliament yesterday that is designed to raise an issue, rather than actually have something enacted.

The Compact is supposed to be an agreement between central and local government that they will behave sensibly when they fund or relate to voluntary organisations, such as short-notive changes of direction. In reality the thing is entirely pointless, because many officials, central or local, don’t think they have any responsibility for the voluntary sector even though it’s providing a bunch of their services for them, or behaving reasonably (not surprisingly in view of the way their political masters behave in relation to their expenses).

Care minister Phil (I have been calling him FullaHope, because of his naively optimistic announcements, but now I’ll have to call him MoreHope in view of the amount of zany expenses he seems to have copped for). Anyway, care minister Phil, is mentioned here as the guy who ran the consultation that decided the Compact’s ‘voluntary nature and values’ was inconsistent with actually making governments do what they say they’re going to do, so here is a more sensible soul having another go.

Tom Levitt (High Peak) (Lab) …At the national level, the picture has been less clear-cut. There is a perception in the sector that commitment to, and compliance with, the compact in some—but by no means all—areas of government is somewhat patchy…

Looking at the national level, many in the third sector are frustrated that the undoubted political commitment to the compact may not have been translated consistently into Government practice. As a result of that analysis, Sir Bert Massie, as Commissioner for the Compact, was asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Phil Hope), then Minister for the Third Sector, to launch a debate on the future of the compact and the commission. The consultation concluded that the compact agreement should retain its voluntary nature and its values, rather than being replaced with a statutory version, so the Bill does not alter the status or the content of the compact.

However, a majority also recognised that significantly more needs to be done to ensure proper implementation of the compact. There was strong consensus that the most effective way to do that would be to establish the Commission for the Compact as a permanent, independent statutory body, and to give it a mandate and a limited range of legal powers to secure better implementation…

With this Bill I propose to place the Commission for the Compact on a statutory basis and confer a very limited range of legal powers to enable it to promote better implementation of the compact. Having the commission established by Parliament, with a constitution…

The new commission would have a number of functions, mainly to promote and strengthen understanding and use of the compact across all tiers of government and within the voluntary and community sector. Its limited number of new powers and duties will constrain it to act in particular ways. Those would include powers of investigation where there have been inconsistencies with compact principles, access to relevant information, and the ability to impose a duty on others to co-operate with its investigations…

Given that the compact is about better partnerships, it is fair and reasonable for the commission’s powers to apply to both sides. There are no sanctions included in the Bill, as I believe that those would be outside the spirit of the compact, other than the power of naming and shaming those who are found not to be acting in that spirit.

Well of course this is a no-hoper. For one thing, if we get a Conservative government, nice ideas for yet another quango are going to go the way of all flesh. And even if we don’t, setting up a body with no powers except to name and shame politicians and officials for not bothering about anything but their own interests is going to be completely ineffective, because nobody is going to be allowed to spend anything on anything soon, so priority for spending money to support bodies external to government is not going to happen.

However, at least Mr Levitt is aware that there is still an issue about how government treats voluntary organisations, even if he’s phrased it so tactfully, that you could use this speech as a wonderful example of not actually calling a shovel anything but an artfully decorated trowel. Did you like: ‘the picture is less clear-cut’ ‘compliance is somewhat patchy’‘undoubted political commitment may not have been translated consistently into Government practice’?

The Hansard report of the presentation of the Bill: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090519/debtext/90519-0004.htm#09051970000001

A commentator tells me that a new edition of the ace guide to the law for voluntary organisations has come out ‘Voluntary but not amateur’, that I was bemoaning needs renewal has now appeared. New readers might not see the comment, so here is the information again:

I hope you’ll be pleased to know that a new – completely updated – edition (the eighth) of Voluntary but not amateur has just been published.

The new edition is published by the Directory of Social Change and is available from www.dsc.org.uk/Publications/Law/@2911 or 08450 77 77 07/ 020 7391 4800, price £35 + postage.

A column in Guardian Public the freebie mag for people who buy things for the public sector (you thought The Guardian was publishing this out of public duty – naïve old you; it hopes to get through to people who spend money on advertising) contains a puff by a Futurebuilders man for their work. This is the organisation that provides up-front funding to help voluntary organisations bid for public contracts.

True to the principle of making the readership of a magazine (in this case commissioners of public services) feel good, the author writes encouragingly that it seems that the distinctiveness of the voluntary sector is going to come from intelligent commissioning. This means cleverness from all those people who set up contracts with voluntary bodies.

No Jonathan, the whole point about the voluntary sector is that it decides what it wants to do and how to do it, and people go and work in it because they have freedom to be creative about things (or, to be brutally accurate, also to get stuck in the past and do things like people did them a hundred years ago provided there’s an endowment). The results are distinctive because they don’t have to fit into any pattern, while on the other hand most commissioning is about complying with government guidelines. E.g, the St Christopher’s contract with its local PCTs, which is an excellent piece of professional work on their part and produced through an exemplary process of communication and collaboration, but actually requires the Hospice to comply with the NICE Guidelines on palliative care.

Let’s stick with the idea that intelligent commissioners, like the people who commission St Christopher’s, look for something good and interesting and then commission it; they don’t create soimething distinctive themselves and then go out and get some cheap organisation to do it their way.

Lewis, J. (2008) The future is bright for the third sector. Public October: 42-3.

The next steps review (the Darzi Report to you and me) was the Department of Health’s plans for the future, and they’ve just published a document about what it means for the third (voluntary) sector.

See it at: http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_091821

One of the things that’s notable about this is the intention to put ‘frontline staff in control’. This means making it possible to set up local community trusts and other mechanisms for NHS staff to opt out from the NHS and run their services with the same freedoms in the community as foundation trusts have for hospitals (ie no responsibility for anything but their own financial interests).

There’s a great deal of emphasis on social enterprise; an important aim seems to be to encourage NHS staff to set up social enterprises to run NHS services, and they can keep NHS pensions and conditions of service (at whose expense? – their social enterprise? In which case it’s not going to happen). They can only do this, it seems, if they work entirely for the NHS.

This is similar to the idea that was mooted to allow social workers to set up general practices and take on child protection responsibilities from local authorities – I think they might have gone a bit cold on that one since Baby P.

The document says very little, though, about voluntary organisations such as hospices. Do they have to convert themselves to social enterprises and take on NHS staff, doing only NHS work in order to gain from the next steps review? The main aim seems to be to get people to set up new organisations to provide preventive and wellbeing services. This preventive approach is an important priority; the NHS has for too long been an illness service. What about the voluntary organisations that are already there, though? It’s not really much of a plan for them, and it’s very much a plan for advancing the government’s policy by shifting provision outside the inflexibilities of the NHS. But the whole priniple of having a voluntary sector is that it makes its own decisions about what to provide and how to do it; that’s why it’s voluntary.