New compact, new commitment?
Back in June 2009, Sir Bert Massie told Caritas (see his First Person article)...
...‘The Compact is now 10 years old and Kevin Brennan has asked me to rewrite it. It is far too long – with all the codes it amounts to 135 pages – we need one integrated document.’
Established in 1998, the Compact functions as an overall framework for promoting effective partnership working between the government and the third sector. Beleaguered by breaches, such as the Office of the Third Sector’s decision to transfer the £750,000 Campaigning Research Fund to the £16.7m Hardship Fund last November, it is the best it gets when it comes to any kind of memorandum of agreement on how the government and the voluntary sector work together in practice. Bodies such as Compact Voice provide support in how organisations can get more out of their Compact, and its chair Simon Blake urges the sector to ‘grasp it’ because ‘effective use of the Compact by both third and public sectors will be vital in the coming period and success will depend on both commitment and resource.’
The national Compact does not apply to local authorities but each local authority with the third sector locally negotiates and agrees a local Compact which reflects local circumstances.
Richard Corden, CEO of The Commission for the Compact told Caritas: ‘Breaches are regrettable and should always be challenged, but they are isolated incidents and, for a proper picture of how the Compact has performed, you need to take a 10-year view and ask yourself whether, in key areas such as funding by government and consultation by government on policy matters, things are better now than they were ten years ago. I’m sure any sensible observer would confirm they are better. The compact has been one of the influences behind that improvement.’
The key changes reflected in the national Compact include:
- Involvement in policy development. This focuses on how the third sector should be involved in policy development rather than lip service paid to consultation exercises. There are clearer commitments governing how people who represent and speak for the third sector should undertake this role.
- Allocating resources. This includes new commitments for the government to ensure that prime and subcontractors and all other public and private bodies work within the Compact principles when distributing money as well as allowing enough time for consortia and partnership bids.
- Advancing equality. This covers an equality impact assessment which relates more closely to equality law, a renewed emphasis on support for equality infrastructure organisations, a clear commitment to ‘fair and equal access to funding’
However, Chris Hanvey, deputy CEO of Barnado’s (which does deliver a lot of central and local government services) told Caritas: ‘The government which should, like Caesar’s wife, be above suspicion, has often been the biggest culprit of the previous Compact. This is not just in terms of the way that contracts are let, but the earlier mechanisms for doing so. For example, new government funding streams are often announced with very short turn round times for the completion of applications and the process of feeding back to unsuccessful bidders is often weak. This in turn weakens the government in its enforcement of local government Compact arrangements.
‘For many in the voluntary sector the future lay in regulation rather than gentle persuasion. If the government is serious about wanting the third sector to be a mainstream provider of services, they need to have impeccable processes for the bids process. What the Compact has never fully recognised is the complexity of the commissioning process and environment, particularly at a local government level. In one London borough, for example, commissioning may be done by a central commissioning unit that, one day is dealing with refuse collection and, the next short break services for children. In another it is within the department that requires the service.
‘The jury is, therefore out, on whether these new arrangements will provide the backbone needed for an effective commissioning process.’
Author: Clarissa Dann
Clarissa Dann is the Editor of Caritas, Charity Funding Report and Codicil.
Clarissa has a background in legal and professional publishing, as well as business journalism and holds an MBA from
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