Where to start: Funding Partnerships

No partnership is starting from a blank page.  There will be a local infrastructure of support in place, with a range of existing organisations (some public, some third sector, some private) providing a range of services for different kinds of clients in different areas.  As the new DWP Commissioning Framework is rolled out, the significance of Prime Contractors in this landscape and both they and partners are likely to want to work closely together to ensure that individual clients and employers experience a clear, coherent and joined up service.

The partner organisations could delivering relevant mainstream services (eg social services or NHS working with clients on Incapapcity Benefit) or funding local employability services.

Partnerships can find it helpful to start with these questions:

• What is out there?
• What services are being delivered to what kinds of clients and where?

• Who is paying for this and what kind of performance is being achieved? (see Service Mapping?).  Answering this question can uncover some significant mismatches between the kinds of services being delivered and the kinds of clients being supported and the shared priorities and objectives of the partners.

The other side of the coin: 

• What are partners spending, on what, for whom & where?  Identifying local spend and its focus is one of the key steps to partnerships understanding the scope of their ability to create a more coherent local employability service.
• To what extent does investment match the geographical concentrations of priority clients?
• Does the existing infrastructure provide a complete supply chain for all our priority clients in each of these areas?

• What does the partnership want to buy?  Crucially, where are the most significant needs for intervention over and above the key services of JCP and Prime Contractors?

DWP, through Flexible New Deal (FND), have decided to buy outputs (ie people in sustainable jobs), so they are seeking to put together complete local supply chains that start with engagement and end with clients in sustainable jobs.  They will be paid mainly on the eventually outputs.  These FND services will complement Jobcentre Plus’ national service for those unemployed for less than 12 months.

Local partners are very unlikely to be in a position where they can or want to do something of similar scope (though Local Authority and NHS mainstream services will be in touch with significant numbers of high priority clients).  They are more likely to want to understand how their own resources (money and staff) can complement and contribute to national programmes and through careful alignment fill gaps and provide supplementary or complementary support and opportunities.  So the procurement task will be about creating a shared understanding of what the current support structure looks like and how the partners can work together to purchase or deliver services which ensure complete supply chains for priority groups and priority areas – and perhaps for the area as a whole.

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