THE relationship between councils and charities has been strained in recent years.
An example is the dispute between Edinburgh City Council and local disability charity Kindred. The charity has been providing a parent-led advice service in the city, for a quarter of a century, run on a shoestring, and subsidised by fundraising.
When a new strategy at the council included respectable funding for a parents’ disability advice service, Kindred thought they would be at the very least in the running. However the £126,000 pot for this was subsumed into a £1.2bn package of other support, for which Kindred was not equipped to bid.
The charity was unable to reach agreement with other charities to bid as part of a consortium, so will not receive any funding and its existing helpline faces closure.
Asking charities to bid for contracts to provide support is commonplace, and tensions around the process are often aggravated by a sense that such exercises are about cutting costs for councils. Procurement departments will usually insist quality is at least as important as price in their decision making.
Austerity, of course has made this worse. Austerity policies add to the sense that councils may be issuing contracts in a bid to save money.
This doesn’t just involve tendering exercises. The enormous financial pressure on councils has inevitably led many to cut back on anything which may be seen to be a luxury, or if not a luxury, an added extra.
Statutory duties, such as providing education, social work and housing services, take priority and important but non-statutory work, such as work to intervene early in troubled families can be sacrificed. But this is often the kind of area you can find charities working in.
The amount councils are willing to commit has also come under pressure. Two years ago Glasgow’s shake up of mental health services saw questions asked about the length of time some people continue to use support groups. The city council wanted to pay for support for no more than a few weeks with a more defined outcome. Glasgow Association for Mental Health, and its service users said that just isn’t the way mental health works.
Overcoming such rifts was the goal of Glasgow’s Third Sector Summit at the City Chambers yesterday. Hundred of representatives of an estimated 2,000 voluntary organisations in the city were there, to help draft a new partnership agreement. It was billed by some as an attempt to rebuild relationships between charities and the local authority.
Much will depend what the eventual agreement involves, but there was enthusiasm for the idea (even if it has been tried before and come to naught. “You could fill a room with the strategies we’ve got,” admitted Baillie Russell Robertson at one point). But Councillor David McDonald, city convener for Communities said the desire to repair the relationship between the council and the third sector was genuine.
As an early gesture of good faith, perhaps, the council is to address the controversial integrated grant fund which was cut by more than £6m last year. It has been criticised as a closed shop, funding the same services year after year.
Cllr Mcdonald announced that the 21 per cent of IGF money which is spent internally at the council will be reviewed, and new applications accepted from March next year. The search for a truce has begun – in Glasgow, at least.
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