Strengthening DPULOs Programme monthly update, no.1 – Feb 2012

As I blogged last week, the Strengthening DPULOs Programme is starting monthly updates to interested stakeholders about its work. Below is a copy of the first update, which was sent earlier today. If you didn’t receive it and would like to, just let me know your contact details in the comments or on Twitter (@rich_w) and I’ll add you to the list.

This is the first monthly update about the Strengthening DPULOs Programme.

The Programme was launched by the Minister for Disabled People, Maria Miller MP, last year. The aim of the Strengthening DPULOs Programme is to provide a range of practical and financial support to DPULOs to become stronger and more sustainable.

You can read an overview of the Strengthening DPULOs Programme here.

Programme news

Since the programme launched there have been lots of things achieved.

One of the main things people have been interested in is the types of financial awards we’ve made through the Facilitation Fund. You can read about some of the first round of awards made by the Programme in September last year here.

You can also read about the difference the Strengthening DPULOs Programme has made so far, in the words of DPULOs themselves.

We have recently published an Expression of Interest for some work we’re doing on disability hate crime. It’s called “DPULOs: Making a Difference”. We want a DPULO to bring together a collection of case studies for us on how up to 10 DPULOs have made a difference in addressing disability hate crime.

We have funding available, both for the DPULO that will coordinate this work and for the DPULOs whose work is featured as a case study.

To find out more, please read the Expression of Interest.

If you’re interested, please submit your Expression of Interest to Richard.Watts1@dwp.gsi.gov.uk by 5pm on Friday 2 March 2012.

One of the programme’s Ambassadors, Lynne Turnbull, will be speaking at a personalisation conference in March. To find out more about this, visit here.

To find out more about Ambassadors – who they are, what they do, and their contact details – please visit here.

Here are some blogposts the Ambassadors have written about work they’ve done so far:

• Mark Baggley – Visiting two DPULOs
• Rachael Wallach – Visiting My Life, My Choice in Oxfordshire
• Berni Vincent – A DPULO Ambassador writes

You can also hear more from Ambassadors – through video and audio – here.

Useful resources

One key part of the Strengthening DPULOs Programme is to share learning and useful resources. Some useful links to recent information we’ve published are below.

• Evidence from a research project considering a community empowerment approach to health – which is very similar to what DPULOs do in their local communities – shows it saves £3.80 for every £1 invested
• Governance is a vital issue for DPULOs. There is a whole range of governance resources specifically for DPULOs from work done by the Department of Health and hosted by DRUK (formerly National Centre for Independent Living)
• We gave a talk to research in practice for adults about DPULOs, which you can read about here
• The Programme was also kindly invited by In Control to do a webinar on DPULOs, which you can find here
• Community Catalysts is an organisation that provides a wider range of support for micro providers, including DPULOs. To find out more, visit here.

Find out more about the Programme

To find out more about the Strengthening DPULOs Programme, you can visit our website.

You can also keep in touch with the programme through our regularly updated Facebook page. This includes information that may be useful to DPULOs, as well as information about the programme too. If you are on Facebook, you can find us here.

If you are on Twitter, you can share information and find out more about DPULOs using the hashtag #dpulo.

As always, we’d be grateful if you can spread the word and publicise this news throughout your networks / newsletters / websites etc. We’d also be grateful for any feedback you have on this first regular email.

Contact us

For information, biographies, contact details and details of the areas covered by each of the 12 DPULO Ambassadors covers, please visit the Ambassadors page.

If you have any questions about the Facilitation Fund or any part Strengthening DPULOs Programme, please contact odi.businessperformance@dwp.gsi.gov.uk.

Please feel free to forward this information on to any DPULOs, networks or stakeholders you think might find it interesting. If you didn’t receive the original email, please share your contact details with us so you can receive our monthly emails.

Man walks into a column, no.49: Newt

As news – hardly news – filters through that (whisper it) there’s a new frontrunner in the race to be the Republican presidential nominee I couldn’t resist offering my own personal perspective on why the likely voters in the Grand Old Party primaries seem so eager to leap onto Anyone Who Isn’t Mitt Romney.

The latest NonRom is someone deeply, uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has been following US politics over the last couple of decades: ex-Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. New NBC/Wall Street Journal poll results (covered in the FT here) suggest that Newt has opened up a double digit lead over Mitt – first choice of 40 per cent of Republican primary voters compared to 23 per cent for Romney – but would be likely to struggle against Obama in the presidential election itself, if it were held today.

The race is far from over and Gingrich’s thirty odd years in politics (not to mention ‘colourful’ – i.e. sex and filthy lucre filled – personal life) could well mean he comes a cropper before too long – as Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod commented yesterday ‘the higher a monkey climbs … the more you can see his butt’. But with the first primaries only a couple of weeks away it could well be that the Republicans have found someone who they can comfortably, enthusiastically get behind.

Coverage of Gingrich’s sudden front-runner status often focuses by way of explanation on why Newt is a clearly ‘committed member of the tribe’ or why Romney is an untrustworthy flip-flopper (see for example this Washington Post piece which makes both points). But that doesn’t quite explain the speed with which successive NonRom candidates have been latched upon, including most recently a man who referred to himself in the third person and was, well, clearly an idiot.

I think the problem with Romney is this: he sells himself as a tactical choice to beat Obama and in so doing highlights the fact that as a person he is actually quite a lot like Obama. And if there’s one thing that Republicans hate – even more than married gay immigrant tree-hugging neo-commies – it’s Obama.

What really brought the Obama similarities home to me was this profile of Romney published on Sunday by veteran Washington Post writer (and Laura Bush biographer!) Ann Gerhart. That Romney is a rational, intelligent, wonky type is one thing. The problem is he is too good a person. Mitt’s record speaks for itself: married to his high school sweetheart for 42 years, donates 10 per cent of his considerable funds to church, earned his law degree and MBA at the same time. From Harvard. Before he was 30. When he already had a young family. You get the picture: hardly presidential material.

I say that but actually Republican voters – all voters in fact – have seen ample evidence in recent years that even a man with such prodigious talents as Obama is unable to achieve all that much in the face of the momentous pressures affecting the US in the early 21st Century. Everything from Congressional gridlock, global recession and the rise of new world powers conspires against.

It’s in this context that the stormtroopers of the GOP want someone who can fight their corner, who they can feel good about and who can make them feel good: ugly, imperfect, blinkered and angry as they are. That person is not Mitt, but it might well be Newt.

More Ministerial support for DPULOs / #dpulo

Following a recent speech by the Minister for Disabled People, Maria Miller MP, on the importance of Disabled People’s User-Led Organisations (DPULOs), I thought it would be useful to see another speech recently made by the Minister.

Once again, she highlights why DPULOs are important, both in representing the voice of disabled people and in the delivery of services.

An extract from the Minsiter’s speech is below:

At every level we want to see individual disabled people driving change.

And because this is so important, we are investing an extra £3 million to help disabled people’s user led organisations grow and develop.

These grassroots organisations have first hand experience of what disabled people really need.

And stronger, more robust organisations will give disabled people more influence.

Richard Watts from [ecdp] is helping get this project off the ground as joint National Lead with Independent Living and Office for Disability Issues [ODI].

In addition we have appointed 12 ambassadors representing all areas of England. Part of their role is to share expertise and best practice.

We are working to develop a pool of volunteer experts who can help with skills the organisations may lack, for example in human resources, business planning and financial management.

I want every disabled person to have access to a disabled people’s user led organisation.

Because this is the kind of support individual disabled people need to deliver real independence so they can make their own choices, have full control over their lives and achieve their full potential.

You can also watch the Minister’s speech below (the section on DPULOs starts at 2’51”):

A full report of the conference at which the Minister spoke is available here.

Man walks into a column, no.45: Obamacare

Yesterday, the 2012 US presidential election, already resting precariously on the sharpest of knife edges, became even more unpredictable, when the Supreme Court decided to review President Obama’s 2010 healthcare law. The ruling will come next March, smack bang in the middle of the election campaign.

But what’s arguably most interesting about this momentous decision is that howevermuch the ruling will change the election, it might have very little impact on healthcare itself, whichever way the judges come down. Just as in England, where a political vacuum is leaving local health services to make up their own minds, so in the US, people across the country are just getting on with implementing legislation that, whilst passed, could quite possibly be ruled unconstitutional.

In agreeing to review the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (so typically American: even its title is a political statement) the Supreme Court is responding to the only appeals court to have ruled that the Act is unconstitutional: most have said it isn’t. Even courts featuring conservative jurists have refused to strike it down: the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia being the latest example.

This fact – along with the substantive reasons behind the mostly favourable rulings – may give Team Obama hope. The author of the District of Columbia decision, Reagan-appointed Justice Laurence Silberman, said the individual mandate, which requires Americans to buy health insurance or face a penalty (needless to say the most controversial bit) was necessary ‘because the uninsured inflict a disproportionate harm on the rest of the market as a result of their later consumption of health care services.’

For Republicans, the Obamacare legislation – in particular its perceived infringement on individual liberty – has acted as an incredibly strong galvanising force. And GOP attacks on the reforms have certainly swayed public mood: the bill has a bad image. Most people like individual elements of the reforms, up to and including the individual mandate, but don’t like the act overall (see the Washington Post for an overview of the polling data).

So which way will the Supreme Court go? Andrew Cohen, legal analyst at CBS News, has a fun guide to the betting odds on the possible decisions of individual judges and the overall outcome, which smuggles in some useful stuff about precedent and ways for the Court to fudge the issue if it so chooses. It’s probably too early to say what impact the decision will have on the election, not least because, for example, it’s plausible that a strike-down ruling could energise the Democratic base, just as a vote in favour could.

Here’s the really fascinating bit, though: all of the above may come too late, because healthcare reform along the lines of the act is already happening. The New York Times has this overview of how, at local level, health providers are already preparing for reform, with many state legislatures implementing their own versions. Hospitals are already hiring clinicians on mass to cope with predicted influx of new patients. State regulators are keeping a closer watch on insurance premiums, saving citizens money in the process.

If the Supreme Court does decide to rule the healthcare act unconstitutional, there could be real problems caused by the ending of federal funding, but as the NYT piece shows, funding problems are acute already. So the Court’s decision is both momentous and a sideshow: the potential for a really significant impact on the election, and very little impact on what happens on the ground.

Man walks into a column, no.44: Librarians

The second in an occasional series – hopefully very occasional – of posts about conferences Phil’s been to in god awful places at antisocial times. 

As anyone who follows me on Twitter will, despite their best efforts, have been unable to miss, I was stuck in what can only be described, in all honesty, as ‘deepest’ and ‘darkest’ Nottinghamshire; this Friday evening and Saturday morning just passed. Seriously: the most notable and indeed only local landmark appeared to be a vast coal power station. Charming.

The ray of light amidst the mire was the event that had lured me there: the annual conference of the Association of Senior Children’s and Education Librarians (ASCEL). Without wishing to get into ‘lovely people, those librarians’ territory, it is nevertheless only fair to note that I have never, in all my legged life, felt anywhere near as welcomed at such a shindig; all the more remarkable when one considers that I was very much an outsider intruding upon a gathering of people who have every reason to feel resentful and angry at the moment.

Why was I there (well may you ask)? Someone from ASCEL had been to one of OPM’s events about mutuals and social enterprises, and felt that it would be helpful to spend part of the conference thinking about the potential of these and other ‘different models’ of public service management and delivery in the school and public library context. The actual title of my session was ‘the future of library services…’ which in current circumstances had a distinctly oxymoronic ring to it.

Again, without wishing to sound patronising (I was less surprised, more simply relieved, given the prevailing winds) the only reason the session went off okay was because of the willingness of the participants to get stuck in. What emerged from the scenario-based group work was an intriguing mix of creative and astute tactical responses, which included:

1. Political piggy-backing: if ‘saving libraries’ doesn’t have sufficient political salience, find an agenda that does – safeguarding children, for example – and do everything you can to make it impossible for local politicians to miss the full implications of closing libraries.
2. Going where the money is: free schools, for example, were mentioned as one potentially lucrative (and indeed sensible) set of local partners, as were local leisure companies looking for space to expand (what better way to relax after exercising than exercising your mind with a good book?).
3. Mixing and matching: several groups mentioned additional services that could be woven into the fabric of a library, ranging from the obvious cafes and community spaces, to things like job centres. Partly in the interest of adding revenue streams, but also demonstrating maximum bang for local buck: child learns to read, mum or dad finds a job etc.
4. Networked libraries: all of the descriptions of ‘the library of the future’ contained tech elements, as one would expect, but more interesting were those that emphasised libraries as community hubs: not just for isolated older people, but for stay-at-home parents and homeworkers too.

There were plenty more besides, these are just the ones that stuck in my mind the most. The pressures on library services are such that no blame could reasonably be assigned to managers such as these if solutions aren’t found. But I thought the quality of this discussion bodes well: with people like this in charge, one would hope that libraries have at least a fighting chance. In the meantime I’m simply hoping that I can busy myself around the office for the next few weeks.

Four cracking posts on public sector mutuals

This post does what it says on the tin: four cracking posts from OPM on public sector mutuals:

• Making the case for mutuals: three key ingredients
• Practical tips to overcome the challenges facing public sector mutuals: event report
• New challenges face the social care sector: Now is the time for mutuals
• An Indian summer for public service mutuals?

(Disclosure: I know OPM and some of its staff well, and have done a bit of work for them. This post is unprompted, though – just in case you were wondering.)

Interesting resources on Personal Health Budgets

Having blogged about Personal Health Budgets, here are a few links that have caught my eye on the same topic over the last couple of weeks:

• Andrew Lansley trumpets his market-led patient voucher scheme (Guardian) [Interesting to note the Guardian's use of "market-led" here. Personal Budgets are many things, but they're not market-led - they are patient-led]
• Personal Budgets boost for continuing care clients (Community Care) [A better-informed piece about PHBs]
• Personal Health Budgets pilot programme (Dept of Health) [A reminder that PHBs have, in fact, been piloted by DH since 2009]
• Personal Health Budgets learning network (DH)
• Four reports from the PHBs evaluation [An incredibly useful resource]
• My own thoughts on early learning from the PHBs pilot
• News from In Control on the PHBs community (which can be accessed here)
• A video of a PHB user’s story (one of many excellent such videos)

Let me know via the comments or on Twitter if there are any good resources on Personal Health Budgets you’ve come across.

Man walks into a column, no.41: Conferences

I’m writing this in a dingy hotel room in Brussels, where I’m staying for an EU conference on employee financial participation. If you’re still reading by this point then frankly I’m amazed, and tempted to suggest you should get out more. For those still with me (hello Mum!) I’ll continue.

This is only the second ‘international’ conference I’ve been to, the first being almost exactly two years ago, when I was jammy enough to speak at a conference on urban governance in Porto Alegre – home of participatory budgeting – in Brazil. Jammy in that it’s a great city, and secondly because my colleague who was originally invited – a real expert – couldn’t go.

Predictably, my trip to Brazil was one of the most surreal experiences of my young life. My first ever long haul flight was considerably marred by sitting in the seat next to a very very fat walrus of a man, and then having a ten hour stopover in Sao Paulo airport. On the plus side this gave me the time I needed to read the book that had brought my colleague to the attention of the Mayor of Porto Alegre. Reading about democratic urban governance in a strange South American airport is not, however, an experience I am particularly looking to repeat.

The conference itself was completely bizarre, alienatingly so. Unlike the Brussels gig where everyone speaks fluent English, I keenly felt my complete lack of Portuguese and spent the entire time trying to decipher rather sub-par English translation through headphones. Not the most natural mingler anyhow, I spent every available break chain smoking in the blistering heat, and trying to avoid the racist Greek professor who felt a kinship with me due to our having studied at the same university.

This time things feel much more familiar and less overwhelming (not least in that I am rather more confident in what I’m speaking about). And whilst – honestly – there was another obese man sitting next to me on the Eurostar, the seats were rather larger and the journey considerably shorter.

Tomorrow morning I shall be talking about the inherent tension between the Coalition Government’s ambitions for nationwide take up of employee ownership and its localism agenda (how to achieve widespread change when each local area gets to make up its own mind?). I shall mention my belief that yes, the relative lack of evidence about public sector mutuals is an issue but suggest that evidence only persuades so many people, some of the time, and say that we need broadly distributed political leadership to move forward. And I shall underline my strongly-held belief that we must not forget that the mutuals agenda is first and foremost about real people making difficult decisions during challenging times. And then I shall hop on the train again, fervently hoping to be seated next to someone slim.

£10m Investment and Contract Readiness Fund = #win

In a recent post about Big Beasts versus Social Enterprises, I noted that creating the conditions to ensure that social enterprises and voluntary and community sector organisations can play a part in the provision of public services would require a practical support programme and commissioning strategy, supported by the government.

In July this year – and I’m not quite sure how I missed it – the Cabinet Office announced a £10m fund to do precisely that: the Investment and Contract Readiness Fund.

The focus seems to be on developing the skills and infrastructure of VCS organisations, rather than, say, levelling the playing field in actual procurement processes (preferential treatment for VCS providers, anyone?).

One further cautionary note I’d highlight is that I hope infrastructure organisations don’t get the bulk of the funding in the hope it will have a “trickle-down” effect to frontline organisations. Though a national delivery partner is a very good idea (an NCVO, say), having a multiplicity of local delivery partners would dilute, in my view, the potential impact of the fund. (Anyway, there’s always the Transforming Local Infrastructure Fund of £30m for them.)

Nevertheless, the Investment and Contract Readiness Fund is a welcome boost and one that I think VCS organisations – including disabled people’s user-led organisations – will benefit from.

Man walks into a column, no.39: Polar

True story: I have been stealing another man’s magazine subscription, for the last five years. The man: Charlie Diggle, the magazine: TIME. Mr Diggle (apparently his real name) was the previous owner of the flat we now call our home – a landlord, specifically – and each week, without fail, a new cellophane-wrapped parcel plops on the doormat.

One can only imagine Charlie was given the subscription as a gift from a friendly but remote aunt or uncle and that as far as they’re concerned their nephew is still very grateful. Or perhaps the $30 annual subscription is simply beneath Mr Diggle’s banking radar. In any case: I am the sole beneficiary of Uncle Diggle’s largesse/Charlie’s louche lifestyle.

TIME is, I feel, rather overlooked on this side of the pond. The first weekly news magazine in the US, and still the most widely read – in the western world at least – the quality of the writing is consistently high, and the coverage of US politics in particular is often just as insightful as anything you’ll find in the Washington Post or the New York Times.

And yet TIME seems to only be cited in the British media (mainstream and social alike) when there’s someone interesting on the cover. Mark Zuckerberg, say (Person of the Year 2010), or Jonathan Franzen (Great American Novelist). Perhaps it’s latent anti-Americanism, or at least anti-populist-Americanism: if 20 million yanks read it, it must be beneath us.

As evidence to counter this glib cultural imperialism, I offer two interesting insights from the latest slim red-rimmed volume to wing its way to me. (As if to emphasise the magnitude of my crime, I’m afraid to say neither of these pieces are openly online – they seem to move into ‘subscriber only’ territory after a week.)

First, the ever-excellent Joe Klein – he of Primary Colours fame – currently on a road trip through the states likely to form the chief battleground for the 2012 presidential election. Klein contrasts the vitriol of a typical Tea Party caller to a radio talkshow (‘I would vote for Charles Manson before [Obama]‘) with the ‘non-stop civility’ our correspondent has encountered from all points on the political spectrum during the three weeks of his trip to date.

The polarisation of political debate is leaving the moderate middle appalled, Klein suggests. As evidence he quotes a moderate Republican – typical in his views, we’re told – who says:

It seems to me the President is trying to do the right thing on a lot of these issues, but his hands are tied by Congress. And I guess the most disturbing thing is that people like us aren’t speaking up. We’re letting the extremists do the yakking.

Klein thinks the vast majority are ‘sick to death’ of politicians who ‘play to the rant’, but that leaders of both main US parties have no choice because of the need to finance expensive campaigns (the logical extension, one would assume, being that the most giving are likely to be more extreme).

Which brings me onto the second of my TIME morsels: an article by Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. The big question, Sachs thinks, is whether the scale of the ongoing financial crisis will have a similar effect as the Great Depression, in jolting the US out of a period of eye-wateringly high inequality. For the first time since 1929 the top one per cent of households in the States take almost a quarter of all household income.

In the twenties this inequality was caused by a combination of the Wall Street financial boom creating wealth at the top, and mass immigration keeping the bottom very low indeed. The more recent slide towards inequality is, in Sachs’ analysis, down to the skills of US workers failing to keep pace with the need to add value (in an industrial sense) to match the wages demanded, meaning companies cannot compete against cheap foreign labour.

What America needs, says Sachs, and it’s hard to argue, is a grown-up conversation about how to fund future competitiveness, rather than the current mud-slinging. The problem is, of course, how such a conversation can be even conceived of when US politics is as polarised as its society.