Cuts to vital local community services have put the police service under increasing pressure as it attempts to plug the gaps. Social Value Exchange founder Dan Ebanks says the Social Value Act may provide the answer to getting more resources into local organisations that, in turn, would alleviate some of those pressures.
There is an ever-widening gap between supply of and demand for local public services. Supply has reduced over the past eight years due to the biggest public sector spending cuts since the Second World War. Demand, particularly in urban areas, is growing due to population growth and demographic change.
There are few parts of the public sector where the growing gap between supply and demand is felt more viscerally than with the UK police services. According to the National Police Chiefs Council, there has been a real term reduction of police budgets of 19% since 2010.
And while the police’s attempts to build relationships with BAME communities are coming under strain as a result of the increase in ‘stop and search’, police are also having to deal with local communities that are already fraying as a result of cuts to local services.
For instance, Devon and Cornwall Police have said they spend 40% of their time dealing with mental health issues. Similarly, the Metropolitan Police have said that five people with mental health issues, ‘racked up 8,655 calls’ in 2017, costing £70,000 to answer.
Police as provider of a range of local services?
Massive cuts to local government funding has led to police increasingly being seen as a provider of local services to a range of vulnerable individuals, who are normally supported through local social care interventions. More people are falling through the net and into the police’s lap, taking resources away from services that police really should be prioritising.
Local communities need to be stronger, more cohesive, healthier. Can we look to the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector to pick up some of the slack? The VCSE sector provides the latticework of preventative projects, signposting and network building that manages and smoothens demand for more expensive and statutory services. While this can never be a replacement for the kind of interventions the police or the NHS make, they are an important part of the local fabric of service delivery. And better resourced communities can apply balm to the difficult relationships between the police and many in BAME communities.
The answer is no. According to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the VCSE sector has also had its government funding slashed; its organisations are struggling to maintain the services they provide to local people.
The weakening of the local VCSE sector in the context of policing is a problem compounded by the unique relationship between the police and the policed. Beyond the effective local community safety partnerships, there are equally important but less formal relationships between police and local grassroots community organisations and leaders that help the police police better. If these organisations are suffering, the quality of local policing may be suffering as a result.
How, then, can we get more resources into those local community organisations that work with the local police?
The Social Value Act
The Social Value Act was born in unusual circumstances. As the former MP Tom Levitt recollects in his book, ‘Partners for Good’, the then new Conservative MP Chris White launched the Bill in October 2010. It gained Royal Assent in March 2012, ‘a feat of patience only made possible by Parliament’s long sitting between one state opening and the next, unprecedented in modern times … Private members’ bills usually succeed, or more often fail, within nine months.’
And it has remained a rare piece of legislation, heralded by some as genuinely transformative, by others as a sop to the public sector. Certainly, as a policy idea, Social Value finds its roots in previous Best Value and Value for Money approaches: how do commissioners get the optimal mix of tangible and intangible benefits from our public services for local communities, whether those benefits be economic, social or environmental?
However, the qualitative break with the past comes in the legal basis the Social Value Act provides to contracting authorities to compel suppliers to create additional benefits, above and beyond the core specification of the contract being tendered.
Over the past few years, we have seen an increase in use of the Social Value Act. in 2017, Social Enterprise UK recorded that 1 in 3 now routinely consider Social Value in their commissioning and procurement. Chris White, who launched the Bill in 2010, noted in a recent review that the Social Value Act has been used in £25bn of public procurement.
Social Value Exchange e-Auction
The Social Value Exchange is a marketplace. Marketplaces match supply and demand, buyers and sellers. The Social Value Exchange matches supplier resources with local community know-how.
We saw that, on the one hand, government suppliers were being asked to create ‘community benefits’ in the tender process, per the requirements of the Social Value Act. While suppliers may indicate that they could and would do this, this is not their area of strength. But they do have resources to bear.
On the other hand, when it comes to creating community benefits, this is the local VCSE sector’s area of expertise. They have the local know-how, have the local insight and have access to local networks. But they lack resource — as a result of the cuts to their funding.
We saw that if we could match these organisations we could create a win-win. Supplier resource and local community insight. Use tech and data to get optimal matches and we could create something of real value.
We then went a step further — rather than simply match suppliers with community projects, we chose to create an auction to maximise the Social Value, to maximise the resources going into local community projects.
Since Spring 2016, we have put through approximately £50m of procurement spend through the Social Value Exchange. Independent evaluation shows that for every pound spent by government on the Social Value Exchange, £222 is leveraged for local communities.
Social Value can make the difference – strengthen local communities and strengthen local policing.