Real Business

In one move, government could improve social services and save lots of money.

As I become more of a non-executive chairman, I am increasingly offering advice elsewhere – as a school governor and a charity trustee. But my brand of upside-down management style doesn’t always suit institutions who favour central control and management by process.

Fellow trustees humour me, saying: “You’re a breath of fresh air” and “It’s good to challenge our thinking”, but usually they ignore my advice.

Not every charity is process driven. Lynn Charlton, CEO of Manchester-based After Adoption, ticks all the health-and-safety boxes and possesses an exemplary carbon footprint, but she is focused on results, helping adopted children, parents and birth parents.

And thank goodness Lynn is so dedicated. Local authorities have a priority to care for children most at risk – with a current 20 per cent shortage of social workers, they don’t always have enough time to work with adoptive families.

After Adoption finds families for hard-to-place children, provides counselling support and offers a regular meeting point for adoptive parents and their children.

Lynn has developed Safe Base, a support programme for adoptive parents. Having adopted two children and fostered 90 more, my wife Alex and I know that raising adopted children is seldom straightforward.

Safe Base provides much-needed advice. It includes home-based assessments, a four-day course and follow-on counselling. It got rave reviews from adoptive parents but local authorities were reluctant to give support, so we at Timpson helped. For only £70,000 a year, Safe Base started to make a real difference. But it is needed throughout the UK.

Lynn worked out how to teach teams elsewhere to deliver the project. It is now being franchised to an agency supported by the Scottish parliament and she hopes others will follow.

After Adoption holds the intellectual property, teaches the new trainers and controls quality. As long as local authorities find the funds, Lynn’s idea could provide nationwide benefit.

Safe Base made me think: could government exercise a bit of upside-down management by encouraging charities to deliver the welfare support currently neglected by cash-strapped social services who are seeing less and less of the children they are there to protect?

The country is blessed with loads of excellent ideas like Safe Base – local charities helping disadvantaged children, ex-offenders, disabled young people and more. But most don’t grow beyond a few square miles. How can the government use this dedication and energy to help the whole country?

Central government spends billions on consultants. Why not commission some charities? I don’t want charities to be nationalised – no-one wants civil servants to serve up new rules, with even more political box-ticking. I want a new government department that gives the freedom needed to develop great local ideas into national assets.

A Voluntary Sector Helpline would be funded by government but not controlled by short-term politics. It would hand out help, not orders; provide finance without interference. 

It would compile a who’s who guide to voluntary sector projects. Inclusion would not be obligatory – some charities will want to be left alone. But there’s an incentive: every charity on the list will have its charitable donations doubled by the helpline.

The who’s who will identify similar projects, to bring like-minded organisations together, and recognise projects with national potential. But the government helpline must not interfere – it simply gets things going, like we did at After Adoption.

Charities can do the work that can’t be done by admin-bound social services. Government grants will help local authorities to support nationwide charity projects in the knowledge that the effort goes directly to those in need. It can work – but requires a significant shift from big to small government.

Few politicians will have the foresight or the courage to put my scheme into practice, but perhaps Lynn’s Safe Base will set an example that some will follow.