We gave up our car at the end of October – you can read more about why we did that here and here.

It wasn’t just about the money – although we’re hoping we will save a bit of cash – but I’m interested whether we end up spending more or less without a car sat on the drive.  So I’ve been keeping track of our transport costs in November (and the last week of October)- and here they are in summary:

• We spent £240 on car hire and related costs (petrol, annual insurance, car club fee)
• We spent £218 on public transport
• So, with a  few other things (including internet shopping delivery charges) in total the cost for a family of three getting round for five weeks without owning a car was just under £480.

A few facts to put these figures into context:

• £85 of the car hire costs are annual charges for insurance and car club membership.
• We hired a car twice for a total of ten days
• Around £200 of the public transport costs are costs we would have incurred if we still had a car –  as that was for work travel (mostly on the bus) and visiting family (mostly train and the odd taxi).
• So, given that we estimated that the car cost us about £3000 to run, we’re on course to save a bit of money, but not much (based on around £240 costs over and above the public transport costs we would have incurred anyway).

Over five weeks our mileage in hire cars was 215 miles.  This compares with a monthly average of around 500 miles a month over our final twelve months with a car.  We’d got our monthly average mileage down from around 1000 miles a month in the previous 18 months.  For me this is the most significant change.

So how have things changed?

• We’re walking more – short journeys of around a mile each way (e.g. to take my son to a weekly after-school activity) which we’d have done in the car – we’re now walking
• We’re shopping more regularly – more locally.  We’re picking up things on the way home from work, or popping out to the shops a mile up the road.  We’ve also had a couple of online supermarket deliveries for bulky stuff.
• I’m cycling more – it’s been fortunate that the weather’s been pretty mild – so I’ve been cycling to more work meetings.

I think the other stuff that’s interesting is how you need to be a bit more organised because you can’t always just pop out and get something that you need.  So I’ll be taking the wheelbarrow up to the Christmas Fair at the local hospice this afternoon to buy our Christmas tree. Life takes a bit more planning when you haven’t got a car sat on the drive ready to go.

Have we missed the car?  Not really – because when we’ve really needed one we’ve hired one.  I think it does change what you choose to do in your leisure time though – we’ve noticed that we’re more regularly going to places that we can get to easily on the bus – which for us means Leeds city centre or Harrogate.  Places like Wilkinson’s and Clas Ohlson – i.e. DIY stores in the city centre – come into their own when you don’t have a car to go out-of-town.

You might be thinking, “So what?”    Fair enough.  I’m not suggesting that everyone should give up their car.  We live in a city, have only one child, and have jobs which mean that with a bit of organisation we can get around without a car.  Our families live in places that we can easily get to on the train.  Not everyone’s life is like ours.

But plenty of us could drive less, or perhaps consider giving up the second car.  Or maybe share our car with other people.  And, in some cases, follow our lead and give up the car altogether.

With years of austerity ahead, many people will need to look at how to spend less.  For years it’s been a given that you learnt to drive at 17 and then as soon as you could afford it, you bought a car.  That’s changing already – and this trend is bound to get stronger as we learn to adapt to a good few years of falling incomes.

More than anything, it feels good not to be such a part of car culture any more.  In a small way we’re reducing demand for a finite resource.  We’re also making a bit of a counter-cultural statement that personal progress (better job, earning more) doesn’t mean you need to buy a nice car to sit on the drive.  And, you never know, I might finally get fit, before the midlife crisis hits……

I was in town this morning for a very productive meeting with a friend who’s a local GP to help me explore potential opportunities for social enterprises (aka #socent on Twitter) if GPs end up directly commissioning services.

We’d spotted earlier in the day that Billy Bragg was going to be at Occupy Leeds in City Square at midday, so we wandered across after our meeting finished.

I love Billy Bragg.  I think kids in 50 years time will study his lyrics in the way that we studied war poets.  And there is a coherence and clarity to his view of the world which I find hugely inspiring (even though I’m the first to admit I’m not a socialist).  So it was good to hear a few songs and listen to what he had to say about the importance of the Occupy movement.

It was the first time I’ve been down to Occupy Leeds.  I took a passing interest when Occupy Wall Street started, and got a bit more interested when people attempted to occupy the London Stock Exchange.  But it really caught my  imagination when the protest moved to the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.

I thought the symbolism was brilliant, and could immediately see how moving the protest to the steps of a Christian church was likely to lead to something quite interesting.  But of course I couldn’t have anticipated how much it would shake up the hierarchy at St Paul’s and in the wider Church.

I’m a conflicted, uncomfortable Roman Catholic, born into a Catholic family.  I wouldn’t actively choose to be a Catholic now, but it’s the tradition I’ve been brought up in and it’s where, in lots of ways, I belong.  I also value in some ways the sense of discomfort that it brings me.  But I have no time for the hierarchy of the Church, and I struggle with a lot of its teaching.  Yet I find a niche within it – informed mainly by my year in Ecuador with a social project steeped in liberation theology - that keeps me hanging in there.

It was my patchy understanding of liberation theology that sparked my interest in the protest at St Paul’s.   I was pretty sure that Jesus would be outside in one of the tents, sitting with the people whose demands may be incoherent but who are saying something profound about social justice.  I also thought that the kind of church leader who inspires me – someone like the assassinated Archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero - would be out there with them too.

So that was my way in to the Occupy movement. But I’d be lying if I said I felt that I was part of that movement.  When I was down at City Square this afternoon I found it too easy to tell myself that the people there – camping, speaking, waving banners were people not like me.  I accept that’s not particularly helpful, but it was my honest response.  Got a beard?  Probably not like me.  Read Socialist Worker?  Not like me.  Look vaguely “alternative” in any of the ways that we like to compartmentalise other people?  Not like me. Got a desire to camp outside in the freezing cold at City Square?  Not like me. And there were lots of people there who, I told myself privately, were “not like me”.

But I think that’s the challenge, both to me and to the rest of us – both those who do currently feel totally part of the Occupy movement – and those like me who are intrigued by it and who see how important it is at this moment in time.  And that’s why I think the We Are The 99% slogan is so clever and so powerful.  Because in my opinion we – the vast majority of the world who are at the mercy of modern capitalism (and the vast majority of the world are doing far worse out of it than I am) – need to see that all of us are ill-served by the current economic system.  There has to be a better way.  If we don’t find one, the only question will be whether it’s economic collapse or environmental catastrophe that gets us first.

So I think with time we need to all see ourselves as the 99% – a diverse, engaged and not so engaged, political and apolitical, religious and non-religious, “alternative” and “mainstream” group of people.  So, speaking personally, I can be part of a movement that aims to make the world a much better place than it currently is.  Me, with my lack of political upbringing, my complicated relationship with Christianity, my lack of desire to take part in protests, my interest in finding business opportunities that deliver social change, my pragmatism, and my messy contradictions.  I see myself as part of the 99 per cent now.  Do you?

We had an interesting round table discussion with two of the leading thinkers and do-ers in the worlds of social enterprise and mental health yesterday – Mark Brown and David Floyd.

Mark is editor of leading mental health magazine One in Four, whilst David runs Social Spider – the social enterprise, which, amongst other things, publishes One in Four.  David also writes what in my opinion is the best UK blog on social enterprise, Beanbags and Bullsh!t.  Well worth a read if you want an honest, front-line take on the world of social business.

We’d invited Mark and David to Leeds because we’ve been chatting to various people over the last few months about exploring new ways to support people with a mental health need.  And, just as importantly, exploring ways that people can help themselves.  Mark and David had written a thinkpiece about the potential for a Big Society approach to helping people to improve people’s mental health – so we were keen to hear more.  The thinkpiece is excellent (but not available online yet) and yesterday’s discussion was fascinating.

I’m no expert in the field of mental health – I’m just someone who cares about this stuff and is interested in trying to work out how to do things better.  But it strikes me that some of the things that can contribute to a person’s improved mental health and sense of wellbeing could include:

• Active involvement in the development and delivery of the support that they receive and the opportunity to influence things (you might call that co-production)
• Support from and contact with peers – people who are – or who have been – in a similar situation – with an emphasis on self-help and peer support
• Appropriate, non-institutionalised, personalised services
• A sense that they matter – they’re not just a statistic in a faceless world of health and social care

So, with that in mind, you can imagine how an approach – which you might call Big Society – could work.  People setting things up themselves to support eachother.  Local charities and social enterprises setting up services which are funded through contracts and charges to paying customers.  All sounds great doesn’t it?

Except the discussion yesterday – whilst highlighting the potential of a Big Society approach – also emphasised the barriers that are in place if more of this stuff is to happen.  Fundamentally, it comes down to money.  Where is the money in the mental  health field?  Much of it stays within the NHS and the local authority.  Some of it goes out through contracts – to deliver pre-determined outcomes, tightly monitored through Key Performance Indicators.  And a bit of it – if you’re lucky – might go on innovative, local, risky, do-it-yourself initiatives.

And please don’t tell me that Personal Budgets could fund this kind of thing.  They could – in theory – and should.  But our experience – and increasing amounts of evidence such as this report into Personal Budget pilots in Scotland – suggest that few people with a mental health need are getting support which is different in a meaningful way through a Personal Budget.

Locally, we’re hearing that the local authority will approve a Personal Budget to cover someone’s transport costs to get to an activity (which could be a Big Society, DIY, self-help/peer support activity) – but they won’t pay for the activity itself.  So how is the service supposed to develop?  And, given that many people with a mental health need are on pretty minimal benefits, they will tend to struggle to pay for that activity.

Solutions?  I doubt there are any quick fixes.  But, as always, the starting point needs to be an honest assessment of where things are.  Big Society approaches aren’t going to magically spring up out of thin air.  If the State decides that more of this kind of thing should happen, then we need to invest in it.  In Leeds we’ve made a start with the Ideas That Change Lives investment fund, which has teamed up with UnLtd to offer support to people with good ideas.  It’s a good start, but we need plenty more.

I went along to Revive Leeds this morning for the launch of the Vision for Leeds 2011-2030 – Our vision to be the best city in the UK.

More on the Vision later, but first a few words about Revive.  It’s an idea that’s been a long time coming – I chatted with someone there who was exploring this idea eight years ago, and someone else reckoned he’d been talking about it fifteen years ago.

Revive Leeds is a Re-Use Shop which is based at a tip (sorry, recycling site) in East Leeds.  It’s run by a Community Interest Company – which in turn is a collaboration between three well established Leeds social enterprises – Emmaus Leeds, St Vincent de Paul Society and Slate.

The idea – and it’s a good one – is that people can drop off stuff that can be re-used whilst they’re dumping other stuff at the tip.  As someone who despairs whenever I go to the tip at what people are throwing away, I’m delighted to see this up and running.

First impressions?  The shop is attractively laid out and has a good range of stock.  The stock was generally good quality.  I think there’s work to do on pricing – as a charity-shop regular I think some of the pricing was a bit on the ambitious side.  £10 for a second hand iron, £175 for a decent but unremarkable three piece suite, didn’t strike me as realistic.  But these things take time – and they’ll have had to second-guess who their customer base will be.  They’ll know better who their customers are in six months time – and I’m sure their pricing will reflect that.

It made me think of my visit a few years back to another Revive (unrelated) in Liverpool – part of the FRC Group.  They take stock primarily from their Bulky Bobs bulky waste collection service (which I notice has today been successful in the Big Venture Challenge) and sell it in their high-street shop.  Shaun Doran, who was responsible for Revive, was frank about they got it very wrong in the early years at Revive.  In short, they took little notice of who their customers were – who was walking past their shop front in that part of Liverpool.  Once they realised who they were really serving, the shop became more successful.

I liked their emphasis on quick turnover of stock – I can’t remember the detail but let’s say it was something like “Have an item for two weeks at full price, two weeks at half price, then move on”.  It’s important that customers see fresh stock regularly – it’s what keeps people coming back.  You might make a bit less on each item, but you’ll sell (and divert from landfill) a lot more stuff.

I also liked their pricing strategy – with different prices for products depending on whether you had just walked in off the street, were on benefits, or had been referred by a FRC partner organisation.  It sounds like a logistical nightmare, and could be a bit embarrassing for people if it was implemented poorly, but it seemed to work well.  The £175 three piece suite brought this pricing strategy back to me – who’s the customer with £175 in their back pocket?

But let’s not take anything away from the people who’ve worked really hard to get Revive Leeds up and running.  They’ve done a great job and I wish them every success.  And it’s been a long road.

Which brings me to the Vision for Leeds.  This was the softest of soft launches I’ve ever witnessed – I’d be interested to know why the Council has gone for this approach to launching the Vision.  At most there were 50 people there – perhaps 10 of whom were unrelated to the Council or to Revive Leeds.

I’ll be honest, I really struggle to get excited about long-term visions.  The ten minute video which accompanies the Vision (not online yet) is all very nice but voxpops with loads of people saying how great Leeds is (it’s friendly, it’s diverse, it’s a great place to do sport/learn/do business etc) just leave me cold.

But, let me try my best to suspend the scepticism.  There’s something quite refreshing in the idea of trying to be the “best” city in the UK.  As the Vision says:

“Not the richest or the biggest, but the best for all who live and work in Leeds – our children, our communities and our businesses.”

Maybe that’s something I can get excited about over time.

It’s worth reflecting on the story of Revive Leeds, alongside the Vision for Leeds.  Revive Leeds will hopefully do well, but we can’t wait another 8 years for the next great innovation.  The Councillor at today’s event was very proud of the Council’s collaboration with three local social enterprises – and that is undoubtedly a step forward.  But we have to get better – and quicker – at coming up with creative ideas which make a real difference.

And this is where things might just get interesting.  Leeds Council – according to this article by the Council Leader in the Yorkshire Post – seems to be opening up and suggesting that in the future it needs to become more entrepreneurial – for example by collaborating more with other organisations.

As someone who’s worked with the Council closely for a number of years, let me just say they’ve got a long way to go before I’d use the words entrepreneurial and Council in the same sentence.  But acknowledging that things need to improve is a starting point, at least.  The hard bit will be moving from nice words to messy practice.  Councillors and Council officers have a steep learning curve ahead of them.

We ran a seminar with Adult Social Care at Leeds City Council yesterday exploring the idea of timebanking.

If you’ve not come across timebanking before, you can find out more on this Scoop.It site that we’ve put together – or by visiting the Timebanking UK website. You can also find out more about Just Add Spice – whose co-director, Tris Dyson, spoke at our seminar yesterday. In essence, it’s about give and take. People offer time to eachother, and get credits in return – which can be used to buy in the time of someone else in the timebank.

If you were to look inside my head you would discover the remnants of a lifetime of discussions between my sceptical self and my idealist self. I love the values behind timebanking. The idea of helping people to focus on what they can offer, as well as what they need. The concept of everyone’s time being of equal value. The importance of putting some kind of value on the social capital which makes life worth living.

But I worry that it’s one of those things which is much better in theory than it is in practice. My worry isn’t about people abusing the system – taking and not giving, or perhaps even stealing. Instead my concern is that people won’t take enough. They’ll give for a while – and then not get round to taking. For timebanking to work, we need people who are willing to accept help and support – as well as people are happy to give it.

There was a lot of discussion yesterday about how a timebank would work – in particular focusing on the role of the broker – the person who will help to ensure that people give and take. The impression I get is that in most cases we have to aim for a fairly light-touch broker, for two reasons. One is that there isn’t much money about – so we’ll struggle to sustain any timebanks which rely too much on paid staff.

Secondly, I think part of the attraction of timebanking is its DIY nature. I fear for timebanks which end up with a broker housed within a third sector or public sector organisation – unless that broker sees their role as that of a catalyst – moving on – or at least stepping back – once things are running smoothly. We really don’t need brokers who feel they need to cover their backs by routinely getting everyone to have CRB checks for example.

I’m not gung-ho about safety concerns, but I think part of the value of timebanking is the opportunity it gives us to start taking some responsibility – and making our own decisions about whether we want to accept a service from someone. I think there’s far more danger in communities that don’t talk to eachother than there is in connected communities where people are dealing with eachother on a more regular basis.

But as I say, the scepticism – and the desire to work out what might stop timebanking from working in Leeds – is balanced by a real sense of what it could achieve. There were various ideas discussed yesterday – from simple neighbourhood (person to person) based timebanks, run on a voluntary basis, to slightly more involved ones, (often agency to person) where people might be able to redeem credits not just for services from within the timebank, but for services from the local authority, or local businesses. So an hour at a Housing Association consultation might be exchanged for an hour at the local council swimming baths – which needs more customers to survive. Or a local coffee shop might want to acknowledge the efforts of local volunteers by allowing for a time-limited exchange of credits for coffee and cake.

But isn’t that going against the very nature of volunteering? There’s a discussion to be had about that I think, but my own take is that we need to lose this idea that volunteering is all about selfless giving. Self-interest – what’s in it for me – is an important part of the reasoning behind giving. If people give more because they’re acknowledged, and get something in return, then in my opinion that’s no bad thing.

Personally, I’m most intrigued by the anecdotal evidence I’m hearing time and again of the impact timebanking can have on improving people’s mental health. It makes a lot of sense. I know myself – you probably do too – that one of the best ways of dragging myself out of occasional dark places is to do something for someone else, to be reminded that I have skills to give and have a value to others. There’s far more to better mental health than that, but it could be a starting point for some.

I’ll write more about this in the future – but in the meantime, if you’re in Leeds and you’re interested in exploring timebanking more please get in touch. The Ideas That Change Lives fund that we work on is interested in investing in timebanking – and we’re planning another get-together later in the month. We’re particularly interested in chatting with individuals (not just people working in organisations) who want to see something happen in their community.

I went last night to the launch of an opportunity to invest in a pioneering strawbale co-housing community in Leeds.

I’ll let LILAC tell you more themselves.  You can also find out more on their website and on this blogpost from someone else who was there last night.

LILAC Cohousing Documentary from LILAC on Vimeo.

What impressed me last night was how the people involved responded to some fairly detailed questioning.  I talk a lot in my work about the need for activists and entrepreneurs – we need to be both if we are going to tackle some of the big social problems we face.  There’s a real passion amongst LILAC members to build something pioneering – but they’re not wishy-washy about it. This is a well-planned, well-executed development.  And, crucially, a development which seems to be meeting unmet demand – as all but 5 of the houses and flats are already allocated.  (You can contact them here if you’re interested in living at LILAC – they’re particularly keen to attract more families with school-age children.)

They asked me to say a few words last night in support of what they’re doing.  I’ve followed them pretty closely since they started looking at this idea – and a few people we know will be moving to LILAC.  I encouraged people to loan money to LILAC – and to do that, if they want to, without taking interest.  But I also encouraged people not to feel bad about expecting a financial return (LILAC are offering up to 3%).  I firmly believe that if we’re going to see more developments like LILAC, we need to encourage people to see them as viable investments – and expecting a 3% return is hardly over the top.  But clearly the people they’re last night with their cheque books were primarily investing because LILAC represents something that they believe in.

But my challenge to the people gathered last night was for us to see LILAC as a catalyst for other good things to happen. It’d be too easy to just point to them and bask in their solar thermal glow, whilst leaving our own lives untouched.  What would be more interesting would be to work with them and to learn from them about ways we too can change how we live.   Ways we can be more green and build communities where we feel supported and feel able to support others.

So, for example, we’re keen to explore whether we can collaborate with LILAC to form buying groups for solar panels – similar to the One Block Off The Grid model in the US.  And Collaborative Consumption – which will work brilliantly in a community such as LILAC – could work just as well in our street or yours – if we make the effort.  And maybe I need to take a bit more of a risk and talk to my neighbours more, invite them round for tea, and go beyond polite hello’s as we pass in the street.

We’re working on these issues a bit at the moment – for example we’re helping to run a Timebanking workshop in early July – which you can sign up for here. We’re also planning a Collaborative Consumption get-together for later in the year. If you’d like to work with us on any of this, please get in touch.

Before all of that, I’ll be investing in LILAC.  It would be great if you could too.

Research published today on behalf of Think Local Act Personal paints a pretty positive picture of Personal Budgets – you can read the press release here and a research summary here.  You can read a Guardian report into the research – which includes quotes from me – here.

I have read the research summary – but as yet I’ve not read the full report.  But I think it’s fair to say that the researchers are painting a pretty positive picture, with a few important caveats.  Here’s their brief summary of the report’s findings:

“..it seems that personal budgets are likely to have generally positive impacts on the lives of all groups of personal budget holders and the people who care for them. The likelihood of people experiencing a positive impact from a personal budget is maximised by a personal budget support process that keeps people fully informed, puts people in control of the personal budget and how it is spent, supports people without undue constraint and bureaucracy and fully involves carers.

Under these conditions, personal budgets can and do work well for everyone” (My emphasis)

I’d like to focus on that last line.  You would hope that that would be the case.  If a person-centred approach is taken, if a person and their carers are involved in their support plan, if the process isn’t overly-bureaucratic and if they end up with the support that they need, then things should turn out just fine.

The problem, in our experience, is that those ifs are not just big, they’re enormous.  As research from ADASS, published last week, confirmed, nearly all of the people who were classed as receiving personal budgets in the last twelve months (around 170,000 people) received what is called a managed budget – where the local authority continues to manage the budget.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that the majority of people who receive a managed budget end up with a package of support which is pretty much the same as what they had before.  Even allowing for the fact that some people might be happy with what they had, such an approach doesn’t feel like it fits with the principles of Personalisation.

Which leads me onto one of the other findings of the research:

“Those managing the budget themselves as a direct payment reported significantly more positive outcomes than people receiving council managed budgets.”

So, if we combine this finding with the data which suggests that just about everybody in England who received a personal budget in 2010-11 actually received a council managed budget, you could conclude that personal budgets have had limited impact in the last twelve months.

Our reading of the situation (which may or may not be correct) is that the incentives that Councils received in order to reach the 30% of people on  Personal Budgets by April 2011 target has ended up distorting the market.  Councils have concentrated on getting people onto managed budgets – which is a far easier process than going through a proper, person-centred process like the one the researchers point to above. A majority of Councils have achieved the target, so Ministers and Local Authorities can say that Personal Budgets are working just fine.

But our experience is that they’re not working just fine.  I won’t rehash the arguments – they’re detailed in this post and this post – but we would say that the research finding that “the survey revealed markedly different outcomes across councils” is an accurate one.

The research does point out that there is still work to be done – such as the following finding:

“Overall, less than half felt that the council had made it easy or very easy for people to change their support, choose the best option from a range of services, or voice their opinions or complain.”

So, if we go back to the big ifs in the research summary, it would seem that a lot of local authorities have not managed to “support people without undue constraint and bureaucracy”.

This is of particular concern if we look at who completed the research.  Nearly 80% of the 2000 respondents were from ten “demonstrator sites” – which, I assume, were local authorities which were involved in piloting Personal Budgets.  (Note, 23rd June – please see clarification on this in the comment below)  They, of course, had more money and resources to commit to making Personal Budgets work.  So, if a significant number of them haven’t managed to crack the bureaucracy nut, can we realistically expect those that follow to do much better, with fewer resources?

I really believe in person-centred services – and I still believe that Personal Budgets can work.  And I acknowledge that I’ve read the summary, not the full report.   But I’m afraid that our experience of Personalisation doesn’t chime with the generally positive tone of the research summary.  I’d be interested in your experiences and thoughts.

I wrote last week about our experience of Personalisation.  I talked you through the early stages of the self-directed support process, highlighting some issues that we’d come up against at each stage.  I’ll continue now with the next stages of the process, before considering what to do to change things for the better.  Again, your thoughts and experiences – in particular any examples of where things are working well  - would be much appreciated.

• Let’s look first of all at the support planning and brokerage stages.  We’ve witnessed a lack of creative thinking here.  There’s lots of terminology here – and how this is done differs in each local authority area.  But the basic idea is that a person is supported to work out how best to meet their desired outcomes (support planning).  They can then be supported to find creative, person-centred ways to meet those outcomes, by identifying appropriate services to buy (brokerage).

  We are finding that, even though support planning and brokerage can, in theory, be done by organisations outside of the social care system (eg an older people’s support network could do it for one of their members) the majority of this work is done by social workers.  Social workers who are under immense pressure, and have very little time.  Social workers who are accustomed, however person-centred they may be in their philosophy, to offering people what the system can offer.  It’s hardly surprising that (according to anecdotal evidence) the majority of people going through this process are ending up with pretty much what they had before.  In other words, services which the system can deliver.

  Let’s just pause and think about that for a while.  So a load of money, time and effort is being put into this, and it seems that a majority of people are coming out with what they always had.  Isn’t that a bit ridiculous, even if we accept that some people may actually be quite happy with what they had?  Well, what might seem more ridiculous is that, statistically at least, this person counts as someone who has accessed a Personal Budget (and until April 2011, councils received a financial incentive for getting people onto a Personal Budget in this way).  Even though nothing has changed for them, and the council still manages their money (sometimes spending it only on services provided by organisations with whom the council has framework agreements (contracts).  This is what is often referred to as a Virtual Budget. This statistical massage is why Ministers can confidently proclaim that all is well with Personalisation.

• One of the things councils have been charged with is stimulating  a market in social care.  They are required to produce what are called Market Position Statements – in order to communicate with other providers (third sector, private sector) how they would like to see the market develop.  In one area where we’ve done some work in the past, the consultation event on the Market Position Statement has been postponed twice, and we’re still waiting for a new date.  That’s not a great way to stimulate a market.

  But how do you stimulate a market?  I think it’s a really hard thing to do.  And to be fair to the councils where we’ve worked, they’ve each put money into encouraging third sector organisations to set up services.  But at the same time, they’ve been less than forthcoming with the kind of information which would give organisations confidence to take the risk in setting up services.  Simple information, like how many people in the city have got a Personal Budget, and how many of them ended up with services which were materially different to what they had before.

  So you can understand why, when they don’t get answers to these questions, organisations may assume that few people are being enabled to access new services.  If this is your perception, you’re hardly likely to set up a service are you?  Which, of course, means that there are fewer services to choose from – which makes it more likely that people will go for what they’ve always had.  And so we go on.

We do what we do because we want to make a difference.  I write stuff like this not to point the finger, but to acknowledge that things aren’t working as they could do.  I think, with a policy as radical as Personalisation, it’s natural that things will take a while to work out.  But you need to feel that things are at least moving in the right direction – and that issues are acknowledged.

I think that recently people are starting to publicly acknowledge that we are struggling to make Personalisation work.  I really think we need more openness about this.  But it doesn’t come naturally to local authorities to admit that they don’t have the answers.

What are we doing about this?  We’re continuing to work on Personalisation (some paid work, some speculative work) – and in particular we’re focusing on what we’ve called Personalisation – Made in…. We ran a Personalisation – Made in Bradford open space event earlier this month – and we’ve set up a network in Leeds too.  The idea is to bring different people together – who all have a stake in making this work.  Service providers, people who receive social care support, investors, service designers, social workers.  We believe that we’ll find ways to make Personalisation work by bringing people together to discuss issues openly, and then collaborating to make the system work for people.

They say you never really appreciate the true value of something til it’s gone.  They’re usually right, but not in this case.  Guardian Leeds hasn’t shut up shop yet and I am in no doubt about its value to Leeds.  I feel it also has profound implications for the future of local news gathering too.

For those of you don’t know, Guardian Leeds was a bit of an experiment by the Guardian.  They recruited a beatblogger for three cities – Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, to try out a new way of gathering news.  Exclusively online, and with a remit (I’m summarising here but you’ll get the idea) to find local news, write about local news, link to local news and get other people to write about what they’re up to and what interests them in Leeds.

I’ve written before about my exasperation with much reporting of local news.  In fact, I got into quite a big debate with a local NUJ official (see the comments section) when I blogged about not showing my support for striking Yorkshire Evening Post journalists.  Guardian Leeds has, for me, filled an important gap.  In short, it’s given me news and information that is of interest to me.  Instead of what I tend to get from a lot of other local news providers – crime, fear, regurgitated PR company press releases and community stories which exclusively feature individuals painted as heroes posing for daft photographs.

It’s also given me the chance to get publicity for some of the things that I’ve been involved in.  Without the chance to reach a wider audience through Guardian Leeds we wouldn’t, for example, have got such a good turnout for our public meeting about a city-centre community owned shop.

Yet the Guardian tell us that they can’t make Guardian Leeds pay.  It was an experiment.  And good on them for experimenting.  But you do wonder how they ever thought they were going to sustain a local web-based news service.

Of course the newspaper industry is on its knees, so it’s no surprise that the Guardian hasn’t got any ready cash available to continue to fund a service like Guardian Leeds.  But is there another way?  Maybe we need to find different ways to fund and support a local newsgathering service.  @MattEdgar is encouraging people to pledge £23.32 a month (the figure’s symbolic – it’s the cost of a monthly subscription to the Guardian) to “support a citizen-run news service for Leeds that offers quality writing with a determinedly local focus, but only if 35 other local people do the same”.  It’s an interesting idea – and I’ve just signed up.

Maybe there’s a way to partner with the Guardian on this?  It’d be interesting to know what the maths – how much would it run to continue to run something under the Guardian banner, but with a mix of income, including subscriptions from local people committed to the approach?  Or would it need to be something new and totally local?

I’ll let you into a secret.  I went for the Leeds beatblogger job.  I just thought it sounded like a fantastic opportunity – and as you’ll know, if you’ve read previous posts, I only ever wanted to be a journalist (and a footballer) when I was a kid.  It was a couple of years ago, I fancied doing something different and I was at the height of my powers as a blogger (I’ve since neglected it in favour of Twitter – but I’m going to make the effort again) and I thought I’d have something to offer.  I didn’t get shortlisted – and having seen the quality of work that John has put into Guardian Leeds, I can understand why.

The Government recently announced who will be the Prime Providers delivering Work Programme contracts across the country.

The Work Programme is basically about supporting people to get them back into paid employment.  I don’t doubt for a minute that we need some fresh thinking here, and I’m not opposed to private sector involvement.  But there are various issues which are causing me some concern in the way that things are happening.

Social Enterprise Magazine has done some good work looking into this in more detail.  The Department for Work of Pensions and the Minister for Civil Society have been keen to assert that 40% of the work will be carried out by voluntary sector providers  – as sub-contractors to the (mainly private sector) Prime Providers.  In other words, this is a massive boost for the Big Society.

But it’s not easy to work out exactly where that 40% figure has come from.  A quick look through the letter from Chris Grayling, (see pdf at bottom of article) outlining which sectors the subcontractors on each Prime Provider contract come from, invites you to challenge whether 40% of the fees will find their way to third sector providers.

Take, for example, my patch, West Yorkshire.  The two Prime Providers for our area are BEST and a collaboration between Ingeus and Deloitte.

The letter from Employment Minister Chris Grayling seems to suggest that none of BEST’s subcontractors will come from the third sector, whilst 8.2% of the work on the Ingeus/Deloitte contract will be delivered by the third sector.

That doesn’t feel like a victory for the West Yorkshire branch of the Big Society.

What bothers me here is that it feels like another example of dogmatic belief getting in the way of hard analysis of facts, and experience of how such contracting arrangements may not always work in the best interests of smaller providers.

I’ve written before about how I see parallels between the category management approach often adopted by supermarkets, and the Prime Provider system which the DWP is using.  Whilst, of course, there’s a world of difference between purchasing tinned fruit and procuring job-readiness training, I think it’s worth acknowledging that there is potential for difficulty when a big company (the Prime Provider) is tasked with collaborating with lots of smaller providers.  Government would have us believe that they’ll all play happy families, nurturing the young’uns and small’uns so that together they can share the proceeds and make the contract a success.  I’m afraid I just don’t believe that it will turn out like that in a lot of cases.

Others have written about their concerns about how the Work Programme will pan out.  There certainly seem to have been issues with regards to an over-emphasis on low prices, in place of quality.  That doesn’t bode well – and certainly doesn’t feel like the kind of environment where the smaller, perhaps more innovative, approaches will thrive.