Local Matters
Saturday/14/Nov 2009
First of all
my apologies to those who have kept coming back here day after day
to see if I've picked up this blog again - and yes Jim, I do mean
you! In October 2008 a very close member of my family - and someone
for whom I have long had caring responsibilities - was arrested,
charged and subsequently found guilty of a number of very serious
offences. Since then, I've spent a lot of my time navigating my way
around the criminal justice system - prisons, the courts and
forensic mental health services. Despite having worked alongside
this system for over 20 years, it has been eye opening. I have
nothing but admiration for those working directly in the system who
retain their humanity and courage to act in the interests of all
victims of crime and of society as a whole by working effectively
with people in prison. Sadly however I have at most times been
stricken by something like despair at the amateurish, fractured,
incompetent, clumsy and dehumanising nature of the system itself.
For example the nonsense that is the supervised consumption of
sleeping medication at 4pm in the afternoon, and the general
paucity of prison health services. Or the inhumanity and sheer
dangerousness of court transfers. However in particular the lack of
support for families of people in prison has disturbed and upset
me. Nothing I have done professionally has ever prepared me for the
sight of a 3 year old girl throwing herself repeatedly at an
airlocked door, screaming for her mother at the end of a one hour
visit. Or for the constant rule changes, moves and various
incompetencies of process that are a major feature of prison life -
and impact most keenly often on those left behind outside. At some
point I will write about these experiences - as we are finally now
approaching sentencing and at least the first part of this will be
over. For now I simply hope you will forgive me my lengthy absence,
understand that sometimes there are more important things than drug
policy, and let us pick up (nearly) where we left off
...
The 2008 drug strategy, with its emphasis on reintegration, employment, housing and family support, requires the creative deployment of a range of resources not currently in the purview of most DATs. Nor does the current performance management framework for local partnerships - CDRPs, DATs or LSPs, challenge them to tackle these issues. We have a strategy that looks and sounds good, but in many ways none of the machinery to make it work. Or to put it another way, we have a performance management regime focussed on delivering the outcomes of the last strategy, not the current one.
When we looked at the status and composition of DATs we found many of them limited by a narrow membership and low levels of influence and sometimes by outlook. Most disturbing of all possibly were the paucity of links with Children's Trusts and acute health services. We also found many DATs had very poor links with regeneration agencies, Local Involvement Networks, employment partnerships, Registered Social Landlords and local inspectorates.
Most DATs we looked at were subsumed into their local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership. This meant that discussions about drugs soley focussed on crime. It was a police lead who said to us on one of our visits:
"The focus of the Crime and Disorder Partnership is enforcement and policing. Other subject areas are lucky to get a look in once in a blue moon. In some ways Crime and Disorder Partnerships have just become another silo"
Of the remaining DATs the majority had boiled down to a Joint Commissioning Group - which meant their focus was pretty much exclusively on treatment - and many of the critical checks and balances between commissioning and strategy had been lost. The agenda had become technical, specialist and obscure, meaning that senior officers would often find they had little to contribute to discussions that seemed opaque and full of jargon. DAT officers and members all told us that the central management of elements of the drugs strategy had had a big impact on the way partnerships worked. While it was easy to see how central forcefulnesss and specialism had increased the resources available for drug treatment nationally and increased exponentially its availability across England, it was also clear that it had reinforced the isolation of drugs issues locally. As one DAT member wryly observed:
"What can I meaningfully add when all I get told all the time is that we are 'green'"
For both configurations, issues such as housing, community development and relations, employment, regeneration, family support and drug related health problems seemed to be rarely discussed at the main partnership meeting. Rather, where these issues were explored it would be at a subgroup of a subgroup attended by junior officers and practitioners - who could have limited local impact except within their own areas of practice.
Others told us that while they recognised that meeting the National Targets was important, it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify locally that all that mattered was treatment and DIP, when there was a National Strategy that was prioritising reintegration and a challenging rising public awareness of the importance of reintegration, personalisation and recovery. A number of DATs told us they felt trapped between local and national politics.
The narrowing of the local agenda to those elements that are performance managed centrally has also impacted in another very significant way. Local democracy is a key part of our process for driving value for money from investment and of ensuring that those who spend that money are accountable for it. Yet time again when we spoke to local elected members they told us they saw no point engaging with drugs as an issue locally because they believed it was run from the centre and they could have no impact on it. If this perception is widespread, it effectively removes drugs issues from local scrutiny - and that's dangerous.
What we also found however - and what gave us real cause for optimism - were a number of partnership areas where despite the difficulties and despite central pressure, real progress was being made - albeit slowly and sometimes in secret - towards the things that concerned local communities. We also found a number of DAT members and officers who despite feeling beleaguered and sometimes bullied and sometimes forgotten, were working incredibly hard to create a coherent joined up partnership driven approach to drugs and alcohol.
We made a series of recommendations - for Government and for Local Areas. We have called for the creation of genuinely cross cutting drug strategies at a local level, live documents that explore local needs, match them with central ambitions and lay out a balanced programme of activity against national and local investment. We suggested that in the drive for local control it was not enough to simply drop the reins in Whitehall and expect local areas to pick them up, but that a range of levers and a more balanced performance management system would be necessary to manage this period of transition. In response to concerns locally, we also suggested that greater opportunities should be found to merge the alcohol and drugs agendas into a single substance misuse strategy - thus avoiding the needless separation and differential funding of these two critical areas.
You can read the full report here
Over the past year I've been
working with the London Drug Policy Forum on a project supported by
the Home Office that looks at the current and future roles of local
partnerships - and how the resources they currently receive or are
able to generate locally are used to deliver the outcomes of the
2008 National Drugs Strategy.
In particular the report explores
- The robustness of local partnerships
- To what extent they are able to deliver the new national drug strategy
- What Government needs to do to help partnerships work better
- How local Scrutiny can work as part of performance management and support implementation
The 2008 drug strategy, with its emphasis on reintegration, employment, housing and family support, requires the creative deployment of a range of resources not currently in the purview of most DATs. Nor does the current performance management framework for local partnerships - CDRPs, DATs or LSPs, challenge them to tackle these issues. We have a strategy that looks and sounds good, but in many ways none of the machinery to make it work. Or to put it another way, we have a performance management regime focussed on delivering the outcomes of the last strategy, not the current one.
When we looked at the status and composition of DATs we found many of them limited by a narrow membership and low levels of influence and sometimes by outlook. Most disturbing of all possibly were the paucity of links with Children's Trusts and acute health services. We also found many DATs had very poor links with regeneration agencies, Local Involvement Networks, employment partnerships, Registered Social Landlords and local inspectorates.
Most DATs we looked at were subsumed into their local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership. This meant that discussions about drugs soley focussed on crime. It was a police lead who said to us on one of our visits:
"The focus of the Crime and Disorder Partnership is enforcement and policing. Other subject areas are lucky to get a look in once in a blue moon. In some ways Crime and Disorder Partnerships have just become another silo"
Of the remaining DATs the majority had boiled down to a Joint Commissioning Group - which meant their focus was pretty much exclusively on treatment - and many of the critical checks and balances between commissioning and strategy had been lost. The agenda had become technical, specialist and obscure, meaning that senior officers would often find they had little to contribute to discussions that seemed opaque and full of jargon. DAT officers and members all told us that the central management of elements of the drugs strategy had had a big impact on the way partnerships worked. While it was easy to see how central forcefulnesss and specialism had increased the resources available for drug treatment nationally and increased exponentially its availability across England, it was also clear that it had reinforced the isolation of drugs issues locally. As one DAT member wryly observed:
"What can I meaningfully add when all I get told all the time is that we are 'green'"
For both configurations, issues such as housing, community development and relations, employment, regeneration, family support and drug related health problems seemed to be rarely discussed at the main partnership meeting. Rather, where these issues were explored it would be at a subgroup of a subgroup attended by junior officers and practitioners - who could have limited local impact except within their own areas of practice.
Others told us that while they recognised that meeting the National Targets was important, it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify locally that all that mattered was treatment and DIP, when there was a National Strategy that was prioritising reintegration and a challenging rising public awareness of the importance of reintegration, personalisation and recovery. A number of DATs told us they felt trapped between local and national politics.
The narrowing of the local agenda to those elements that are performance managed centrally has also impacted in another very significant way. Local democracy is a key part of our process for driving value for money from investment and of ensuring that those who spend that money are accountable for it. Yet time again when we spoke to local elected members they told us they saw no point engaging with drugs as an issue locally because they believed it was run from the centre and they could have no impact on it. If this perception is widespread, it effectively removes drugs issues from local scrutiny - and that's dangerous.
What we also found however - and what gave us real cause for optimism - were a number of partnership areas where despite the difficulties and despite central pressure, real progress was being made - albeit slowly and sometimes in secret - towards the things that concerned local communities. We also found a number of DAT members and officers who despite feeling beleaguered and sometimes bullied and sometimes forgotten, were working incredibly hard to create a coherent joined up partnership driven approach to drugs and alcohol.
We made a series of recommendations - for Government and for Local Areas. We have called for the creation of genuinely cross cutting drug strategies at a local level, live documents that explore local needs, match them with central ambitions and lay out a balanced programme of activity against national and local investment. We suggested that in the drive for local control it was not enough to simply drop the reins in Whitehall and expect local areas to pick them up, but that a range of levers and a more balanced performance management system would be necessary to manage this period of transition. In response to concerns locally, we also suggested that greater opportunities should be found to merge the alcohol and drugs agendas into a single substance misuse strategy - thus avoiding the needless separation and differential funding of these two critical areas.
You can read the full report here