Who or what is the LSP - part two!

Last week, following questions asked and left unanswered at the Rochdale Township meeting, Rochdale Online asked LSP coordinator Lea Fothergill Who or what is the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP)? Who, if anyone, elects LSP members? And to whom are they accountable?

Lea Fothergill, LSP coordinator and Andrea Meade, LSP Communications Officer provide the answers.

What is an LSP?

LSPs have been established across the country and here in Rochdale since 2001.  An LSP operates at a strategic level and brings together key service delivers and stakeholders

LSPs aim to:

• Improve the quality of life of the boroughs residents through enhanced partnership working. 
• Ensure that major service providers and stakeholders work together in partnership.
• Based on clear statistical analysis and evidence, agree key strategic priorities for the borough. 
• They also work to deliver these priorities and monitor the impact on the Borough’s communities.

How are they accountable?

LSPs are annually assessed by Government and are given an annual rating on how well they were performing. This Borough’s LSP is currently rated Amber Green (green being the best, amber green second best). In future, the effectiveness of LSPs will be judged, along with the performance of the Council and the other partners through the Comprehensive Area Assessment process, which is currently being developed and refined by the Government and the Audit Commission.

Rochdale’s LSP is governed by a Board. The Board has public, private, community, voluntary and faith sectors represented on it and representatives have a responsibility to feed through the views of their agency or organisation (normally based on considerable community consultation) into any discussion and to feed back any decisions made by the LSP.  The Board has geographical representation from the Borough’s four Area Partnerships which cover Heywood, Middleton, Pennines amp; Rochdale.

The Council is represented on the Board by the Leaders of the three political parties (or their nominees) and the Chief Executive. These are the named leaders of those groups.

How is the LSP in the Borough structured?

The Board - agrees a Community Strategy for the Borough (the first was published in 2002 and the second in 2007) setting out priorities for the Borough.  Those priorities are based on extensive public consultation.  Before the LSP agreed them, partner agencies, including the Council, gave them prior approval.  The five priorities for the Borough in the agreed community safety have been specifically adopted by the Council. The Board also approves the allocation of the relatively small amount of funding at the LSPs disposal, monitors the work overall and considers issues of an overarching importance for the borough.

The Executive ensures the day to day running of the business of the LSP on behalf of the Board and has a smaller number of representatives from key partnerships and stakeholders.

The thematic partnerships have wide and varied membership. They develop policy, plans and targets and implement and monitor activity in relation to their area of expertise i.e. Community Safety, Economic, Housing, the Environment, Children, Health, Voluntary and Community Sector.  This work assists in the delivery of the borough wide strategic priorities.

There is a considerable input of Council officers into the work of the LSP and major effort has been made to ensure that the priorities of the council and other partners work with and support the overall strategic priories of the Community Strategy which the LSP has responsibly for ensuring is delivered. 

There is elected member input at various levels with some councillors being very active members of thematic partnerships. For example, on the Rochdale Community Safety Partnership, there are the four Councillors who chair the Township Community Safety Partnerships, the Cabinet member for Community Safety and the Council’s representative on the GM Police Authority. 

Scrutiny of the work of these Partnerships takes place through the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committees.  When these Committees were first established, in 2001, there was a specific External Partnerships O amp; S Committee with the sole role of scrutinizing partnership work and holding to account the elected and other Council representatives on Partnerships.  However when the Committees were reviewed after a few years of operation, Members expressed little interest in the External Partnerships role and decided to abolish that Committee in May 2004.

Does the LSP have power?

The LSP has no direct budget.  Its “power” comes from the willingness of partners to work together collectively and its impact will depend on how well this is done. Everything it does, it does though discussion, negotiation and agreement with partners and its entire activity links to the strategic plans and priorities of partners.  It agrees priorities and agrees through negotiation with partners how to fund activities which deliver these. 

It has in the past, been responsible for agreeing the process for the allocation of the former Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, monitoring the overall impact of this spend and reporting to the Government Office North West.   The Council has had the role of “accountable body” ensuring financial propriety in relation to how the finance was handled.   

Funding

The NRF was first allocated to LSPs some seven years ago. Its main aim was to kick start a range of initiatives and secure improvements to services.  Any initiative receiving this fund knew at the outset that it was time limited and wasn’t permanent funding.  The funding was only allocated via LSPs.  If any of the 88 Boroughs in England eligible for NRF did not have an accredited LSP, the funding would not be available. It is also a very small proportion of overall public spending in the Borough.  For example, in 2006/7 the amount allocated by the LSP from that fund was £7 million, or approximately 0.6% of total public expenditure in the Borough during that year.

The review of the LSP

The Borough’s LSP is currently under review. This was a local decision taken by the Board to enable the LSP to be better equipped to deal with the challenges ahead and meet local and government requirements. This review has been ongoing since May last year and has offered Councillors every opportunity to become actively engaged.  The way the LSP works isn’t perfect and can always be improved and Councillors’ view on how this can happen has been sought throughout the review in a number of ways.

Views of councillors

The Board has Councillor representation on it, as do various thematic partnerships.

Events have been held around the development of the Community Strategy, priority setting and working-up activity to assist in delivery.  All Councillors were invited to participate in those events and a good number did.

The LSP is aware of the heavy workload of Councillors.   An LSP must have Councillor involvement in it to be truly effective and it is intended that the current review will encourage Councillors to further understand where they currently influence the work of the LSP and how they can increase this in the future. 
 
Allocation of funding through the Borough’s LSP

The LSP two years ago agreed a process for allocating the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (which has supported the Community base) combined with another similar fund to promote Safer and Stronger Communities.  That combined fund amounted to approximately £7million in each of the years 2006/7 and 2007/8.  The process was also reported to and approved by the Council’s Cabinet in March 2006.

It was established at the outset that the role of the Board was to fairly allocate a percentage of the overall NRF to the “thematic” partnerships (i.e. Economic, Environmental, Safer Communities, Children’s, Health, Housing and the VCSP) based on its strategic priorities and evidence of need. Each thematic partnership then had full responsibility for ensuring that the funding was used by projects to meet their and the LSP’s strategic priorities.  By devolving decisions about funding for the Voluntary and Community Sector to a partnership of voluntary and community sector representatives, the LSP believed it was acting entirely properly in accordance with sound community empowerment principles.

The LSP Board approved a process within which all its thematic partnerships should operate when considering a project for support. This was to ensure consistency in approach across the LSP without being over prescriptive about the type of activity which should be supported.   The LSP Board has a responsibility to ensure that the process has been followed correctly. Its role is not to consider the merits or otherwise of a particular project but rather to ensure it has been considered in line with the process established.

The responsibilities are clearly outlined in the procedure

The funding for the Syke project was allocated by the VCSP, along with numerous other projects, for the years 2006/7 and 2007/8.  There was no certainty of funding for any projects beyond 31 March 2008.

The Government announced in 2007 that the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and Safer Stronger Communities Fund were to be ended and replaced as part of a new Area Based Grant, in which the funding formerly conveyed by NRF/SSCF and numerous other funding sources, would be combined. When this was announced there was no indication from the Government as to the amount to be allocated to each Borough or the rules governing its use. 

In the Autumn of 2007, the LSP was faced with a difficult problem.  Funding for many projects was only available until 31 March 2008.  The LSP knew that an Area Based Grant announcement would be made around the end of 2007 but did not know how much Rochdale was likely to receive or how it should be allocated.  Much of the funding paid for projects to employ staff and they needed to know whether those staff could be kept on from 1 April.  In the absence of knowledge of the amounts or the rules to be followed the LSP could not sensibly make decisions as to which projects should be continued.

So the LSP decided to allow projects to be continued until 30 September 2008, thereby giving breathing space for everyone to take sound decisions on the allocation of the ABG and to aid projects in planning ahead.  The LSP’s briefing to the thematic partnerships advised of the expectation that they would decommission any activity which does not help to deliver the agreed priorities.  In the case of the VCSP, a decision was taken by them to decommission three projects which had received funding via them.  Syke is one of those. Other partnerships have similarly been through the process and recommended that a number of their projects are discontinued.

The Voluntary amp; Community Sector Partnership, along with other thematic partnerships, has followed the agreed procedure and it must be emphasised that the process is still live.  There is a right for projects to appeal against funding decisions.  The Syke project is free to exercise that right of appeal and, until that appeal has been concluded it would be inappropriate for the Board to comment further.