Wednesday, 13 June 2007

This morning, I met briefly with Stella who will soon be our new Finance and Administration Officer. Otherwise, I spent the best part of the morning and early evening working on WCVS’s accounts. So tedious!

Hertfordshire Compact Group

Today’s Herts Compact Group meeting considered very carefully how it can best promote - and secure the future of - the Compact in Hertfordshire. At present, there is a Hertfordshire-wide Compact and then eight of the ten District Councils also have local Compacts. Each individual Compact then includes up to six separate Codes of Practice, so Hertfordshire could potentially have 66 different Compact Codes of Practice.

There were several component parts of the discussion.

First, for months there have been concerns about HCC’s decisions on funding for Home-Start projects in Hertfordshire: were the decisions “Compact compliant”? HCC claims they were, while others take a different view. It’s not a healthy situation and the Herts Compact Group simply have to encourage the two sides to talk. But at a higher level the Group must ask what it can do so in future it is not possible for such opposing views to be taken of the same Compact working practices?

Secondly, our representative from the Learning and Skills Council reported that county-LSC offices had been instructed that they should not sign any more local Codes of Practice as LSC is already committed to the national Codes of Practice. This does not seem an unreasonable position. Previously, Hertfordshire’s Primary Care Trusts each worked on local Compact groups. These PCTs have now been effectively merged and will in future doubtless expect to sign up only to the County-wide Codes of Practice. The Police and Fire Service will also not want to negotiate and sign-up for 66 Codes of Practice when five or six will do. So what future for local Compacts?

Thirdly, in some areas of Hertfordshire there is no Compact at all. This is a major problem. Surely the efforts of the Herts Compact Group should be directed toward addressing this problem? But instead, we could so easily get diverted by the need to update and renegotiate the thirty or more Codes of Practice that are already in existence in different parts of Hertfordshire. How much work will this take? And what value will it add?

No-one had any quick answers; but I do think we were getting to the heart of a very difficult area.

Back home

In the evening, I spoke with my long-standing friend Jane and we discussed the progress we are each making on the BASIS applications we are making for our respective organisations. I got some useful pointers. I doubt that Jane found my comments as helpful.