Wednesday, 12 September 2007

Compact

After a morning trying to catch up on correspondence I travelled to St Albans to chair a meeting of the Hertfordshire Compact Working Group. This was a special meeting to address two key questions.

The first question was:
· Is the Compact a statement of absolute minimum standards (as might be expected if it is negotiated around the table with half a dozen statutory agencies moving at the pace of the slowest)?
· Is the Compact an aspirational statement of best practice (in which case “compact breaches” should be accepted as commonplace rather than otherwise)?
· Or is the Compact a quasi-legal agreement of standards to which everyone will comply and to which compliance can be enforced (in which case many statutory agencies will be far less happy to engage)?

Secondly: how many Compacts should there be in Hertfordshire? At present there is one County-wide Compact, and then an expectation that each District / Borough will also have its own (and some do and some don’t). If all did, we would then have sixty-six Compact documents in Hertfordshire, all needing to be regularly updated and distributed.

We had a useful discussion and consensus emerged around some important issues. There was general agreement that Compact standards and principles should be seen as a minimum requirement below which we should not sink. There was also agreement that if anyone does sink below the standards, then political and moral pressure should be used. There was clear agreement that the Compact should not be about “sticks” or legal enforcement. There was also agreement that the Compact documents would benefit from being shorter and clearer. Generally, it also seemed to be agreed that there should in the fullness of time etc etc be only one Compact in Hertfordshire. These are all very useful "wins" locally - specially at a time when the Public Law Project are seeking a judicial review to enforce Compact standards in Cumbria.

But mostly, consensus emerged around the immediate urgent need to Do Nothing.

This might seem like prevarication. Perhaps it is. But there is also logic because renegotiating a Compact or a Code of Practice can take months of hard work, as can realigning Compact agreements across the County. Meanwhile, the Compact Commissioner has resigned (after committing the Commission to revising all the national Codes of Conduct) and LAA2 is on the horizon for Hertfordshire. Any precipitous moves could easily result in a lot of extra work that is ultimately fruitless.

We agreed to meet again in December to review progress

Hertfordshire Children's Fund

From Compact I went to Hatfield for a meeting of the Hertfordshire Children’s Fund Partnership which is now in the process of winding up its affairs. They seem to have done a good job engaging with 5-13 year-olds. Over the past five years more than forty projects across Hertfordshire have been funded. Many have been very successful but it is too early to know how many will actually be picked up to receive mainstream funding: of the fourteen voluntary sector projects, I counted only one that had been picked up for mainstream funding.