Tuesday, 28 April 2009

This morning I joined a meeting of the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium at the Learning and Skills Council building in St Albans. There was an air of unreality induced by the ever more depopulated LSC offices and the growing conviction that the ChangeUp programme is living on borrowed time.

Still, the Consortium in Hertfordshire takes a pride in its pragmatism and today we took some useful steps along the road to sustainability. There was general consensus that the consortium now needs to embrace the whole of the third sector and not just infrastructure groups and my proposals for new Terms of Reference were usefully refined to read:

1. strengthen the sector’s influence over strategic planning – including LAA;
2. ensure that individual voluntary organisations have access to appropriate networks, information and support;
3. provide accredited voluntary sector representatives to be credible partners in policy and planning discussions etc;
4. champion, promote and empower the voluntary sector as a whole and campaign on key issues;
5. influence policy and planning decisions, including over the allocation of resources;
6. ensure that Hertfordshire’s voluntary organisations can compete on an equal footing for any public service contracts;
7. help strengthen the voice of communities - particularly those that might by isolated, marginalised or disadvantaged;
8. hold the statutory sector to account for its engagement with the voluntary sector, including re: Compact and NI7;
9. commission research appropriate to the needs of the sector;
10. provide a forum to discuss matters of interest to the sector and to legitimise the sector's engagement with the private and public sectors.

Hopefully this will all come to fruition at a conference in the autumn – at which we also finally drop the awful name Hertfordshire Infrastructure Forum. I amused myself by suggesting the new name should be Community Organisations’ Forum so a COF can follow a HIC. No-one else saw the benefit of this.

In the afternoon, I attended a meeting of One Watford (our local strategic partnership) where everything seems to be moving pretty smoothly – although I do need to get a move on with proposals around the Watford Compact and a new Community Assembly.