Thursday, 20 November 2008

My car has now been in the garage a week and has made zero progress toward being fixed as the new engine (promised for Monday) has still not been delivered. I must stay calm and relaxed.

Nationally, Compact has forced many thousands of voluntary and statutory sector managers to spend many thousand hours together negotiating thousands of Codes of Practice. This process has, arguably, been beneficial in bringing people together: jaw jaw, after all, is better than war war.

But the world has moved on: where relationships are strong they have outgrown the limited scope of Compact; where relationships flounder they require something stronger than Compact to move things forward.

In Watford, I believe relations have moved beyond the ambition of Compact. We are now discussing quite detailed strategies for community development, quality assurance, volunteering, etc. Don't misunderstand me: it’s important to still have Compact, but it needs to underpin relationships not dominate them: if we are discussing Compact, we aren’t discussing more important things.

What we are discussin in Watford is a new approach to Compact. Instead of developing new local Codes of Practice (no-one has the time) we will instead reaffirm our commitment to the "core principles" of the Compact adn to the standards of the national Compact. We will then produce a short annual statement in which statutory and voluntary sector partners will each report on how the Compact has helped shape their work in the past year – and how it will inform their work in the coming year. The Borough Council and the Chief Officers’ Information Network each seem pleased with this approach. The next stage is to identify the core Compact principles! How hard can it be?

In the evening, Jackie and I returned to our folk dancing - such fun.