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THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN SCOTLAND ACT 2003
COMMUNITY PLANNING: ADVICE NOTE 4
Effective Partnership Working
MARCH 2004
Introduction
Joined up planning, community governance and public sector delivery implies considerable development of partnership working between key agencies and between these agencies and the communities whom they serve.
In the context of Community Planning effective partnership working will enhance the degree of openness and engagement and maximise the contribution that each partner can make to the quality of service delivery and the well-being of communities. More effective partnership working will also benefit individual organisations through reduced bureaucracy, and increased efficiency.
However, it is important at the outset to acknowledge the challenges of effective partnership working at all levels, and the fact that there are no easy solutions or 'off the shelf' answers. There will be a need for cultural change and continuous learning and development to meet these challenges.
Good Practice in Partnership Working
There is comprehensive literature outlining good practice in partnership working. Certain key criteria may be identified for effective partnership working within the Community Planning framework:
- The purpose of the partnership is clearly defined and is focused on improvements to the provision of services and the well-being of communities.
- All participants understand this rationale and are committed to it.
- There is respect for the roles of partner organisations and for the statutory role of some partners for service delivery.
- A culture of trust and openness is nurtured within the partnership.
- That there is a joint commitment for the partnership to succeed.
- The activity of the partnership takes account of its context (stakeholder views, Community Planning framework, etc).
- The partnership is appropriately inclusive and representative of stakeholder interests.
- There are arrangements for the induction of new members and an exit strategy where relevant.
- There is a regular cycle of review in which members assess how well the partnership is fulfilling its purpose, and decide on action to improve if appropriate.
- This review and evaluation is reported publicly in a clear and accessible manner.
- A process of performance management where clear targets are set for delivery and where there is regular monitoring of performance against these is in place.
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Connecting Within the Community Planning Process
Effective partnership working will require communication and connection within the Community Planning partnership itself and within the individual agencies comprising the partnership.
As the Community Planning partnership is the key over-arching partnership framework, joint activities should be effectively integrated with each other. This implies the need for vertical integration from thematic or sub-Community Planning partnerships to the overarching Community Planning partnership and vice versa. This also implies the need for horizontal communication between thematic partnerships. For example, the work of Drug and Alcohol Action Teams should be integrated with that of the team developing and implementing the Joint Health Improvement Plan. Equally, sustainability strategies may be appropriately linked into economic development planning.
Fife Partnership Reporting to the Fife Partnership, co-ordinators of the Community Planning strategic partnerships and forums (health, environment, economic, rural, safety, equality, children's services) meet on a regular basis. The purpose of this group is to ensure that effective linkages are made between the strategic partnerships and other strands of the Community Plan. The group ensures that the responsibilities for the delivery and monitoring of the Community Plan are communicated effectively to each of the supporting thematic groups, and ensures that key Community Planning issues are fed back up to the Fife Partnership. The group is also used by the co-ordinators to identify cross-working initiatives between partnerships and forums. For example, the work of the Fife Health Alliance is closely linked to the work of the Fife Community Safety Partnership and the Drugs and Alcohol Action Team needs strong linkages to both. For more information see: www.fife.gov.uk |
West Dunbartonshire Community Planning partnership has prioritised communications as a key to ensuring effectiveness. A Communications Forum has been established with an aim to: - Develop a West Dunbartonshire Communications Network.
- Promote community planning.
- Enhance partner Information.
- Develop community engagement.
There are also developments underway to: - Publish a profile of Community Planning partners.
- Improve the sharing of newsletters, Citizen Panels and other communication/consultation tools.
- Develop collaborative tools for communicating Community Planning within organisations.
For more information contact: Communityplanning@west-dunbarton.gov.uk |
Dundee Partnership is developing a website with an intranet facility to enable better communications and information sharing between Community Planning partners and the public. Information on the partnership will be available to the public as will a community interaction section with news and a quick poll facility. A partner extranet protected by password will also be available. Up to 10 theme portals will provide minutes of meetings, working papers and other documents will be provided along with a facility to allow greater information sharing between databases. For more information see: www.dundeecity.gov.uk/cofd/partnership.html |
Connecting Within Individual Organisations
Communication and connection within the partner organisations is also essential to ensure that decisions and planned activities under the Community Planning framework are cascaded to relevant staff throughout each organisation.
There is also a need to mainstream Community Planning and effective partnership working throughout individual organisations participating in the process. It is also good practice for all other agencies engaged in Community Planning to mainstream such activity. Capacity building activities can be used to effect this ( see also Advice Note 6: Building Organisational Capacity) and dedicated support functions may also be of use, especially in the early stages of development.
Strathclyde Police has established a Community Planning and Partnership Co-ordination Unit. In terms of Community Planning the Unit's remit includes the development and implementation of a Community Planing strategy and policy. The Unit provides a support resource for Divisions and the Force as it disseminates Best Practice within the Force. It is also establishing the training requirement throughout the Force and investigating the potential for partnership training. For more information see: http://www.strathclyde.police.uk/ |
Community Planning should also be embedded within the business processes of individual partner organisations. For example, in a Council context, the Council Corporate Plan should reflect the content of the Community Plan and relate the Council's contribution to it (any 'Council-only' issues should also be reflected in the Council Corporate Plan). Service plans will have their direction set by the Council corporate plan and will therefore also reflect priorities set within the Community Plan. In line with the ethos of Community Planning, individual organisations' business plans should be made available to partners to engender shared understanding.
Similarly any 'area' or decentralised service plans should be developed through this hierarchy, be consistent with and aim to develop the key themes of the Community Plan. Some agencies have already altered their decision-making or operational structures to reflect the Community Planning approach, for example, some services have been grouped to optimise contribution to the Community Planning process.
Aberdeen City Council has re-organised front-line services into three areas across the city as part of the overall Community Planning approach. The Community Plan - aberdeen futures - a social, economic and environmental design for our city ( http://www.aberdeenfutures.com) commits The Aberdeen City Alliance (the Community Planning partnership) in the City, to plan and deliver improved services at a local level. The Council has recognised that to achieve this, services have to be configured in a different way; amalgamating around geographies rather than traditional departments, focusing on the needs of neighbourhoods and Communities of Interests. Aberdeen North, Central and South have been established as administrative areas, while working with local communities to confirm neighbourhood boundaries to ensure that 'every neighbourhood in the City has it's own Neighbourhood Community Plan by 2006' (aberdeen futures). |
The Best Value framework being pursued by individual partners should also support the Community Planning process. It is important to stress the comprehensive nature of the Best Value duty. Best Value applies not just to structures, but also to planning processes, consultation, reporting, service delivery arrangements and bidding for resources. The Community Planning partnership should take responsibility to ensure that these connections are made through the Community Planning process.
Evaluating partnership working
As outlined above there is a need for a regular cycle of review in which members assess how well the partnership has fulfilled its purpose, and decide on action to improve if appropriate.
A range of tools and toolkits are available to assist partnerships with this. Evaluation may be carried out by any one partner or by a partnership as a whole.
The Highland Wellbeing Alliance has participated in a number of exercises to evaluate the effectiveness of the partnership and its processes. One such exercise was the 'Verona Benchmark'. This was a pilot being led under the auspices of the World Health Organisation, to develop a self-assessment tool for partnerships wishing to evaluate their approach to 'investing for health'. The concept of investing for health was thought to have many similarities with the concept of well-being that the Alliance partners were trying to promote and the vision contained in the Community Plan for Highland. With support from the Research Unit in Health, Behaviour and Change at Edinburgh University, the lead officers involved in the Alliance from each partner participated in a self-assessment exercise. This looked at how well the partnership was working under 6 headings of Leadership, People, Policy & Strategy, Resources, Programme, and Processes. The results were then discussed by the officers and used to inform improvement actions for the partnership as a whole. The approach used has some similarities with other self-assessment tools such as that developed for community safety partnerships. The findings from the pilot as a whole were refined and have been used by the Health Development Agency as part of their 'working partnership' information. For more information see:
www.highland.gov.uk/cx/service-management/cxoffice/policy-unit/wba.htm |
Tackling partnership overload
There has been much concern recently about partnership overload, and the need to streamline the proliferation of partnership arrangements, at the regional, local authority and sub-local authority level, which have grown up over recent years. The statutory guidance (paragraph 2.1) sets out the statutory duty for local authorities to facilitate the Community Planning process including a requirement to develop a framework for streamlining planning and delivery of services with an emphasis on removing wasteful overlap.
In order to promote streamlining and Best Value in the use of resources, there should be a presumption against creating new partnership structures. This implies both at the level of the Community Planning partnership itself, and partnerships linked closely to it, and at the sub-local authority level. Existing partnership structures should be used or adapted whenever possible to tackle new issues and initiatives. Community Planning also provides an opportunity to make existing partnership structures more effective and where possible rationalise the number of structures, or make these more effective. In doing this partnerships will also be able to tackle overload in joint planning, reporting and making funding bids. The following mechanisms can assist in this process:
- Establishment of systematic self-assessment processes as described above.
- An audit of partnership activity and review of its effectiveness.
- Improving 'connectedness' between partnerships.
- The oversight and leadership role of the Community Planning partnership, although it is important to recognise there will be competing interests in rationalising partnership activity and this will need to be handled sensitively.
The Task Force commissioned research to provide further advice on taking the rationalisation process further forward, and the Community Planning Implementation Group is taking this forward.
There is also a need for the Scottish Executive to facilitate this process through the better integration of national policy initiatives and funding streams that may require, or lead to, the establishment of partnerships at a local level ( see also Advice Note 1: National Framework: National Priorities).
Partnership Toolkit
Communities Scotland and the Community Planning Task Force commissioned a piece of work to identify and assess the different tools available to help improve partnership working in Scotland. This work aimed to bring together, in one place, a range of toolkits that could provide partnerships with access to good practice and subsequently help them to improve their effectiveness. These toolkits cover a range of issues including financial planning, community involvement, strategic planning and performance monitoring. The website drawing together these toolkits can be found at:
http://www.communitiesscotland.gov.uk/scripts/WebObjects.exe/CommScot.woa/wa
The website has been designed to make it easy for partnerships to identify the toolkits and tools which will be relevant and provide a valuable source of knowledge for partnerships. It is also hoped that the website will evolve over time through users providing feedback on the gaps, strengths and areas for improvement in toolkits. The Scottish Centre for Regeneration in Communities Scotland is planning a number of knowledge building events about the toolkits over autumn/winter 2003. Information on the Centre is available through the Communities Scotland website or by calling 0141 314 0021.
Joint Service Delivery
At the local level, wherever appropriate, the aim should be to create a common joint vehicle to deliver different initiatives, rather than a proliferation of separate initiatives. For example, at service level Healthy Living Centres could be combined with New Community Schools, or new area management arrangements could be combined with Social Inclusion Partnership structures. Consideration should also be given to maximising the use of public sector estates, moving the development of joint premises and one-stop shops to a more strategic footing.
Integrated Youth Service The first round of the Modernising Government Fund supported a number of local authorities and their Community Planning partners and the Young Scot organisation in developing an integrated approach to delivering services to young people. The approach was to introduce Dialogue Youth Centres - a multi-agency, one-stop shop approach to youth services supported by the introduction of 'smartcards', widening access to public services including school meals, libraries and discounted access to leisure and retail services. This was further supported by the development of the National Youth Portal delivering interactive online information and advice to support young people. An important feature of this was the involvement and recruitment of young people to deliver the project; young people delivering services to young people in a way that is meaningful to them. This project has grown and the Scottish Executive along with COSLA, Young Scot and all 32 councils (along with their respective Community Planning partners) will now support this integrated approach. Information on Dialogue Youth services can be found on the National Youth Portal - www.youngscot.org |
Links / other reading
- Audit Commission (1998), "A fruitful partnership: effective partnership working"
- Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (2001), "Local Strategic Partnerships: Government Guidance"
- Department for Education and Employment , "Working in Partnership: Lessons from the Literature", Research Brief No 63
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation (1997), Making partnerships work: a practical guide for the public, private, voluntary and community sectors.http://www.jrf.org.uk/
- sport scotland launched a programme in February 2002 aimed at increasing opportunities for people living in SIP areas to participate in sport and physical recreation. One objective of the programme is to promote capacity building by helping groups to establish and sustain projects, developing voluntary and other community organisations. The publication "Sport and Community Development: A Manual" (sportscotland July 2002) is a guide to assist those setting up and running sports-based partnership projects in the community. ( http://www.sportscotland.org.uk)
- Assessment of Partnership toolkits.
Volume 1http://www.communityplanning.org.uk/documents/ToolkitFinalVol1.pdf
Volume 2http://www.communityplanning.org.uk/documents/ToolkitFinalVol2.pdf
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