Seeing is believing innovation tour of Northumberland

Photos from the innovation tour of Northumberland

Local Innovation Awards Scheme (LIA Scheme) Panel member Hamish Davidson, and Ruby Dixon, Head of Programmes for the LlA Scheme, share their impressions of their innovation tour of Northumberland’s innovative award winning practice.

• The role of ‘employees as citizens’
• Prevention and better outcomes for users
• Stimulating self-help and community-driven delivery
• Distributed leadership is key
• Northumberland is here to help you

Delivering public services in a diverse and sparsely populated rural county like Northumberland brings real challenges. In fact, in his first week in the job at the Council, Steve Stewart, Chief Executive, faced the 2008 floods. Now, like council chief executives everywhere, as he finds himself in the perfect storm of widespread cuts, his most pressing challenge is to deliver ‘more and better with less’.

The Coalition Government has announced local authority cuts of at least 30 per cent and a power shift to neighbourhood control. Places like Northumberland - which took a clean sweep of four Local Innovation Awards earlier this year – will be hit hard hit. Around 57 per cent of employment in the North East is dependent on the public sector in some way or other.

The role of ‘employees as citizens’

When the council's employees live in the area they work in, they aren’t just doing a job - they are living it. Like local elected members, council employers and the volunteer-residents they work with are exemplars of a passionate community spirit, and ‘place-based’ leadership.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the joint Fire Service and Sure Start community centre in Rothbury, opened in July 2009. Winner of the Local Innovation Award challenge theme of ‘achieving more through partnership’, this multi-purpose community centre offers a radical way of delivering services with dramatic savings to the public purse, whilst delivering positive outcomes for individuals and communities.

Find out more about Northumberland's joint Fire Service and Sure Start community centre

Prevention and better outcomes for users

Northumberland is able to show that core funding has shifted towards a lean management model: assessment, timescales and quality improvement.

The council’s role is delivering less but with more facilitation of community action and local decision making. Increasingly, elected members are always looking for alternative modes of delivery such as social enterprises, shared location, and shared delivery of multi-functional roving teams who actually live in the area.

This has resulted in the council realising efficiencies - £100k per annum saved in running costs in Rothbury Community Centre, being responsive and nurturing people's identify with the local place. One Sure Start user explained: 'The centre has been a lifeline. Coming here has put me in touch with people when previously I would have been isolated'.

Steve Stewart explains Northumberland's approach to localism more fully: ”We are working with neighbourhoods to change behaviours. This requires recognition and support of local tacit knowledge and networks that exist in communities, allows us to focus on prevention, personalised services and efficiencies.”

Stimulating self-help and community-driven delivery

Much of Northumberland’s innovation comes from a focus on local places that have not necessarily invented new practice, but by adapting it and putting it all together in an area to stimulate self help and community driven delivery.

For example, its structured approach to safeguarding high risk teenagers that secured the ‘keeping children and young people safe in our communities’ Local Innovation Award.

Northumberland Safeguarding Partnership created a Risk Assessment Group to address issues with drugs misuse and anti-social behaviour. This invests in prevention rather than social care resources later on to deal with fixing the problems or the consequences of a teenage death.

The county had up to eight teenagers at any one time in secure accommodation at a cost of £5,000 per week – totalling £2 million a year. Through a structured partnership approach of risk assessment alongside the young people at extreme risk, this has been reduced to zero.

The £2 million saved has been diverted to other areas of the service that can deliver more positive outcomes for children and young people. When a teenager who uses and shapes the service told us that the Partnership had ‘saved my life after I got in with a bad crowd and became addicted to drugs’, she was not exaggerating.

Distributed leadership is key

This distributed leadership works well in Northumberland where a sparse but dispersed population prompts citizens to be proactive and to take responsibility for improving their own communities.

Winner of a Bright Ideas award, Carers Northumberland uses ordinary carers as expert care partners through its Virtual Carers Centre. This allows carers to access improved support across the most the rural parts of the County. The group’s Trust has designed an enhanced service, delivering "more for less" by extending support for rurally dispersed carers against a background of reduced resources.

Read more about Carers Northumberland

Alongside Northumberland’s Strengthening Families: from prison to Community project, which provides support in an institutional setting to offenders and their families. The council will utilise the support of the Local Government Group to develop and ‘incubate’ its innovative ideas into practical learning that can be adapted by councils elsewhere.

Learn more about the Strengthening Families programme

After the visit, Dame Denise Platt, the Chair of the independent Advisory Panel for the LIA Scheme, said the Panel felt vindicated in its selection and recommendation of Northumberland’s innovative practice for the awards:

“This council has responded in new ways to the needs of its local communities. We don’t expect others to simply transplant this practice but take a look at Northumberland and perhaps adapt its successful approach to your own circumstances and you just might find a faster, fresher and less costly route to new solutions to local challenges. In this case, seeing truly is believing.”

Northumberland is here to help you

You can contact the LIA Scheme helpline on 0207 296 6662 for details on how you can access tailored peer support from Northumberland and other awardees:

• Sunderland - ’safer communities’
• Trafford - ‘taking control of care’
• Tameside - ‘economic resilience’

Learning and support from LIA Scheme winners is completely free of charge.

NB. The Independent Advisory Panel for the (LIA Scheme) was abolished in October 2010 - find out more about the abolition of the Panel.