Our work

Amplifying Notting Hill Genesis’s impact on health and wellbeing in Grahame Park, Barnet. Supporting the “shifts” from Hospital to Community and from Sickness to Prevention.

Background

This project was a partnership between Locality Matters, SocioEconomics and Notting Hill Genesis and emerged from identifying a gap between health systems and housing associations. These organisations are supporting the same people but don’t commonly work in partnership or join resources to create wider impact. We sought to demonstrate that by working across systems within a neighbourhood, reviewing how resources are used and finding new ways of working, better outcomes could be produced for local people and less pressure placed upon the health and care system.

Housing associations have significant responsibilities in our most deprived neighbourhoods. Often, alongside local authority partners they oversee long-term programmes of regeneration (10-30 years) that seek to transform a place physically, economically and socially. Whilst community engagement for these housing organisations is often a strength, their resources are often not coordinated with other providers with a focus on health and wellbeing. Often, whilst these programmes may well impact on health outcomes these are not measured or at least not measured in ways that are meaningful for the health system.

What did we do?

We believed there was more that Notting Hill Genesis (NHG) could do to help build a stronger and healthier community in Grahame Park. To test this we needed to understand how health related services were currently configured in Grahame Park.

There are a wide range of statutory and voluntary sector organisations operating in the estate. In terms of voluntary sector organisations these range from tiny organisations, with a focus solely on the estate, to borough wide or national charities that work in the area. We held structured interviews with over 30 organisations and reviewed surveys, reports and plans that related to Grahame Park. There is no shortage of ideas and strategies but as is often the case, genuine impact is less easy to find!

What emerged was that (common to many places where there is high deprivation) there were several health issues that remain stubbornly present in the estate despite repeated efforts to address. These include:

Mental health challenges
Obesity
Cardiovascular disease
Respiratory disease
High blood pressure
Diabetes

We also identified several factors (wider determinants) that were contributing to these health issues including:

Access to Health services
Limited agency among residents
Poor nutrition
Access to health checks, screening and vaccinations
Smoking and substance misuse
Poor communication
Lack of physical activity
Limited employment and training opportunities
Structural racism
Debt support
Crime

We alighted on five areas where there was widespread agreement that opportunities existed to make a positive impact. These were:

Measuring impact on health systems – It was clear that whilst much fantastic work was happening in the estate, that related to improving health and wellbeing, this was not being measured in a way that would be significant for key health providers and commissioners. So (for example) organisations were measuring issues like attendance at group events rather than asking “is this project stopping people from unnecessarily attending A&E?”
Better coordinating support for Diabetes, Hypertension, and cardiovascular disease – these are all key health issues in Grahame Park, and their prevalence is a high barrier to employment for residents
Improving access to health and wellbeing services (treatment and prevention).
Developing the local health and wellbeing partnership. Whilst a partnership existed, we heard that it had become somewhat redundant and local organisations were becoming disengaged
Improving Mental health

Taking these research findings, we ran two well attended community meetings. The aim of these meetings was to work with local organisations (both statutory and voluntary) to agree a project idea (or ideas) that could be worked up into a costed proposal.

Holistic Case workers

The idea, that was co-produced, was to secure funding to create a small team of holistic case workers. These will be local people employed by a local VCSE organisation targeted with supporting people living in Grahame Park who have or at risk of long term health conditions. The aims of this project will be to deliver:

Improved health outcomes for individuals
Improved access to health services and other community support
Reduced demand on health systems e.g.
- Reduced Did Not Attends (DNAs) in primary and secondary care
- Speeding up hospital discharge
- Reducing prescriptions
- Reducing readmission rates
Case finding of people at risk of certain diseases
Helping people adopt healthy lifestyles
Reducing unemployment benefits by addressing health issues
Positively impacting on integrated working between services

What have we achieved?

Supported by the Barnet Borough Partnership local stakeholders have secured funding of £120,000, from the North Central London Integrated Care Board, to fund the Holistic Case worker project. This funding will come from the funding allocated to address health inequalities in North Central London. Beyond securing this funding there are other significant achievements.

We have brought the different organisations working in Grahame Park together in a way that had not been achieved before.
We have demonstrated a way of working at a Neighbourhood Level that we know is influencing the way that the North Central London Integrated Care Board (NCL ICB) is thinking about the development of Integrated Neighbourhood Teams (INTs) in the region.
We have shifted the way that statutory providers think about housing organisations and their role in addressing local health challenges.
We have highlighted unmet needs in the community and co-produced a way of addressing these needs.
We have encouraged (through their participation in this project) North London NHS Foundation Trust to devote more resources to support mental health challenges in Grahame Park.
NHG has recognised the impact of this approach and has now commissioned similar projects to take place in Woodberry Down (in Hackney) and The Aylesbury Estate in Southwark.

Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care System – working with George Eliot Hospital to develop volunteer support for patients on their journey to and from their communities and the hospital.

Locality Matters working alongside GEH and national charity Helpforce have developed and implemented a unique and successful programme designed to support patients on their journey to and from hospital. The programme (The Back to Health Pathway) plays key part in GEH working more effectively in their local communities to address health inequalities and improve health outcomes. This being a critical role for GEH since the introduction of new structures supporting local health and care systems that came into place nationally in July 2022. Specifically, the creation of Integrated Care Systems (Coventry and Warwickshire ICS) and Place Based Partnerships (Warwickshire North Place) that GEH are now significant members of.

The pathway aims to work with volunteers to support patients whilst they are waiting for diagnosis or treatment “Waiting Well”, whilst they are in hospital “Getting Well”, when they return home “Recovering Well” and to help through encouraging greater volunteering to build stronger, healthier communities – “Living Well”. The programme has delivered significant measurable benefits in terms of reducing demand for health services, impact on hospital staff, impact on volunteers themselves and most critically improving health outcomes for patients that have been supported.

The programme has recently won a coveted national award for volunteering from Helpforce

Further information about the programme and what has been achieved over the first year of operation can be found here

Helpforce Companions – Supporting three GP practices in West London to established volunteer companions

Locality Matters supported Helpforce to design and deliver the Helpforce Companions project. This is a key component of Helpforce’s Back to Health framework, designed to encourage volunteers to support health and wellbeing in primary care. Building on its success in working with hospital trusts, Helpforce, working with Locality Matters, supported a pilot project at three GP practices in West London.

The aim of the project was to explore how volunteers can support patients, identified by their GP, as needing companionship support. Most of us, when we need assistance, such as picking up a prescription, helping us get to a hospital appointment or just joining us for a walk, can probably call on a friend, family member or neighbour to help. However, many people in our communities don’t have that support, suffering impaired health and wellbeing or loneliness as a result. GPs are very aware that, in addition to medical care, vulnerable patients may need social support to regain their health, which is beyond GP resources to provide.

This is where Helpforce Companions come in. When doctors or other staff in a GP practice identify a patient who they think would benefit from a volunteer companion, they can refer them to the Social Prescribing Link Worker (SPLW) attached to their practice, a role that exists in all Primary Care Networks.

At the practices we supported in this pilot, the SPLW then talks to the patient to assess whether, in addition to other SPLW support, the patient would benefit from being connected to a volunteer Helpforce Companion. If so, the SPLW refers the patient to a local partner organisation, which matches the patient with an appropriate volunteer. Helpforce with Locality Matters has been supported local third sector organisations to provide this role in the pilot, recognising that recruiting, managing, training and supervising volunteers takes experience and resources.

There are many lessons from this project for other health systems, and evidence of significant impact on patients, GP practices and volunteers themselves. There is a useful guide that was developed as part of the project which allows others to adopt and adapt what we achieved. There is also a detailed evaluation carried out by Imperial College Health Partners.

Brent – Weaving a mesh of compassion around local communities

In this article Giles Piercy describes how when working with Helpforce we supported community groups in north west London that had been significantly impacted by COVID.

COVID exposed substantial health inequalities in some of Brent’s communities which suffered some of the highest death rates in the country from the first wave of COVID. Local partners including Brent Council, two key local health trusts (Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust (CLCH) and CNWL) , as well as the NW London Clinical Commissioning Group came together, with a bold ambition to address these health inequalities in two of the worst affected communities: Church End and Alperton.

This programme “Brent Health Matters (BHM)” has made significant strides in these two communities, where they have demonstrated the impact that collaboration can have on addressing local health needs and priorities.

In discussion with Helpforce we agreed that we would work with BHM to support community led projects in both Alperton and Church End that were aimed at understanding how local people and local community groups could play more of a role supporting the emotional wellbeing of people living in Church End and Alperton. As one of the volunteers on the project put it, “the mesh in communities that holds people together in love and compassion is not as tightly woven as it could be – all too often the gaps in that mesh mean that people fall through to more acute services rather than being supported in their community”.

Read more here including detailed evaluation report and guide for others looking to adopt and adapt different elements of the project.

Care City Case Study – Is it feasible for communities to play a far more significant role in reducing demand for public services through supporting healthy ageing?

Care City is an organisation jointly funded by London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) and North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT). Care City is a unique organisation and one of its fundamental aims is to improve healthy ageing for people living in the London Boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge.

Background to project

One of Care City’s aims is to ensure that they effectively engage with local communities. Locality Matters, working with two key associates (Greg Wilkinson and Neil Reeder) met with Care City to explore their approach to working with local communities. In that initial discussion, it became apparent that whilst Care City had a clear view of why they wanted to work more closely with their communities they had not settled on an approach for doing this. Ultimately, after a procurement exercise, Locality Matters was commissioned to undertake a pilot or feasibility study in a community in Barking and Dagenham. The aim of this project was to test a hypothesis that local people, if supported in the right way, can play a significantly greater role in the delivery of public services aimed at supporting people as they age. In particular, the aim was to test the community’s capacity to prevent demand for services materialising.

What we did

We agreed with Care City that we should focus on one community or locality in Barking and Dagenham. There were several criteria we looked at to determine which community. These included:

Does the community place a significant burden on health and social care providers?
Is the community recognisable to the people that live there (i.e. do they associate with the place)?
Is there some degree of social capital we could build upon?
Is the community close to Barking Town centre? Care City were keen to see their office as a hub for community based activity, and picking a community close to the centre of Barking would therefore potentially deliver additional benefits to the project.

We ranked every ward in B&D according to these and other criteria. We emerged with a shortlist of communities and from that shortlist selected Gascoigne. Gascoigne is a notoriously deprived community but also one that has a very strong sense of community. One of the other factors about Gascoigne which, in normal circumstances, might have discouraged us from focusing there, is that in the middle of the ward is an estate of c.20 tower blocks that is in the middle of a massive regeneration project. This involves knocking down the tower blocks and replacing a large part of the residential estate. However, because there is so much development going on across LBBD we agreed, that to work in an area undergoing such a transformation, would be of real value, in terms of building the case for rolling out the programme of work subsequently.

Once we had agreed on Gascoigne the aim of the project was to undertake two key tasks: firstly, build a detailed understanding of what was going on in the community, in terms of what local people and local third sector organisations were doing, and secondly assess what demands older people were placing on statutory services. Essentially, we were hoping that a greater understanding of local capacity and capability would provide opportunities for public service commissioners to think differently about service delivery and particularly to draw on local capabilities when commissioning services.

We got a very varied reaction when we told people we were going to focus on Gascoigne from “its an amazing community” to “your project will fall flat there”.

During the research we uncovered a huge amount of activity going on in and around the ward. As ever with projects of this kind there was little shared information about what was going on and no effective forums to share with each other, or share with the statutory sector the scale and appetite of the voluntary sector. Talking to local people and organisations all manner of opportunities emerged:

Churches helping to visit vulnerable elderly people
Other groups wanting to help speed up hospital discharges
Groups that felt they could be used to deliver a “social prescription”
A mosque that wanted to run a mental health support group
People that offered to help with transport
Many groups that wanted to help with promoting public health messages

In almost every case we asked if they had talked to statutory providers about doing these things and the response was generally that they had never considered doing that although, to be fair, they had typically not been approached by the statutory sector.

We then turned our gaze to what demands the over 45 year olds were placing on local public services. Unsurprisingly from a community such as Gascoigne we found substantial pressures being placed on the health and social care system in areas such as:

Delayed hospital discharges
Unnecessary A&E visits
Loneliness and isolation leading to unwarranted pressure on GP services
Significant demands on domiciliary and residential care services
Widespread and deep evidence of people suffering with long term conditions such as hypertension and diabetes

Having gathered the information, we brought the community together to a meeting where we shared our findings and explored the potential for greater collaboration between local people, local voluntary organisations and statutory providers.

What was the outcome?

There is real power in sharing with statutory providers the scale of activity that is going on in any community and it is also revealing for local people to see the scale of demand that they place upon the statutory sector. What emerged, from the meeting, was both a realisation and a commitment to work more closely together to look at ways in which people in Gascoigne could live longer, healthier, more independent lives. Our original project had been to see if it was feasible that services could be improved and demand could be reduced by taking a more targeted approach to community development. From what we discovered the answer to this was an emphatic yes and acceptance that more could be done. We now embark on the next stage of the project which is to look in more detail at the business case and implementation plan for several the projects we have identified, as well as moving forward with some “quick wins”

Our aim is to demonstrate the positive impact greater community participation will have on:

Demand for health and social care services
Public service cost
Community and personal wellbeing

This post will be updated following the completion of the next stage of the project.

Croydon Council

Croydon Council wanted to understand where best practice existed across local government in terms of building stronger more resilient communities. The council commissioned Locality Matters to undertake a research project across all 148 upper tier local authorities in England.

Essentially Croydon’s question was “Are there approaches to building greater community resilience and independence, being adopted by other Local Councils, which have valuable lessons for Croydon Council”. Specifically, the research sought to identify evidence for approaches to building stronger communities that result in communities playing a more active role in preventing demand for statutory services.

The project has been a review of practice at other councils on their approaches to fostering community empowerment and co-production in service delivery and the extent to which this a) improves services and b) makes savings by managing and preventing demand and c.) creates stronger, more engaged and resilient communities.

This research project formed part of a wider body of work looking to understand how Croydon Council can build more effective relationships with communities and localities in Croydon. Croydon like every other local authority is facing substantial budget cuts and service pressures caused by rising demand. One of the solutions to this challenge, they believe, will be to find a way to support communities become more self-reliant and reduce their demand on public services. This research project sought to support that ambition.

At its heart this project was about trying to understand if there are approaches to building stronger communities that demonstrate that communities are able to prevent demand for services emerging. For example, can a community, with the right support:

Encourage more service users to take direct payments in place of domiciliary care services?
Stop elderly people migrating from domiciliary care to residential care?
Stop unnecessary (i.e. non-biomedical related) visits to local GPs?
Help people out of long term unemployment?
Improve public health outcomes?
Support people with long terms health conditions
Support people being discharged more quickly from hospital with additional support?
Support residents in a way that might prevent non-elective hospital admissions

We took a four stage approach to this work as set out below:

Stage 1 – Rank all 148 upper tier local authorities and identify the top 30

Stage 2 – Filter from 30 to ten councils

Stage 3 – Undertake more detailed research with the top ten

Stage 4 – Write up findings including recommendations for Croydon council

What has emerged from the project is that there are very few examples of local authorities having hard evidence that their work in communities is having an impact upon service demand or spend. There is almost universal acceptance though that one of the solutions to the budget challenges faced by local government is to find a way to support communities to do more to manage their own demand. It is this belief, anecdotal evidence and pockets of best practice that are fueling work in communities up and down the country and increasingly this work has a focus on demand management, rather community building (with no specific cost reduction intent).

One of the most serious challenges of assessing the impact of this work is that of proving that any impact achieved is the product of a particular initiative. There are so many variables and the timescales are such that this will remain a significant challenge. The approach taken by Social Investors through vehicles such as Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) potentially provides examples of how to assess, and reward financially, specific interventions. However, the majority of SIBs are either at a very early stage or are directed at relatively less complex and more short term projects than some of the major challenges faced by local government.

In doing the research, and drawing from previous experience, we identified a number of characteristics that we believe are indicators of councils that are making good progress in terms of creating communities that will place less demand on public service and these are set out, at a high level, below.

Characteristics of a high performing councils

They have very clear INTENT

Community empowerment is embedded in strategic plans.
Beyond principles they have a defined approach – a way of doing things.
They see community empowerment as a part of budget and demand management approaches.
They recognise that people can get trapped in a service delivery world.

They have a defined and consistently applied APPROACH for building stronger more resilient communities.

They have approaches that support communities place less demand on public services.
They are actively looking to encourage greater co-production of public services. By this we mean involving communities, at the earliest possible time, in defining requirements and designing how these will be addressed (or their need prevented) and being involved in the delivery of services or demand management activity.
They are working with elected members to get them to be more involved in their local communities.
In Unitary councils they are creating and funding Ward Forums.
They have dedicated staff teams to undertake community work and co-ordinate activity across the council.
They try to understand which staff live and work in their communities.
They are devolving meaningful budgets to community control.

They have KNOWLEDGE about their communities and processes to maintain this knowledge

Have a defined way of understanding and mapping community assets (people, organisations and physical assets).
Are able to define and calculate public sector spend at a community level.
Have some way of measuring community capacity across all their communities.

They COMMISSION from an asset basis which is underpinned by the aim of fostering greater community delivery (i.e. greater involvement of the community and voluntary sector from design through to delivery).

Commissioners engage with communities at the earliest possible stage.
Commissioners test, as part of any procurement exercise, whether the community is capable of delivering the required service or aspects of it.
They have processes in place to measure the impact of community empowerment on budgets, service delivery and service demand.
They understand the principles of social impact investment and are looking to apply them to community development work.

They have effective GOVERNANCE in place.

They have director with specific responsibility for supporting demand management work in communities.
They have an elected member with specific responsibility for supporting demand management work in communities.
Political patience – i.e. an acceptance that it will take time to measure impact upon public services.
They recognise, and are dealing with, the challenge that may come from encouraging greater involvement of community groups and how this may clash with the responsibilities and mandate of elected members.

They are changing the CULTURE within their organisations.

They have programmes in place to help support and train staff.
Their aspirations around community empowerment are enshrined in staff appraisals and team targets.

They have effective PARTNERSHIP working at a locality level.

They have processes in place to allow joint working at a locality level.
They are starting conversations with partners where they say “if we can reduce demand for your service in this area will you commit to realignment of budget”.
There is meaningful activity around shared budgets at a locality level between different statutory providers.

They are able to MEASURE the impact they are having.

They have specific goals both around strengthening communities and reducing public service demand.
They are able to assess whether interventions are improving services or what specific difference they are making.
They have systems in place to measure the impact they are having on:
Community resilience,
Service demand and service costs.

Essex County Fire and Rescue Services

Delivering Differently in Neighbourhoods

This project was driven from ECFRS’s desire to understand the potential for Essex’s communities to play a more active role in helping to prevent Accidental Dwelling Fires (ADFs) across the county. At the heart of this project was the hypothesis that, typically when public sector organisations commission services, to a certain extent they marginalise the “assets” within any community.
“If we had a better understanding of our local communities and organisations, we could work with them to help reduce the risk of fire.”
Locality Matters were awarded a contract which started in August 2014. The project had five distinct phases as described below:

Identify two communities to work with
Gather data about these two communities
Map the assets within both communities
Build a picture of public sector in both communities
Identify services that the community could play a greater role in design, commissioning or delivery of
Create plans for implementing different delivery options
Produce final report

At the start of this project the focus of the work was building an understanding of how different communities in Essex could support the prevention of fire risks materialising for ECFRS. However, what quickly became apparent, in conversations with local people, local organisations, and local statutory providers, was that whilst local people and organisations were happy to discuss how they could help ECFRS they also wanted to explore the potential for ECFRS to play a more substantial role in supporting them and their services.

The project focussed on two wards in Essex: St Lukes is Southend-on-Sea and Vange in Basildon. When building an understanding of the capabilities of the communities the key assets we wanted to explore were the role of different organisations and the work that they undertake locally.

To understand whether an organisation is likely to be a valuable partner for ECFRS, in preventing accident dwelling fires, we determined that we needed to find out two things about that organisation: Firstly is the organisation dealing with groups that are vulnerable to fires? Secondly is the organisation capable of undertaking work that would either augment or replace what ECFRS already does?

There are groups of citizens that are known to have a relatively higher risk of an accidental dwelling fire than others. Therefore it was important to understand to what extent different organisations in Vange and St Lukes were dealing with those vulnerable groups such as:

Hoarders
Elderly living alone
Drug and alcohol users
Single parents
Unemployed

Unsurprisingly we uncovered many local third sector and statutory providers, in both communities, that also target these groups. Our work in both communities sought to understand the degree to which these organisations are working with these groups.

Local Community helping ECFRS

As well as understanding the focus of different organisations on the groups that ECFRS tends to target, we also wanted to understand the capability of those organisations to support the work that ECFRS does to prevent ADFs. This required assessment of activities that ECFRS does that could potentially be augmented by other agencies or organisations. We determined a number of activities that we agreed other organisations could carry out:

Helping to promote the preventative work that the fire service does:
Free home fire safety checks
Free smoke install of smoke detectors
Helping the fire service following a specific event e.g. an After Incident Response (AIR)
Visiting homes of people identified as being vulnerable
Identifying people or homes that are vulnerable
Supplying volunteers

As we turned our attention from thinking about how the Fire service could better understand and work with local assets to help reduce ADFs the other side of this question loomed large: How could assets within the fire service be used to help support other statutory providers? When looking at the assets of fire service we identified the following key assets:

The brand of the fire service
The fire service’s expertise in prevention
The volunteers recruited and managed by ECFRS
The physical assets of the fire service:
Fire stations
Gyms
Kitchens
Fire appliances
Capacity of Fire fighters to support the community

It was clear that the existing work of ECFRS has a significant positive impact on local communities and supports a reduction in demand for statutory services.

It is also clear the fire service, across the county, has become expert in prevention or demand management. Whilst a number of reasons for the reduced demand placed on the fire service are unique to the fire service, it is undoubtedly the case that the fire service has actively and successfully shifted emphasis towards prevention.

Fundamentally we felt that many of the fire service’s “assets” are not recognised by other statutory providers who marginalise or ignore these when commissioning services. It became clear in the project that we needed to consider how the capabilities, brand and capacity of the fire service could be used to support other agencies – some examples:

Mentoring disruptive children at school
Mentoring the unemployed
Visiting vulnerable older adults
Expanding Fire Break courses
Reducing demand on health services
Other “distraction” activities

Outcomes

Emerging from this initial project, in both Vange and St Lukes we have developed and set of plans for implementing changes. These plans will leverage local assets and capabilities in both communities to deliver service improvements and prevent demand for services materialising. Whether this be demand for fire services or demand for other services that closer collaboration between the fires service, other local organisations and the community can help prevent materialising.

Next steps

ECFRS have been successful, as one of 25 Local Councils (and the only Fire Brigade), in becoming part of the Department for Community and Local Government’s (DCLG’s) Delivering Differently in Neighbourhoods programme. This programme is providing support and funding to allow ECFRS to take the work in Vange and St Lukes through to implementation and broaden the project to two new areas in Essex (Purfleet in Thurrock and Staple Tye in Harlow). As well as moving through to implementation in all four areas, the DCLG funding requires ECFRS to undertake a cost benefit analysis of the work.

London Borough of Barnet

Assessing the feasibility for greater community involvement in public service delivery through work in the Dollis Valley

LBB’ staff, like virtually every other Local Authority, are deeply engaged in thinking through how they address the challenge of maintaining public services in a time of rapidly rising demand and declining resources. One of the options they wanted to consider, more systematically, was how to explore the potential for community-led organisations to take on a greater role in the design and delivery of public services. This project is part of a wider Community Participation Strategy LBB have developed which aims to get residents more involved in the design and delivery of services. The aim was to pilot an approach in a single community in Barnet.

Locality Matters was commissioned to undertake a three stage approach to this work.

The three stages were as follows:

1. Determine which communities in Barnet have the greatest potential to deliver or co-produce public services.

This work entailed assessing every major community (approximately 20) in Barnet to understand, across over 40 different measures, the level of community engagement and activity that may indicate the community’s potential to play a more significant role in service delivery. Using a structured approach, this data was set against other publicly available data, such as deprivation indices, to come up with a list of communities that are both strong, in terms of community social capital, but are also significant consumers of public services. The key to this approach is the assumption that community development work of this kind should be focussed on both the most fertile ground (in terms of social capital) and where significant public sector spend occurs. Emerging from the first stage of the assignment was a ranked list of Barnet’s communities and an agreement to work specifically with one community. This was the community based around the Dollis Valley Estate in Underhill Ward.

2. Spend and asset mapping

During the second stage we undertook a detailed assessment of Public sector spend in the Dollis Valley and built a map of community assets. We looked at assets across three different dimensions: the people that live and work in the community, the organisations based in the community (private, third sector and statutory organisations), and the existing physical assets, such as community buildings, church halls and playing fields. The rationale supporting this approach is that, typically there is a lack of understanding, across all stake holders, about what is going on in a community and the level of public sector spend in the community. The information can galvanise local people and organisations to consider… “if we better coordinated all this capability surely we could do more with that budget or at least prevent demand for some of these services”.

3. Planning

Using the data gathered in stage two we then worked closely with the Dollis Valley community to understand which public services outcomes the community could be well placed to take on greater responsibility for the design and or delivery of.

Outcomes:

As part of the project Locality Matters have developed a toolkit, which LB Barnet are able to use for similar work in other communities. Amongst other aspects this covers the approach we took to: rank communities, map assets in the community, build a picture of spend in the community and develop implementation plans.

Through the project we have brought together different people and organisations in the community, to explore the potential for the community taking on greater responsibility for public services. This is something that had not been done before. Previous engagement tended to be on the basis of understanding what can a community can do to augment public services. The focus of this project was on the potential for the community to replace services or prevent the need for them.

We have identified a number of areas where there is duplication across the public sector and potentially a marginalisation of the assets within the community. The feasibility study identified a number of specific opportunities, which will be taken forward where we have identified potential for service improvement and demand reduction through greater involvement of the community. Amongst others these include: Services to encourage people into apprenticeships and employment, health and wellbeing services for older adults, community meals, carrying out low repairs and maintenance to housing stock and public spaces.

“The work carried out by Locality Matters was an important piece of engagement and analysis, which helped us to understand how much collectively is spent by the public sector in a precise area and how many community assets – including community leaders – there are. In both cases, more than we thought. The toolkit will be helpful in replicating this analysis elsewhere.”

Stephen Evans – Director Strategy and Communications

Leiston (Leiston Town Council, Suffolk Coastal District Council, Suffolk County Council)

Leiston is a rural market town in the East of Suffolk. The town falls within the administrative Boundaries of Suffolk Coastal District Council (SCDC) and Suffolk County Council (SCC). There is a movement from local people within the town to explore the potential for a community led organisation to take on the delivery of more public services. The assumption behind this is that historically commissioners have taken a deficit approach to configuring public services and this approach has not fully leveraged the assets that exist within the town which could be incorporated into the delivery of improved services. Locality Matters has been commissioned by Leiston Town Council and Suffolk County Council who are leading a partnership covering other public sector agencies and local organisations to explore in far greater detail the potential for a community led organisation to explore and then build a case for being far more involved in the delivery of local services.

As part of this programme Locality Matters is mapping out the extent of public sector spend within the town. This has involved close working with a number of different organisations and thinking through the most practical way to gather spend and demand data at a locality level which has different challenges in different organisations. We are also carrying out a community asset mapping exercise where we will assess and map the assets within the town.This exercise will look at assets from four different dimensions: Individual assets, the strength of different informal groups and associations, the strengths of the third sector and existing community groups and lastly the physical assets with the town (such as buildings, parks and other open spaces).

Thamesmead SE London (LB Bexley and LB Greenwich)

Locality Matters is supporting Trust Thamesmead www.trust-thamesmead.co.uk Trust Thamesmead is a community based organisation based in Thamesmead (a large residential development with high levels of social housing straddling the boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley). Trust Thamesmead has set up Together Against Poverty (TAP) programme. The fundamental aim of the TAP programme is to support people in Thamesmead who are struggling with poverty.The programme has pulled together a range of partners to help signpost and deliver support to people struggling with issues arising from debt and financial illiteracy issues. This support will cover a range of services such as: provision of affordable furniture and affordable loans, advice about welfare benefits, access to food banks if required.

Locality Matters is supporting Trust Thamesmead as part of the DCLG’s Our Place programme.

Our work is to support the development of the programme and particularly to look at two key areas. Firstly, we are quantifying the level of debt and financial illiteracy issues in the community and will ensure Trust Thamesmead is in a position to be able to measure the impact that the TAP programme is having on these measures. Secondly, we are working alongside key local delivery partners such as local GP practices and the Local Authority to identify those services that might benefit from the TAP programme. We have identified a number of public services costs that we believe will be reduced as a consequence of the TAP programme such as: the number of GP visits and the costs of dealing with housing evictions.Our intention through the project is to demonstrate that TAP can reduce demand for these services and prove the case that those “benefitting organisations” such as the Local Authority or the Local Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) acknowledge the benefits that TAP is creating and agree to realign budgets as a consequence.

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