Our two local MSPs, MIchael Russell and Jackie Baillie, have together convinced Audit Scotland of the need, for a start, to investigate the process by which the Argyll and Bute Alcohol and Drugs Partnership [ADP] tendered and commissioned the contract for the provision of addiction services it awarded on 4th November 2014.
For Argyll now has new indications of serious failures in this commissioning, which present a strong prima facie case for additional specific Audit Scotland investigation as it interrogates this tendering and commissioning operation.
The reality is that a knowingly undeliverable contract was awarded and accepted, with a contract price based on figures for these community rehabilitation services costs which have remained unrevised since 2003; and further, have been cut since then by 10%.
From what we have been able to discover, many of these statutory community rehabilitation services [housing support, psychosocial support, drop in counselling etc], substantially underfunded, have long been delivered by supplementary funding sought through third party 3rd Sector organisations from charitable foundations, with ADP support.
Moreover, it appears that ADP intend that these statutory services, now to be delivered from a single underfunded source, are planned to be part funded from the National Lottery, presented obliquely in joint applications with Argyll and Bute Council and possibly other 3rd Sector bodies and supported by ADP endorsement.
For what appear to be reasons of unaffordable cost, given the contract price, the new contractor is unable:
- to attempt yet to deliver some of the contracted services for which they are legally responsible;
- to afford the dispersed premises that are crucial in supporting a professional service across Argyll and Bute without arousing distress and distrust in service users;
- to deliver a working hours crisis response across the territory, as had previously been available.
There is documentary evidence that the Chair of ADP misled both local MSPs and the ADP Executive Group in failing to give them full information on this currently depleted delivery of contracted services – to support her assertion that all services were now being delivered by the new contractor; and that consequently any continuation funding to the 3rd Sector service delivery groups would be duplication of costs.
This is a story of actions and consequences: actions in commissioning with the opposite of integrity of process – which have had direct consequences in the inability of the contracted services to be delivered, leaving some of the most vulnerable without the supporting services public funding has tasked the ADP to deliver.
Contract price unable to fund tendered services
The contract tendered and awarded on 4th November 2015 to Addaction was for the delivery of all community rehabilitation addiction services across Argyll and Bute.
These are the services heretofore provided by five locally based 3rd Sector service providers covering the territory – HART for Helensburgh; ENCOMPASS for Bute, Mid Argyll and Islay; KALEIDOSCOPE for Cowal; KADAS for Kintyre; and OASIS for Oban. [Following the termination of the 3rd sector groups' contracts, ENCOMPASS has had to close and no longer provides services across its areas.]
Argyll and Bute ADP’s total budget is £1.2 million per annum.
This annually sees £800,000 [67% of the total funding] routinely topsliced to pay for the treatment services delivered by the Argyll and Bute Addiction Team [ABAT] which is made up of staff from Argyll and Bute Council and NHS Highland.
No costed details have ever been provided to justify this substantial topslicing – although they have been serially requested for some time by 3rd Sector partners.
A scant £90k of the remaining £400k of the annual £1.2 million public sector funding has traditionally been used to contribute to the community rehabilitation addiction services contracted to the locally dispersed 3rd Sector partners identified above.
It may be that the long underfunding of these services, which the new operator is currently unable to deliver as contracted, is not unrelated to the 67% of that funding automatically topsliced each year, in what might be said to be in the budgetary interests of Argyll and Bute Council and of NHS Highland.
While the ADP funding for community rehabilitation services gets a 2.5% uplift each year, ADP cannot explain the basis for the amount they initially set for these services; and Argyll and Bute Council’s funding for 3rd Sector Addiction Services has not been revised since 20o3, except negatively and by default in a council cost cut of 10% a few years ago.
In addition to the 12 year unrevised funding of these services, to explain the assertion that there is not enough money in the contract to fund the contracted services – and that this was known to be the case at tendering, commissioning, award and acceptance of contract, we use the case of one of these local delivery groups as illustration.
This group is traditionally given a total of £60k per annum from ADP and from Argyll and Bute Council: £40k from the council for Young People’s Services and £20k from ADP for Adult Services.
This funding is inadequate to the cost of providing the services contracted by Service Level Agreement – so the 3rd Sector group has to seek funding from charitable foundations to enable the delivery of the specified adult services. It needs and raises £100k a year to do this. So the actual cost of a single 3rd Sector group’s local service provision is £160k per annum, not £60k.
Assuming that all five groups’ costs were of a similar order, one would have expected to see a contract price of around £700k per annum [or £2.1 million for three years], allowing a generous £100k in economies through a centralised delivery.
The price in the Community Rehabilitation Addiction Services contract awarded in November 2014 was £1.24 million for three years, or £413k per annum – for the provision of these services for all of Argyll and Bute.
It is immediately clear that £413 per annum in the ADP November contract to Addaction could never have been hoped to deliver the services contracted.
It cannot be said that Argyll and Bute Council, which provides the procurement for ADP, has been unaware of the large annual funding shortfall for the community rehabilitation services – or unaware of exactly how the 3rd Sector organisations have raised the money to enable the delivery of the services. Moreover it is likely that ADP and/or the council endorsed their funding applications to give them the best possible chance of success.
We have, in the first article we published on this matter, told of an incident where the ABAT [Argyll and Bute Addiction Team] Manager, a council employee [who also - and controversially, sits on the commissioning team], made it her business to contact a charitable organisation which was funding one of the 3rd Sector groups. She advised them not to fund it again because the Manager of the 3rd Sector group in question would not be reliable because she had an illness. [The illness is treatable and the Manager concerned has taken virtually no time off work as a consequence of it.]
The ABAT Manager in this incident is the same one who snatched her coat off a chair beside three 3rd Sector members of the ADP, before an Action Day in Inveraray under the regime of the current ADP Chair, saying: I’m not sitting beside scum like you’ [witnessed by a senior councilor who reported the incident]; and the same ABAT Manager who was one of two Argyll and Bute Council staff falsifying a service review report which coincidentally was for the same group whose external funding opportunities she had tried directly to undermine.
Anyone who easily accepts the ADP management’s version of its dysfunctionality as being down to ‘relationship difficulties’ with some 3rd Sector members should contemplate the location of the driving force in the incidents noted above. It is also risible to claim that the powerless are in a position to cause systemic dysfunctionality, rather than those who have the power to address and resolve.
Current service delivery planned for Lottery support
For Argyll understands that a major focus of effort since the 4th November 2014 contract award to Addaction has been the need to progress Lottery funding, for which suitable partners have been sought to submit joint applications.
One plan under consideration is a joint application between Argyll and Bute Council’s employability team and Addaction. This plan has been set up by the ADP Coordinator who is an NHS employee.
Current failure to deliver housing support services
This is a particularly troubled matter.
It was revealed that Addaction had not registered with the Care Commission to deliver housing support services in Argyll & Bute – which it would have had to do before starting on 1st January to deliver its contracted services.
Amidst rising concerns on this situation, the Chair of ADP wrote that the new service provider, Addaction, was not contracted to provide housing support services, was not therefore doing so and consequently had no need to register with the Care Commission in this respect. The Chair also said in this communication that Addaction would, at an unspecified later date, be working up the provision of housing support services and would then register with the Care Commission to deliver them
At the same time, one 3rd Sector service provider was protesting to Addaction for having rejected transferring its staff to Addaction under TUPE [Transfer Under Protection of Employment]. Addaction wrote to this group saying that its staff were not eligible for TUPE transfer because Addaction was not responsible for providing housing support services and therefore had no need of their specialist services.
That tallies with the assurances given by the ADP Chair – but…
The 3rd Sector group that had complained about its staff not being TUPEd to Addaction was a bidder in the tender for the provision of housing support services in its area – and has documented evidence of the tender specification’s requirement – under ‘Specific Services Required’ – for the provision of a minimum of 180 hours of housing services in their area alone.
It is reasonable to assume that housing services would have been required in the other areas of Argyll and Bute as well. Why would they not?
These services are provided to vulnerable people to improve their quality of life by providing a stable environment to enable independent living. The services include helping them to manage their home and personal lives in different ways, with assistance to claim welfare benefits, fill in forms, manage a household budget, keep safe and secure, get help from other specialist services, obtain furniture and furnishings and physical help with shopping and housework. They also include community alarm services in sheltered housing. The type of support provided is configured to meet the specific needs of the individual.
The evidence that housing support services were indeed in the contract awarded to Addaction seems incontrovertible.
If the assertions are correct, from the ADP Chair that Addaction is not contractually required to provide such services – and from Addaction’s to the 3rd Sector group concerned that it s not providing such services and that therefore their staff have no basis to be TUPEd to Addaction – this would indicate a post-tender and possibly a post-contract award change of specification.
If this has been the case it would be a contentious matter prejudicial to competing bidders, in which Audit Scotland would have to take an interest.
Either way, the documentary evidence is not consistent with the assurances given by the ADP Chair and by Addaction.
Misleading of MSPs and ADP Executive Group
Local MSP Michael Russell had, in the light of the well founded uncertainly about the security of provision of services at the current time, asked the Chair of ADP to provide continuation funding to ensure the delivery of these services for the months of February and March by the locally based 3rd Sector groups.
The ADP Chair wrote to the MSP refusing this request outright, saying that Addaction were currently providing all of the required services and that therefore providing continuation funding to the 3rd Sector groups would be a duplication.
But she herself had said that Addaction were not providing housing support services as had the company itself. This means that no one is delivering this fundamentally important service cluster at the moment – and there appear to be no plans for bringing these familiar services back onstream.
At a recent meeting of the Executive Group of ADP, the Chair assured those present that all the services were currently being delivered by Addaction – and again omitted to mention the failure to deliver housing support services – or their retrospective removal from the contract, whichever is the case.
Service failures
The lack of adequate funding in the contract means that the new contractor, Addaction, cannot afford to have dispersed premises across the complex territory of Argyll and Bute. They are headquartered in Dunoon in circumstances we have highlighted previously as also open to question.
The lack of presence on the ground makes it largely impossible for Addaction to respond to crisis calls by recovering addicts , even in working hours. They have already failed to respond to one crisis call from an addict out of reach of Dunoon and who was in trouble, wanting to stay clean but distressed and asking for immediate support. Despite the repeated statement that this was a crisis situation, the person was asked to phone the following morning to see if someone might be able to get to see them.
In another situation a Kintyre client was referred to Addaction. The response was to send an Addaction employee from Islay to see the man. The hour-long meeting involved the support worker making a 7 hour round trip by ferry from Islay. It is worth noting in this respect that Addaction propose permanently to service Mid Argyll from Islay – an arrangement whose logistics and operational unreliability beggar belief.
In yet another situation, a very vulnerable female client was referred from Oban. Two male Addaction workers travelled from Glasgow to see her and tried to access the offices there to see her. The NHS staff told them that, given the young woman’s circumstances, it would be inappropriate for two males to see or even meet her without some pre-arranged understanding. The two workers said they would return the following week, but on the arranged day, the weather made their visit impossible.
In another instance, where Addaction has neither presence in the locality nor TUPEd staff from the local 3rd Sector group, its employee was able only to interview a service user in her own home. There was no neutral space they could offer. The person in question was very uncomfortable about this arrangement because she did not want her child to discover that she was an addict.
These are only a few of the instances of effective service failure on which we have become informed – but they testify to the cost to the needy service user of an arrangement chaotically scrambled prematurely into service by ADP and far from fit to serve.
At the heart of the chaos: flawed and failed commissioning
The process and the execution of this commissioning process for fundamentally necessary service to vulnerable people would appear to have been been flawed through manipulation and intervention at pretty well every point of its progress.
The process was compromised from the beginning by an inappropriate nine month-long relationship throughout the tendering period between the eventual contract winner and a 3rd Sector group whose Manager was also Chair of the ADP’s Delivery Group; who produced the service specification for the tender; who arranged, demonstrably before the award of contract, for her group to merge with the contract winner; and whose group’s staff, in the words of one of them, knew ‘months ago’, before the contract was awarded, that, unlike the majority of employees in the 3rd Sector partner groups, they were TUPEing to the contract winner.
The contract was knowingly undeliverable for the money in it.
It would appear that these long underfunded statutory services had traditionally been enabled by managed access to grants from charitable foundations; and that this modus operandi is planned to continue.
The services are not being fully delivered; are seen to be compromised by the impact of the lack of competent funding in the contract; and are causing distress and discomfort in service users because of the unprofessional contacts the circumstances of delivery are creating.
While the commissioning process in question is centrally germane to this entire situation, the continuing failure of management to the highest level is of profound concern.
At least three externally commissioned reports have, on evidence and experience, raised serious issues about the inability of this ADP – a matter we will shortly examine.
