£12m Approved For Transformation Programme Despite Independent Concerns
Millions given to transformation programme, despite major warnings from independent report
A £12m spend has been unanimously approved by Children and Young People Policy Committee (CYPPC) this week, despite an independent review raising six areas of concern with the business case.
The report by Ernst & Young, found issues with a ‘lack of documented rigour’ and financial modelling with a logic of approach that is ‘difficult to follow’. The modelling also has issues including ‘unverifiable data sources’.
There are ‘inconsistencies with baseline data’ and a process which relies upon the council’s advisor’s experience in delivering similar programmes elsewhere but not in Bristol.
Bristol journalist Joanna Booth, has been taking a closer look into what each of the six risks means: https://joannab.substack.com/p/councils-65m-savings-plan-undermined
The advice was in the papers for the Children and Education Transformation Update, which took place at the council house this week.
Councillors were asked to vote on the officer recommendations of the updated Families First Full Business Case. This included the cost of the ‘transformation delivery partner in 2025/2026 and 2026/2027 which would come to £6m and £1.5m. This, the paper says, would deliver £17m of savings on a ‘risk and reward’ contract. The anticipated saving for this, according to the paper of is projected to be £65m over five years.
Finance was also being asked to fund a Transformation Director post at £130k.
The Finance Advice in the Children & Education Transformation Update paper says: ‘The proposals in this Addendum to the Families First Full Business Case Key Decision Report require the Council to spend an estimated £12m on transformational activity to achieve a projected net annual budget reduction of £17m over the five years 2025/26 to 2029/30 (total £65m over 5 years). If these savings can be achieved within that cost, this investment has a net present value of £42m at a 3.5% discount rate representing a rate of return of 225%.
‘The Council’s approved budget for 2025/26 was set based on achieving the stretch projected savings identified as of December 2024. The projected savings in this Addendum to that original Full Business Case have been calculated based on achieving the midpoint savings. As a result, there is now a shortfall in
projected savings of £1.9m in 2025/26 when compared to the 2025/26 approved budget. This shortfall will require alternative savings to be identified.
‘The programme costs are projected to be £12m over the five years 2025/26 to 2029/30. Within this envelope, it is proposed that the transformation partner will be remunerated based on their performance at delivering against agreed key performance indicators. The details of this payment arrangement have yet tobe finalised. Given the scale and level of uncertainty of outcome, it is recommended that this payment arrangement is aligned with the need to deliver the Council’s significant financial savings requirements and mitigate the risks.
‘Given the issues identified above, it is uncertain if the implementation of the proposed interventions described in both the original Full Business Case and in this Addendum will achieve the Council’s required level of savings or provide adequate value for money’
The agreement by the committee would also have to be subject to approval at the Strategy and Resources committee on the 19 May.
At CYPPC, Executive Director for Children and Education, Hannah Woodhouse said: “So we’ve got the overall update report and we’ve got an addendum which has been published separately which updates our full business case which we brought to January – remember we had a conversation in January about our business case for Families First? The addendum updates it and provides slightly adjusted figures because what we’ve done is we’ve done some further due diligence ahead of delivery. That’s what we’re asking you to approve today.
“We’ve also got in the papers – and I’ll speak to it in a minute – an additional external review of the model itself which was done by Ernst & Young which is in order to make sure that we’re inviting scrutiny on ourselves as we make sure that we track every single bit of our financial position as we should be. They’re giving us some challenge and that’s that’s what we asked them to do.
“So background to Families First, you’ll remember we had Our Families programme last year which was our transformation program and it focused particularly on workforce recruitment and service changes as well as the development of new children’s homes and the enhancement of support for foster care through Mocking Bird.
“It did deliver some savings but as we’ve looked at it this year we have concluded that we need to focus more on early intervention and prevention. To build on that work. And therefore, we have developed a programme which we’ve talked about before which we’re calling Families First, which is about targeting resources preventing children coming into care as well as making sure that those that are in care have the right placement mix, they are supported at home as close to home to Bristol as much as possible.
“Fiona [Tudge] will talk in a little more about sort of what it means to the service and to social work. But the focus of this programme is about supporting children better first and delivering savings second. This is one of the sort of rare areas where if our improvement goes up, if our performance goes up, our budget goes down. So everyone’s a winner. But the intention of this work is to improve outcomes for children first and in the right way. which is obviously what we all want to do.
“It is linked to the government’s reforms keeping children safe helping families thrive and it is very much part of the national Families First programme as well. So we have to do this work and this is our Bristol response to it.
“I think obviously the last thing to say is that on sort of the why we are elsewhere in the paperwork reporting a £22 million pound overspend on children’s social care at the end of this last financial year. As we know we’ve talked about this throughout the year. The bulk of that is about children in placements outside of Bristol or at least outside of our own provision. Therefore, whilst there is a need to focus on outcomes for children there’s also a need to focus on budgets as well.
“So we need to do something and we need to do it well and we need to make sure we’ve got everything in place to be able to do that well. So what we’re bringing is a really significant programme and we’ve talked about it before. It has a number of strands looking at the number of care starts, preventing children entering care by supporting them better at home, supporting children better into permanence positions, supporting children into fostering. The unit cost of residential placements as well as what we’re calling coming home. So supporting children where their care plan says it’s the right thing for them to return home to either fostering or supported accommodation or you know, put potentially back to back to the family.
“So that those are the strands which you’ve you’ve got set out in in the paper. The total savings proposed this year is now six million and then next year another £5 million so cumulative £11.5. and then you’ve got £65 million over the five years. And we have reduced that slightly, partly because the program has as we’ve been tying down the, you know, get getting it right, getting it accurate, taking a bit of external sort of challenge on it. The program has moved back by a month so therefore the numbers are coming down. That’s not to say I don’t still have those targets against children in education. And I still need to find those savings but not from within this program in this in this way.
“We want to make sure we put savings forward that we’re really confident in so we’re confident that we’re going to be able to deliver this um this work. So those are the savings that are due to be delivered. We are asking for £12 million in total transformation funding, of which a significant proportion of that will go to a strategic partner. So we are negotiating to reward a contract to a strategic partner. Obviously the total the final amount will be subject to negotiation and that’s why we wanted to get the external challenge. To make sure that we’re doing that as you know, as robustly as we possibly can.
“What we’ll be asking is that the strategic partner signs up to a risk and reward contract. So total savings is £17 million savings against their work. It’s a contingency fee contract, so they won’t get paid unless we deliver those savings. It’s risk and reward. Christine Townsend [Chair of the committee] was particularly keen that that we did do that.
“I think the the last thing to say is obviously we have been in mobilisation. We’ve been building up to this. We’ve got a number of staff already appointed to lead the programme. We have appointed a number of additional social care staff to build our capacity in the early system, in the family help system to support children better. We are getting ready to deliver and we’re very much on our toes ready to go as soon as we sign off this programme.
“We obviously will have a robust governance process. So you’ve got some details about governance in the paper. The governance will also look at benefits realisation, it will look at KPIs baselines, milestones against delivery and we have all of that set out in our governance model.
“Just to speak a little bit explicitly to the challenge position which is right at the bottom of the addendum. Just to to draw attention to it. We did ask for an external view of this program from Ernst & Young and they have given it. What they’re not saying is the programme’s wrong or it’s not going to give deliver the savings or it’s heading in the wrong direction. What they are saying is that we need to set out more about the governance of delivery. So your KPIs, your baselines, how’s it going to work? They couldn’t see that in enough detail when they looked at it. So obviously as you can see in our action plan and our mitigation is that we are doing that. We have done that as part of the development of the governance of this programme. The financial model is set out really clearly, well understood by staff who are holding the strategic partner to account and that is part of the work that we’re doing our mobilization.”
Director Children and Families Fiona Tudge said: “I’ve spoken here before about the transformation programme. But as Hannah says absolutely aligns with the financial savings, the workforce culture and the national reforms that we will need to to meet requirements that that they bring for us .As I said before, I mean social workers, social care practitioners they come into this work to work intensively with children and families. Yo come alongside them when they need that. To enable children and families um to grow up together. Children to be happy and loved within their their family homes. That’s what kind of social care practitioners come to do every day. And if they can’t, you know, achieve that alongside the families, then social workers will work really hard to think about other family members or connected people that children can live with. And would aim to keep children within their communities and with their families. And if not, within foster homes if possible. And they would look for permanence for children. If children are in care could they think about them returning home at some point. They think about permanence through a special guardianship order with foster carers or with family members or thinking about adoption.
“So all the programme, the projects all align with all of that. That aligns with our savings programme. So it’s absolutely what social work and social care practitioners want to happen. We’ve had significant engagement with the social work team as Hannah said. We have appointed from within the service design leads attached to the seven projects. And we decided to appoint those within the service because they are practitioners who already have the trust and respect of our workforce. They understand Bristol. They’re committed to kind of investing in Bristol and seeing these changes through. And that’s been really positive for us.
“We’ve had a significant launch event in the conference hall next door which was really well attended a lot of enthusiasm a lot of engagement and quite a buzz about what can be achieved here. There’s been kind of a plan of engagement with the workforce. The general feedback is that people feel valued they feel heard. They feel enthused about what can happen from now going forward really. And there’s quite a lot of energy around.
“So we’re not starting from a blank sheet of paper. This service has already, you know, have experience and expertise in some of these areas of work. So we will kind of push forward with it. But there’s generally absolutely a sense of enthusiasm commitment and energy to taking this forward.
Green Party Councillor for Lawrence Hill, Shona Jemphrey asked: “I don’t think anyone would disagree with the aims of this to keep more children with their families and to reduce the rate of placement breakdowns.
“In terms of jargon I think this is even more jargony than the other papers we were looking at earlier. So I wonder if you could talk a bit more about the transformation delivery partner or the strategic partner? What actually are they going to do? Why are we spending so much money on them? Why can this not be done internally?
“And this Transformation Director post. if I’m right in reading that’s going to be £130,000 going to one that’s one person’s salary. That feels like a lot of money how are we justifying that?
Woodhouse replied: “I mean it is. And I think you know we have, this is the single biggest challenge financially that the council faces probably. Certainly on the General Fund. The other big challenge around the Dedicated Schools Grant. So as I say, we ended the year on £22 million overspend. We really significantly need to, for children and for the budget, manage our processes so that we support children earlier. You know for reasons we will all understand and get alongside.
“And I think what a number of councils are doing is bringing in the capacity to work alongside us and behind us in a transformation programme. So as Fiona said what we’ve got is I think six leads. And the role of the strategic partner is to provide the programme infrastructure which sits behind them. Particularly the data-led work so that we’re tracking on a really clinical basis the children who are both supported to remain or through early intervention, supported outside of care. But as well as those um coming in but not going on to residential placement.
“So there’s the infrastructure behind that but I think also we will be appointing a strategic partner who has done this work in big city councils elsewhere in the country and has evidence that they have not just delivered the savings that is in the risk and reward contract, but has also changed the nature of the way that we work over the long term. So that we are working earlier, that we are clearer earlier about where we should be focusing. That we do have better data systems and support system.
“So I think that there’s both the capacity to stand up a programme on this scale and the expertise from elsewhere. That in order to deliver it we could do it obviously you know and we have tried a number of times to do work like this. But without that expertise capacity I don’t think we could be confident of it. Hence the need for a risk and reward contract really.
“Just on the transformation director. So as a city a core city on this scale, my view is and that and that of the Chief Executive and um the leadership, is that we do need that third role. Because we have two directors we have the Education Social Care Directorate. And normally core cities would have three, four or more directorates leading particularly on partnerships work, performance work, quality, strategy. We are a heavily regulated service as well. So again we’ve got a lot of savings coming out of this programme so we do need to be able to balance that from the savings. But my view is that we need that capacity to be able to deliver a programme on this scale.”
Jemphrey asked: “I get the argument that you obviously have to invest to save. I’m still fuzzy on what the strategic partner will actually do. You’re saying they’ll be tracking data. What does that look like day-to-day? How will they interact with our own workforce?”
Tudge replied: “I could give kind of two examples in a sense about kind of really understanding it. So in terms of our Following Families programme, so that’s about preventing our children coming in into care. We had a team, Strengthening Families, whose role that was to do. And they had good outcomes. And yet our data was still showing us that we had high numbers of adolescence coming into care. A strategic partner comes in and really digs into that for us. So what you know, how can we make sure that we’re working with the right children who are at risk of coming into care rather than the children we think are at risk of coming into care that we haven’t actually got quite right so far.
“And they will be able to really kind of support and dig into that so we’re absolutely targeting the right children. And in the same way another example of that would be in terms of our stability. so that’s trying to support our children to remain within foster homes. And what we see is that we already have a team that supports our foster carers when they’re working with children that they’re caring for. But we have still got a number of foster care breakdowns that we don’t, you know, we want to support children to be able to remain.
“So even though we had a team and we’re doing that work, we haven’t been able to prevent that from happening. So they again kind of really dig down to that data and look at analyze that quite clearly so that we can get in front of that. Because often when we know that things are going are becoming difficult for children in foster homes it’s becoming too late. And what we need to do is think about – okay you know that that transition period from primary to secondary school. That adolescent period. Is that going to be the time that we need to step into foster homes even though they’re not saying they kind of are finding things difficult and do that work before it gets to a point that it’s too late. And it’s that kind of analytics and that working out where do we need to target our efforts that we’re going to make the biggest impact for our children is the bit that we haven’t got to date.”
Woodhouse added: “Just to add to that. We would expect significant additional capacity. So it’s obviously there’s a lot of analytics, there’s a lot of rigor in the programme, there’s a lot of rigor in the terms of the data you’ve heard that and focusing and targeting. But also we’re standing up a number of our own staff to work alongside in terms of training and developing in them as best practice. Deliverers of programs like this. So that when the strategic partner exits – and they will exit – that they both give us the pace and the sort of boost and the capacity. So significant numbers of actual people here working alongside social work within our service. But when they exit that we have that capacity to be able to carry on and deliver that same. So training both the sort of data analytics programme management, expertise and best practice leadership capacity. Yeah it is more than data.”
Jemphrey asked: “So there’s a transformation team the transformation partner and the transformation director. So how long are each of these sort of staying involved with us?”
Hannah replied: “So the transformation team have been mobilising now – or our own transformation team have been mobilising now. The strategic partner would be working with us from the beginning of this contract for a period of 12 months full tilt. And then there’ll be a phasing down of another six months and then they would exit from the service. And we’ve got some significant savings to make after that. So yes the expectation is that those savings deliver but we would segment the savings against the time they’re with us so they wouldn’t be paid those until we see the savings coming out.
“Transformation director is currently being funded on a three-year basis and it would be on me to make the case for that as a permanent position which will come through this obviously the proper member-led approach.”
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