I remember, vaguely, some research by, I think, Elaine Kempson & Penny Otley in the late 70s which found that people had no idea about the 'ownership', funding or independence of advice centres and just looked for somewhere that could offer a service. This was a blow to people who were arguing vociferously at the time that people wanted 'independent' centres and wouldn't go to LA or government run places.
I think the issues are very different now and I've been banging on about some of them for ages. (Cassandra of Ferret?)
I believe that this government started off with the best of intentions and the real belief that advice was important. In fact, because it was so important, it was something that the government should take responsibility for.
That led to the expansionist phase with funding becoming available and the usual tussle within departments for who was going to control the money. Understandably perhaps, that victory went to the 'legal' arm of government which has caused, in my opinion, one major problem; the belief that advice is solely about legal issues.
We then have the unsurprising discovery that there is a Parkinson's law for advice services, not just "demand expands to fill the advice available." but the demand always outstrips the advice available. In fact the more advice services there are the more, and longer, queues there are as well.
So government hasn't solved the problems of the citizen; in fact by increasing the rate of change in civil society, institutions and rules they've increased the real need for advice.
Then we reach the stage of efficiency savings or cuts.
This brings in the organisational and management planners who look at how to give advice more efficiently which leads to the more limited pot seeing a substantial portion being used on things other than advice giving; planning, reorganising, tendering, quality control etc.
The unedifying spectacle of sharp end advice givers squabbling and competing for funding. Following money for other purposes in the hope of diverting some of it for advice, bending and twisting the bids to try and get within the scope of the funders. Living year to year with almost all of the management effort devoted to chasing money. I've been a CAB trustee for many years so I speak with bitter experience here.
... and now...
we have a single funder in practice, in many areas, who are organising the giving of advice, at least partially, for their administrative convenience. They're picking the areas of operation so that existing, natural community boundary based, organisations have to merge, form consortia or expand unwillingly in order to become monopoly suppliers that are easy to supervise. We have advice givers who are told what to advise on, when to do it, where to do it and how to do it.
When we are told that our bureaux are not meeting standards, we worry a lot about our service. When we're told that it's because we are spending too much time giving advice, not enough time recording activities or on management then I worry about the priorities of the service. To be told that we should cut advice hours and spend more time on our internal administration is not my idea of our purpose. Nor is giving priority access to advisers to people referred by funders under SLAs.
It also makes us less able to compete with the pure commercial sector who can be much more flexible about the use they make of staff, the speed of training, the level of expertise and the 'quality of service'.
A lot of the advice sector grew out of people in the 60s in the rights movement taking their folding tables and chairs to street corners to help people.
They might not have had soundproof interview rooms, awareness training or quality marks and we probably couldn't give as good a service as some people can get now, if they can reach an adviser, but it was focussed on people and it wasn't constrained by the rules of the funders because there weren't any.
Of course, people weren't dependant on the work to pay the bills and mortgages and I wouldn't try to suggest that we ought to return to that model, but there are some values that we should try to keep. At the moment there seems to be more noise about who wins the bids rather than whether the model of advice is good or bad.
The LSC aren't trying to provide bad advice but they don't work from the perspective of advisers and they're working to their budget. There's been a bit of a Pastor Martin Niemöller process over the past few years as the independence and operation of the advice sector has been nibbled away and we're faced with a monolithic service controlled from Whitehall.
If that happens does it really matter who staffs the offices?
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