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Recontracting 2008-9 Manchester City Council’s Children’s Services Department procures the delivery of various front line services through partnerships with the voluntary and community sector. The budget for these comes from a combination of external funds (eg Children’s Fund, Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, Neighbourhood Support Fund) and mainstream budgets (eg Youth Services, Play). Because each of these has evolved separately, the result is that there are varying standards in place for contracts and service specifications. From the providers’ perspective, this means a confusing array of contacts within the City Council, and a range of monitoring, financial reporting and data collection regimes. To try to simplify this situation, a project has been set up within Children’s Services to oversee a re-contracting process for these funds. MACC has been working with statutory colleagues to support the re-contracting process to develop a rationalised approach. As well as ensuring up to date contracts are in place for 2008/9, the project team will also be doing more in-depth work on designing monitoring procedures for the year, establishing a performance management framework and capacity building. Update - August 2008Organisations should now have been issued contracts for funding June 08-March 09. We're hearing that there seem to be issues for some groups regarding the suitability of the contract agreement and we are working with the contracts team to try to resolve these issues and developing a more appropriate standard contract for 2009. It has been agreed at Children’s Board to allocate funding from the Area Based Grant (ABG) to commission preventative and early intervention services from the VCS for the next two years (April 2009 – 2011). This is because funding streams allocated in this year’s re- contracting process now sit within the ABG. As a starting point, this will be equivalent to 08/09 funding levels which is approximately £3 million. It is possible that by October Children’s Board may be able to recommend a revised level of funding, and we are lobbying for a level which is at the very minimum at the rate of inflation. MACC submitted a written commentary on the initial part of this process
This initial process is now complete and is being followed by the Commissioning Process for 2009-2001. Click here for more details and the latest updates. |
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© Copyright 2008 Manchester Alliance for Community Care
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