Social Enterprise will continue to grow under Right to Provide
Wednesday 27th July 2011
In the previous newsletter we looked at some of the issues facing new organisations that enable public sector workers to take ownership of the services they deliver. With growing pressure to reorganise services growing amid the largest programme of cuts since the end of the War, the Coalition has continued the social enterprise agenda and added new layers under the headings of Localism and the Big Society.
The Government has already announced it will launch a programme called “Right to Provide” as a successor to Labour’s Right to Request programme. This requires commissioning bodies to consider a proposal by their health and social care teams to establish a separate social enterprise which takes over delivery of existing services.
There are plans to extend this right and also introduce a Community Right to Challenge which will enable members of the public to involve themselves in commissioning decisions, across large parts of public sector service delivery.
Buzzacott has a long track record of supporting independent organisations that contract to provide public services. For example, many of our clients – including a significant number of operations from our religious clients – are pre Welfare State providers of health, care and education services, and provide these wholly or partly under contract to state-funded commissioners. We already act for many independent organisations previously within the state sector, more than 100 City Academies and further and higher education institutions being the most numerous examples.
We have extensive experience of the challenges the leadership of the newly created organisations find hardest to overcome: culturally, running a separately governed and accountable legal entity, together with its operational risks; financially, controlling both income and expenditure, and managing TUPE and pension liabilities; and fiscally, handling payroll, benefits and all relevant aspects of taxation.
The Social Enterprise Team is planning some events in the coming months which will explore the challenges facing this growing sector. We suggest you keep an eye on our website or sign up to our mailing list to be kept up to date.
Edward Finch