Shadow Minister for Communities and Local Government, Mark Isherwood AM, has called on the First Minister to “personally intervene” to ensure that funding that is available for the third sector “is going to where it can make a real difference rather than into County Halls”.
Mr Isherwood raised the matter when questioning the First Minister in the Chamber yesterday over how the Welsh Government is co-producing services with the third sector and communities.
He said:
“I've worked for many years with the Co-production Network for Wales. I was in fact the only politician, I think, invited to their official launch, which was well worthy of support. Last Friday, I once again visited a small charity, an autism charity supporting families with children on the spectrum, which is having to devote a massive amount of volunteer time to applying for tiny grants, and often not being successful.
“I routinely visit equivalent small charities doing wonderful work, co-producing solutions with families and with community members that work, and yet millions are going into the Welsh Government statutory provision or the Integrated Autism Service (IAS) and other top-down programmes that are not reaching the organisations on the ground making that real difference.
“Given that the interim evaluation of the IAS last March identified the failure of co-production because of a top-down approach as being a significant problem, how can you, and will you, personally intervene, so that we can actually start to begin to do this right and ensure that what funding is available - and there's a lot out there - is going where it can make a real difference rather than into county halls where it doesn't always reach the places that could make that difference, so badly needed?”
In his response, the First Minister said the Welsh Government “is committed to making sure that we work with a plurality of third sector organisations, recognising the very important contribution that they make to public services”, but added: “The place where I depart from Mark Isherwood, in relation to co-production, is that I sometimes think he describes it as a way of replacing the state as though it is a mechanism for moving things away from public services and replacing them with the work of others. I've never seen it that way myself; I see it as a way of augmenting, supplementing, influencing, shaping the work of others, but not of supplanting it.”
Mr Isherwood added:
“If that’s what this First Minister really thinks, he clearly doesn’t understand that co-production is about social justice, about breaking down the barriers between those providing services and those receiving them, about sharing power and responsibility, about designing and delivering services together in equal relationships. It is not therefore about ‘either/or’!”.
