Justice for Surrey & Borders NHS Partnership & Richmond Fellowship Garden Centre Workers

The End

2007-06-24T22:04:00.000+01:00

This blog has been running for over a year and apart from exposing and embarassing SABP's executives as incompentent and dishonest , the quackademics from SCMH as corrupt manipulative idiots and the statutory bodies and structures which are supposed to monitor SABP on behalf of patients and the public as totally useless we havent really modified anyones behavior.

So, its time to move on.

Not sure if people just want the blog left here or deleted , e-mail your preferences here slamback@gmail.com

This ending reminds me a bit of that scene in War of the Worlds where the aliens are all dead and people survey the destruction around them and start to think about rebuilding their world and the narrator cuts in to say "It wasnt any human weapon that destroyed the menace but the small things of nature" .....in this case though the aliens simply wandered off to leave the earthlings to fuck things up for themselves.....again.

Smash the Glass Ceilings, Ignore the Official Stone Walls

2007-06-23T09:53:00.000+01:00

Jonathan Naess is a manic depressive, very successful legal partner with city firm Nabarro-Wells and Co and founder of new MH recovery model iniative 'Stand to Reason'. Jonathan was recently described by the Guardian's MH correspondent David Brindle as 'Mental Health's Voice of Reason'.

Jonathan hopes his organisation Stand to Reason will address workplace stigma and discrimination and smash the glass ceilings that he believes workers with MH issues face. In the Guardian article and on his website Mr Naess explained how he equated Stand to Reason with Stonewall, the political pressure group that campaigned for gay equal rights for 14 years and then in 2003 , after many of its political aims had been achieved , became a registered charity and adopted a less political and more educational role.

I entered into correspondence with Mr Naess because the Guardian article presented him as a maverick independent service user activist when in fact he has very close links to the system. This type of misrepresentation has now become very common in MH circles , for some reason the well connected feel they need to dupe people and underhandedly network outcomes rather than explain their case and take other peoples points of view on board.

Because of the comparison to ' Stonewall ' he made , its there on the Stand to Reason website too, I questioned Jonathan about the way the officially favoured and relentlessly pushed recovery model was creating a new form of 'stigma and discrimination' for MH services users who could not conform to it. Rather than being abstract I pointed to a specific example involving the South London & Maudsley NHS Trust, my local Trust and one Mr Naess has been officially involved with for some time.

Mr Naess responded in the regal ' We' You should be able to pick up the gist of the exchange and problem here.

Jonathan,

With respect, you have long been involved with SLAM , you are a Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry and you are professionally involved with the Institute/SLAM's Professor Graham Thornicroft an expert in 'stigma and discrimination' so the problem with your' we ' is that you do not appear to be independent enough from the establishment, as Stonewall orginally was, to effectively challenge it when the discrimination and/or inequality arises from its actions.

Off ward, SLAM makes no effort to ensure the basic financial security of service users who do not conveniently fit into its officially favoured recovery model .

( There is no MH specific benefits advice or support in certain boroughs within the SLAM catchment area)

For those who can recover SLAM funds training and employment projects and even plans 'recovery' orientated art exhibitions with initiatives like yours ( Stand to Reason is planning to partner a recovery arts event with SLAM) so it isnt as if the institution lacks the money to provide equality of service , it simply restricts its concerns about financial security and its relationship with the mental health and well-being of its service users to the world of work and thereby makes a conscious decision to really stigmatise and discriminate.

Stonewall did not just campaign on behalf of employed gay people Jonathan!

As for feedback, this is not feedback, it is criticism , as to date, with Stand to Reason you have simply replicated the top down decision making of institutions like SLAM as in addition to trying to sidestep the discrimination and inequality of service perpetuated by SLAM because your project enjoys some type of favoured status there is no participatory capacity designed in to the Stand to Reason website to allow ordinary service users to engage in anything but private e-mail exchange with you or talk to or contact each other ( on the site ) to discuss the aims and objectives you have set out on their behalf.

I'm sorry but you appear to have simply rotated the Stand to Reason iniative around yourself and attempted to re-create the work environment and meetings culture you are familiar with in the city to ensure you remain within your comfort zone : power breakfasts, evening events and round table meetings completely ignoring the fact that the internet is a participatory not top down medium and that very many MH service users are not as mobile, confident enough around other people or even as able to get up in the morning as you are. Many also find the meetings culture toxic.

How do you relate to them Jonathan?

Regards

Des Curley

My message bounced back. Mr Naess is broadcasting but not receiving. Whats new?

Softools Contract FOIA Update

2007-06-17T20:44:00.000+01:00

Received this communication from Paul Mitchell , the Surrey & Borders Partnership MHS Trusts Corporate Spin Doctor the other day. There seems to be a flurry of (un)official activity behind the scenes re. Softtools-gate so perhaps I'll be legally forced to apologise for telling the truth . Who knows...

Mr Riseborough and Mr Mitchell are very well paid public officials so read the footer of the communication to gain a better idea of the lengths these corporate types will go to pull the wool over peoples eyes.

Paul Mitchell
date Jun 15, 2007 4:34 PM
subject Complaint and FOI request

Stanley Riseborough is not in his office today, but has asked me to make sure you are sent the following:

Re: Complaint and FOI request

In my email to you of 11th May I said that I would come back to you with the outcome of the next stage of the process by today. Unfortunately, this will not be completed until the end of next week. I will therefore contact you on Monday, 25th June 2007. Please accept my apologies for the delay.

Yours sincerely

Stanley Riseborough

Director of Nursing and Service User Involvement

This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are notified that any use, dissemination or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error please notify the sender and delete it immediately.

Any information, statements or opinions contained in this message (including any attachments) are given by the author. They are not given on behalf of the Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust unless subsequently confirmed by an individual, other than the author, who is authorised to represent Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust.

Request for Information from Surrey PCT

2007-06-14T21:03:00.000+01:00

Diane Woods
Director of Commissioning
MH and Learning Difficulties

Dear Diane,

I spoke to Emmanuel Gbetuwa Mental Health Commissioning Manager on the 23rd May 2007 and he confirmed that the Richmond Fellowship had submitted revised proposals for running the Old Moat Garden Centre , agreed that this information should be placed in the public domain and stated that he would get back to me within days to provide me with a copy of the proposals or an explanation why he could not..

Emmanuel appears to have forgotten to do this so would you please :

1.provide me with a copy of the revised proposals submitted by the Richmond Fellowship

and

2. explain the extent of public consultation there has been over the Richmond Fellowships new plans for the Old Moat Garden Centre

as with this matter dragging on for over a year now at great public expense I am sure you understand the need for greater transparency and accountability .

Please treat the above questions as FOIA requests.

Thank You

Des Curley

Letter to Chris Grayling MP

2007-06-13T15:05:00.000+01:00

to GRAYLING, Chris
date 13-Jun-2007 14:37
subject Re: Hospital Campaign

Dear Chris,

I have been following your campaign against the closure of Epsom's impatient and maternity services, I've been copied in to developments, and hope you and everyone else involved in the campaign manage to force a rethink during the public consultation process. That is, if it doesnt turn out to be yet another ' consultative' sham.

You will recall that the Surrey and Borders & Partnership Trust was forced to do a very embarassing u turn over their treatment of the Old Moat Garden Centre workers . This shows that public opinion does matter and can make a difference on the other hand it has been over a year since SABP and the Surrey PCT announced plans to ' modernise' the Old Moat Garden Centre and yet we still do not know what their new plans for the centre and its workers and users are.

I have repeatedly asked the Surrey PCT to make public the revised proposals for the centre submitted by the Richmond Fellowship earlier this year, proposals there has been no public consultation about , but the PCT refuses to place this information into the public domain.

The Richmond Fellowship is the sole bidder so there are no commercial confidentiality issues .

The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health (SCMH) academics who were involved in this modernisation process received over £40,000 in public money. One of those academics, Dr Bob Groves also sat on and advised the Remploy Taskforce that recently decided to 'mainstream' away over 2000 disabled peoples sheltered Remploy jobs . This was also done in the name of modernisation without the disabled workers being consulted at all.

Dr Groves is seconded to the DWP and also exercises massive leverage within NIMHE, a useless but powerful Government quango set up by SCMH, ( costs million £60 and rising ) so what is actually driving these top down decisions isnt Dr Groves' self proclaimed 'world leading expertise' but his and SCMH's slavish , unobjective and non independent blind allegiance to politically correct Government policy.

The Government politically objects to sheltered employment and has decided that everyone must be subject to market forces, irrespective of whether people can actually cope with this.

The ongoing situation with the Old Moat Garden Centre is evidence that this Government, NIMHE, SCMH and some of the other major disability charities are more interested in pushing their dogma than its impact on disabled peoples lives.

Changes to public services should be made after the experts have thought them through and meaningfully discussed them with service users and the public , not before as here.

Your constituents are currently paying for the chaos SCMH left behind at SABP , whereas Dr Groves and his fellow SCMH academics and associates are rushing ahead to pick up their next publicly funded paychecks for advising public services to 'mainstream' their complex employment and therapeutic activities problems away. This approach is fraudulent, reckless and wrong.

Des Curley

Dogs, Fearfulness & the Inconsistency of Being

2007-06-12T22:30:00.000+01:00

I have not posted for a while. I'm sorry I hit a real low last week and just couldnt rally to write anything about an issue SABP and the Surrey PCT simply refuse to volunteer information about. They also continue to insist that it has nothing to do with me.

That's the official line. Distance is all.

Five days ago my friend lost her dog Wishie who ran off in Mountain Home , Idaho in the middle of a violent storm. Wishie hasnt been seen since.

I remember my friend choosing Wishie in a shelter in Ontario , Oregon where the wall was lined with cages containing dogs which had been lost , rejected and abused.The place reminded me of my own life growing up in care. At the end of the row were two really mournful long eared King Charles spaniels who whined for attention but howled in misery the moment I stopped stroking their ears. I had to stroke their ears at the same time to stop them becoming jealous.

They were beautiful.

The King Charles siblings , I assumed they were, craved attention but that was ok, they were hurt animals. Stroking their ears and comforting them didnt require an awful lot of effort. But I knew as much as I wanted to take them home that I couldnt save them as I wouldnt have been able to look after them. I can barely look after me. They should have been looked after by people who had more going for them in life.

I hope those dogs were properly adopted. I can still feel their cool drooping velvety ears. I hope they are relaxed and kicking back watching some movie from the couch. yeah, if those two dudes made it to happilly slobbing out in front of the tv, thats ok by me.

My friend chose Wishie - or Flossie as she was then called - whose papers set out how she had been evacuated from New Orleans . I was in the US driving across the rockies when Katrina struck and even got home quicker because Katrina's dying breath blew my plane back acoss the Atlantic that much quicker.

Katrina blew me a taunting kiss...

I was also in New Orleans for the first post Katrina Mardi Gras. I wanted to be. The sun shone, the costumes and freaks outed and the bands played downtown but the devastation wasnt just confined to blocks , it stretched across whole neighbourhoods and states. I remember entering the South through Cairo Illinois , a rapidly decaying town where the great Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet and watching the damage inflicted by Katrina piling up as we got closer and closer to New Orleans. After leaving the Big Easy we drove along the shattered coastline of Lousianna to Gulfport/Biloxi in Mississippi where casino's had been flipped into the air and on to Florida a land of hurricane hit holiday homes for sale. Outside of the devastated urban sprawl much of the once natural landscape had been transformed into writhing orgies of dead trees and debris. If you want to know why Americans watch weather forecasts a bit more closely than we do, go check out the aftermath of a hurricane.

The French Quarter faired well though. As did Flossie.

That first post Katrina Mardi Gras went well. People turned up to party. Flossie got evacuated up to Ontario , Oregon or thereabouts then, through my friend became Wishkah or Wishie and moved on to Nevada a hot, calm and gambling aside, boring desert state and then , weeks ago up to Mountain Home Idaho.

On June 7th the winds picked up and an unleashed storm front hit Mountain Home. Wishie took off. Who can blame her?

Yesterday I created a missing dog poster , posted an appeal on Flickr , set up a Lost Pets group on Flickr and managed to get the local newspaper the Mountain Home News to cover Wishie running off in storm as well.

This took all my energy but I will be back to follow through on the SABP issue later.

Visualisation

2007-06-06T10:59:00.001+01:00

Not in great mood to write today. This kinda sums up the last post.

Back story is , I have a Russian Blue ( or at least he thinks he's of noble birth but he has banded tail - see here ) called Ziggy and he's a real schmuck as he catches mice in the garden , brings them into the house and then loses them....

Dont you just hate those people who bang on about cats being so intelligent and mystic....

"Look Now See What You Made Me Do"

2007-06-05T00:32:00.000+01:00

Since I mentioned that Softools, the company ran by Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust Chief Executive Fiona Edwards husband Mark Edwards had a contract with the Trust but hadnt declared their relationship when talking up the SABP contract to attract work from other NHS Trust's on its website, there's been a lot of interest in the blog from the Buckinghamshire area where Softools is registered and was once based.

We're talking numerous hits per day here.

It may be just a coincidence . I certainly thought so but the other day I absent mindedly mapped out all the hits from the IP in question and the pattern that emerged was of someone commuting from Buckinghamshire to the Surrey & Borders area almost every day .

This person had also logged on to this blog from virtually right outside my home - another coincidence I suppose - and their interest extends beyond the professional as the hits went up over the recent Bank Holiday weekend and they even seem to have checked in with the blog while on holiday in another country.

Someone needs a life....

The timing of the hits also suggest that this individual doesnt commute on a 9 to 5 basis - God, I feel like Lloyd Grossman on through the keyhole here ! - but is a professional who organises their own workload and routinely travels between different sites within the Surrey & Borders catchment area. Perhaps its an executive, academic or high flying paid service user representative....who knows.

In fact, the pattern is so established that it could be used to predict which geographical location the person leaves from and is going to be at on certain days of the week. I could almost meet their train. I wouldnt of course nor publish the map of their movements because it would simply be unethical. It might breach their confidentiality.

Dont get me wrong, I'm not nosy and I'm obviously glad people read and comment on this blog, the more the merrier either for or against it but has anyone ever seen that film Misery, based on the Stephen King book of the same name? You know the one where author Paul Sheldon (James Caan) has the luck to career off the road on an isolated snowy mountain track right on the doorstep of one of his most adoring and stable fans played by the amazing Kathy Bates.

Well, if I'm found with my ankles cobbled or worse any time soon --------- ------------ did it. Ok?

One Year On

2007-06-04T10:57:00.000+01:00

This was the first post on the blog in June 2006. Since then the Surrey & Borders NHS Trust has backtracked on cutting payments but the so called ' Modernisation' of the Old Moat Garden Centre has simply resulted in incompetent managers within SABP , Surrey PCT, Surrey County Council , MCCH , SCMH and the Richmond Fellowship wasting public money or funds donated to them passing the buck.

During the same period it transpired that SABP Chief Executive Fiona Edwards and her husband Mark Edwards were underhandedly profiting from contracts between her Trust and his business Softools, a firm that also had a contract with one of the PCT's inherited by the Surrey PCT.

Softools claims to increase visibility of process and efficiency within and across organisations however one year on I dont think its just the workers at the Surrey & Borders Old Moat Garden Centre , who still face a totally uncertain future, who feel short changed.

The Surrey PCT has yet to get back to me with details about the Richmond Fellowship's revised proposals for the Old Moat Garden Centre.

Posted June 2006

Health Bosses Axe £3 a Day Wages

THE father of a man with learning difficulties is furious that health bosses have axed his £3-a-day wages for working at a NHS Trust owned garden centre.

By Joan Mulcaster

This means that for digging, hoeing, weeding, shovelling, planting, moving and potting at The Moat Garden Centre in Epsom, owned by Surrey and Borders NHS Trust, Brian Hall, 44, now gets nothing.

And the same goes for his other £3-a-day job, filling envelopes atthe trust's Office Project in Cobham.

Brian's father, David Hall of Green Lane, Ewell, said: "From very, very cheap labour he and his friends are now being used as free labour - how low can you get?"

Brian, who lives in a trust community home in Langley Vale and others housed in similar homes and also employed in its various commercial enterprises, are having their pay docked as part of a modernisation policy.

Bosses claim this is not a cost cutting exercise.

Mr Hall added: "I am disgusted at this treatment of the most vulnerable members of our society who carry out hard manual work for what is a commercial garden centre."

"News of this was broken at the centre last Friday.

"It was 'we won't be paying you any more' and some of the chaps didn't realise what was going on.

"It is disgraceful that this penny-pinching NHS Trust should penalise these vulnerable, disabled people working for them. Epsom and Ewell MP Chris Grayling said: "It is beyond belief that they save money by depriving the people who work for them.

"They paid them hardly anything and now they are paying them
nothing."

The Moat House Garden Centre was launched as a showpiece project to be run as a commercial enterprise and staffed by supervised adults with learning difficulties.

However, the £3-a-day pay - described by the trust as therapeutic reward money - compares badly with pay convicted criminals earn on prison enterprises.

A statement from trust director of operations Peter Quinsey said: "Payments are a throwback to the days of large mental health and learning disability institutions when patients were rewarded for work or therapy activities.

"This is now outdated and many mental health institutions do not recognise the practice so the trust has decided to end these payments.

"Work services are being remodelled to reflect modern practices which clearly distinguish between paid work, voluntary work, training and therapy."

The Spirit of Resistance

2007-06-03T23:46:00.000+01:00

Someone sent me this video this morning and after viewing it I couldnt help thinking it's a brilliant example of how collective action can affect outcomes even , sometimes, in what appear to be the most hopeless of cases.. Warning: this video contains some pretty brutal wildlife footage but stay with it.

Comment on Disability Charity & User Involvment from Peter Beresford

2007-05-29T23:36:00.000+01:00

Peter Beresford is Professor of Social Policy at Brunel University and a long-term service user.

The Remploy Closures: Disabled people, segregation and the small matter of user involvement

Hurray! Three cheers. Drinks all round. Some more segregated employment to close. Remploy is shutting down a number of its workshops for disabled people. The big disability charities – that is to say those longstanding charities for, rather than controlled by disabled people – are applauding and supporting the closures.

Admittedly, not so long ago they were praising the benefits of such segregated provision (some indeed still offering such services themselves). They were also criticising the disabled people’s movement for calling for an end to segregation. Now though they are on the side of the angels - and who knows what government money this might free to come in their direction.

Or is it really all as simple as this? How come some trade unionists and some disabled people, included disabled people employed by Remploy aren’t so keen on the closures? Do they need consciousness raising, some additional empowerment perhaps ? Do they need to have their internalised oppression further challenged? Again, I don’t think it is quite as simple as that.

Because yet again what we are seeing is policy being developed and implemented without another key principle which the disabled people’s movement has long campaigned for – the active and effective involvement of disabled people, other service users and their organisations.

The fact is that we are yet again seeing top-down paternalistic policy at work. Admittedly the rhetoric is right-on, but the traditional non-user controlled charities have become increasingly skilled, as disabled people increasingly argue, at voicing disabled people’s demands, if not necessarily so good at embodying them, themselves.

This policy shift can be seen to follow from broader government policy, committed to moving people from welfare to mainstream employment, as well as the EU’s direction of travel.

No matter about the nature of the mainstream labour market and employment conditions. No discussion about how discriminatory and excluding these still are. No questioning of the benefit traps many service users will continue to be placed in. No guarantees for the people who will be out of a job. No consideration of the pressure to be in a job, any job, regardless of its nature, conditions or quality. No mention of he real and justifiable anxieties disabled people will have because they may not be able to work full-time (or indeed any time) in the harsh world of modern employment practices.

No suggestion that workplaces like Remploy, for all their ideological limitations, might have a place to serve in some people’s lives, where they can contribute alongside others and earn some sort of a crust (albeit not enough) - until some really serious work is done to make open employment truly inclusive, accessible and non-disabling.

There is a big principle here. When people have half a loaf – don’t just take it away, as is now happening, both with Remploy and indeed many more day centres. Instead involve them fully and equally in the process of working to ensure that they can have a whole loaf - like non-disabled people – a truly inclusive, flexible and humanistic labour market and other alternatives. Don’t shut down an existing inferior arrangemenet until you guarantee for everyone the mainstream options all should have a right to.

Peter Beresford is dead right to raise questions about the top down decision making of the disability charitites over the closure of Remploy's factories but he falls foul of his own argument in assuming that the gurantee of 'mainstream options for all as of right' is a realistic or even desirable proposition.

I think its a pretty unrealistic goal .

Peter is honest but a bit niave in expecting ' user involvment ' to ever amount to anything more than the few most able service users being accepted by service providers as having a right to speak on behalf of all other service users. There again, Peter is someone who functions very well in the ' mainstream ' , which is not a fault, but of course it is natural for him to want , desire and possibly even expect everyone else to be capable of his'mainstream' capability and stability as well.

One 'mainstream' loaf for all makes a great political slogan unfortunately its also a pretty unrealistic one for some people whose disabilities dont make them as marketable , stable or independent as Peter is.

Fight Club

2007-05-29T10:48:00.000+01:00

Embattled Mind Director Paul Farmer has recently taken a hiding over the autocratic and discriminatory way he runs his charity's business, including cowardly laying into to the Remploy workers. The charity's head office isnt open today again , out of respect to funders and its service users obviously , but we caught up with Farmer in the ring of the Lame Duck public house a few doors down from Mind's palatial offices in Stratford East London to give you the opportunity to strike back at this useless bureaucrat.

To hit back remember its A = left jab D = right jab and S = upper cut. Presss space bar to block but watch Farmer , he fights dirty...

Press start to play.

Link: PlayMyGame

Here's what the creep looked like when I'd finished with him...

Documenting a Way of Life and Resisting

2007-05-27T19:51:00.000+01:00

If you actually look at a map of the planned Remploy Factory closures it looks pretty grim.

The politicians, managers and disability charities who insisted upon the Remploy factory closures can explain away their actions in fancy words but once you see the nationwide closures visaully mapped out , you really grasp the sheer scale of the problem and the impact the closures are most likely to have upon the workers and their families.

Many of the names on the map mean nothing to me but they'll mean an awful lot to the Remploy workers who have worked in these places for years and their families, friends and people living in their communities.

A few posts back, Gillian shared her memories of working at the Remploy print works in Sharston for 17 years in the comments section which got me to thinking that as well as disrupting and potentially ending many disabled peoples working lives, these proposed closures do something else, they threaten to brush away a whole supportive working culture and history just like that.

From personal experience I know that when something socially established is broken , particularly in a top down way, the first thing to go is the supportive links between people.

One of the ways of resisting closures and making sure that this does not happen here is for people to use free resources like the photographic site Flickr ,personal video sites like Youtube and Social Network applications like Facebook and Ning to sustain the links people have at Remploy and document and create a living and lasting record of their Remploy workplaces , their work, the friendships they have developed there and the whole way of life the top down decision making of the Government and six disability charities on the Remploy Taskforce now threaten to wipe off the map.

Dont let them do that.

The 'Remploy Factory Closures' map is a public map. The map placements can be populated with text,images, video, weblinks, etc. and the map itself was created with Google My Maps and embedded with My Maps Plus

Charities Get Wake Up Call

2007-05-25T12:05:00.000+01:00

A year ago I wrote to the UK national mental health charity Mind, which recently sat on the Remploy Taskforce and supported massive factory closures and job losses 'on behalf' of Remploy's disabled workers , and politely asked why its Director Paul Farmer wasnt blogging what Mind was doing to keep its service users , donors and supporters abreast of what the organisation was up to and enable them to inform the charity's decisions.

It was a good question.

It went unanswered though because Mr Farmer, who has boasted in the national press about his ambition to transform Mind into the UK's foremost MH service provider, does not view making his charity accountable to the people he gets funded to provide services for and serve as part of his job description. The assumption is , Mind can be a largescale service provider and represent the interests of its service users.

That's a pretty unrealistic assumption.

The GMB Union has taken up the case of the Remploy workers Mind and the five other disability charities on the Remploy Taskforce helped decide out of their jobs . One union leader expressed his disgust at the way these charities made top down decisions about the workers without even talking to them.

People should not be suprised by this though as many MH and learning difficulties charities operate in this arrogant and patronising top down way. Unfortunately , the Paul Farmers of this world think they know whats best for disabled people. He'll talk to the press at the drop of a hat but not to the people his charity is funded to serve.

Well, thats about to change as Project Agape has just launched 'Causes' on Facebook , a popular social network with 20 million plus users, which enables good causes to directly raise money from their supporters but just as important, because of the nature of social networks, it also allows people who support causes to find out and question what organisations , groups and individuals are actually doing with the money donated to them.

If I'm giving money to a charity, I want to be able to ask what its going to be used for , to get the views of its intended beneficiaries and make sure that my money gets to them rather than vanishes in staff salaries , perks and bureaucracy along the way.

Facebooks 'Causes' network and hopefully, copycat social applications like it should enable grassroots organisations to get a look in as well. This is crucially important as many of the big disability charities now sit on Government advisory bodies and simply roll out Government policy to secure Government contracts . Local causes often dont get any exposure or funding at all because the media and larger grant awarding bodies find it easier to thrust attention and cash at the corporates without much scrutiny or any real auditing for effectiveness.

I just tried to contact Mind, which describes itself as the 'UK's leading MH charity ', from the contact details on its website and got sent to a standalone MH infoline in Manchester where an operator begrudgingly told me ' it wasnt a switchboard ' and after a bit of grumbling gave me the number of Carol Bradbury, Mind's administrator , 0208 2152207 but every time I called I was sent straight to an answering machine.

Professional organisations often guarantee to answer calls within a certain amount of rings. I've been trying to contact Mind for hours. Its pointless phoning them. Mind doesnt want to hear what you have to say!

A national charity thats basically uncontactable!

It's very easy to see how Mind and other charities drift towards representing the interests and career prospects of those who work for them .

Mind national office is also closed now until Wednesday. Monday is a national holiday in the UK, Mind's staff are just taking the Tuesday off because they can. It's pretty contemptuous of those who fund Mind or may find themselves needing to contact them isnt it?

Now imagine if the six charities on the Remploy Taskforce had been accountable to the people they claimed to be acting on behalf of.

Imagine if the 2000 odd disabled Remploy workers whose jobs Mind helped decide away had been able to speak directly to that charity's funders about the audacity and unfairness of Mind supporting that decision on their behalf.

This is a disruptive. The charity sector just got dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century and Paul Farmer volunteered himself as the selfish unacceptable face of the disability charity sector as he clearly lacks the imagination to move his organisation forward and put the needs of the people it claims to serve first, because if he had his blog would be attracting additional interest in MH issues and funding and Mind would be promoting itself on Facebook's Causes network instead of gearing up for the extra paid days holiday Paul Farmer and his corporate executives obviously think they deserve.

Well relax and enjoy the break Mr Farmer, you made it on to the causes page anyway.

Here are the names of the other charities and organisations connected with the Remploy Taskforce.

Mencap
Scope
Disability Rights Commission
Papworth Trust
Opportunities
Work Directions
Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health

I am copying this to Mind and the Charity Commission as a formal complaint. If Mind , which is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary , simply wants to be the UK's biggest MH service provider that's great but people need to know that it does not represent the interests of people with MH issues it makes money off them as essentially its not a charity its a business with charitable status.

I have invited Paul Farmer to respond .

Garden Centre Update II

2007-05-24T08:07:00.000+01:00

I spoke to Emmanuel from Surrey & Borders PCT yesterday morning and he re-confirmed what Jill found out earlier in the year, that the Richmond Fellowship now wanted to take on the Old Moat Garden Centre again despite orginally pulling out because they did not want to work with people with learning difficulties .

Emmanuel confirmed that the Richmond Fellowship had very little experience working with this group and told me that the charity had submitted new proposals - presumably explaining their change of heart and new plans for the centre - that he was going to try to make available to keep the renegotiation of the contract open and transparent. He said he would get back to me on this over the next couple of days.

There is a shocking back story here though. According to Emmanuel , Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health (SCMH) 'disability employment expert' Dr Bob Groves who was involved in advising the Remploy Taskforce and Surrey and Borders on ' Modernisation ' of work services , has been pushing ' Mainstream ' in the Remploy case but advising here to establish a voluntary sector ' training and employment ' scheme at the garden centre restricted to one disability group!

The centre has traditionally been a 80/20 mental health/learning disabilities client split without any problems so in effect Dr Groves and his colleague Dr Helen Lockett have been talking up how everyone with disabilities can be catapaulted into the Mainstream jobs market to suit their, SCMH's and the Governments politically correct agenda but advising charities behind the scenes to abandon any pan-disability approach for the ' cause'.

For those new to this blog, the Old Moat Garden Centre hasnt actually been employing anyone or paying the national minimum wage , it has had the NHS Trust's and local Social Services service users using the centre long term for ' training ' or ' therapeutic activity ' purposes and has being paying them £3 a day and 'Modernisation' was, in theory, supposed to turn the centre into a more dynamic training and employment scheme run by the voluntary sector purely focussed on getting people into mainstream work.

The problem is , these schemes have a record of not getting people into any kind of work or worse, getting people into unsustainable mainstream jobs that fall through and screw up peoples benefits and lives. They tend to keep the charities who run them , usually with some DWP money, well funded though.

We've camapaigned to have the centre run properly so it provides real sustainable work paid at the national minimum wage upwards for those who want and are able to undertake it, provides quality training on the same basis and continues to provide therapeutic activities and support so that NHS service users - the centre is an NHS resource remember - have the widest range of choices and the centre remains a viable community resource.

It's taken Dr Bob Groves of the SCMH, the Surrey and Borders MH Trust, the Surrey PCT , the Richmond Fellowship and MCCH a year to get to the point where they've figured out that the Old Moat Garden Centre has a mixed client group!!!

Groves , who is ultimately responsible for this farce, has just supported mass factory closures across the country at Remploy in favour of politically correct Government policy when he and the major disability charities have no evidence that all disabled people or even large numbers of them can be seamlessly inserted into sustainable mainstream jobs.

I am sure that many disabled people can, already do and want to work in mainstream employment however its reckless and cruel to just ignore disabled peoples circumstances and needs and just try to catapault them at mainstream jobs to suit some narrow political agenda.

There should have been one definite job loss over the Remploy issue, Dr Bob Groves job as he clearly failed to inform people of the local difficulties he was having here planning to 'transform' just one garden centre smack bang in the centre of the stockbroker belt, the most affluent area in Britain .

Perhaps the GMB should hire a good lawyer to get their proposals given the same weight as Dr Bob's bulshit......

Remploy Factory Closures

2007-05-22T20:57:00.000+01:00

Today Remploy announced cost-cutting plans to close 43 of its factories across Britain. A total of 32 of Remploy's 83 factories will close and a further 11 will merge with other sites under the cuts. Remploy said 2,270 disabled people and 280 non-disabled workers would be affected by the closures in England and Scotland and Wales.

Remploy says it wants to place 2,270 disabled people into mainstream employment.

Unions called for the sites to stay open and criticised six disability charities who have backed the closures.

Phil Davies, national officer for the GMB union, said: "We do not accept this level of closures and we will fight to maintain the current factory network.

"The trade unions do not accept the financial arguments that have been put forward and we are concerned at the way the company has conducted itself in the last few weeks, including leaking information to the media."

Mr Davies also accused six charities which had supported closure plans of acting in a "despicable manner".

Mencap, Mind, Radar, Scope, Leonard Cheshire and the Royal National Institute of Deaf People have said disabled people were more likely to have fulfilling lives by working in an "inclusive environment".

Mr Davies said unions would consult their members but he raised the prospect of a national industrial action ballot across workers at the 83 factories.

A group of Remploy workers protesting outside the news conference. held banners saying "save our factories".

Les Woodward, a disabled worker based in Swansea, said: "We feel frustrated and totally betrayed by the company and the government.

"This has come as a complete shock to us all - we did not expect such decimation. They have declared war on us."

The following Remploy factories will close under the plans: Aberdare, Aberdeen, Abertillery, Aintree, Ashington, Bradford, Bridgend, Brixton (London), Halifax, Hartlepool, Hillington (Glasgow), Hull, Leatherhead, Leicester, Lydney (Forest of Dean), Manchester, Mansfield, Medway, Pinxton (Derbyshire), Plymouth, Poole, St Helens, Southend, Spennymoor, Stockton, Treforest, Wigan, Wisbech, Wishaw (Lanarkshire), Worksop, Wrexham and York.

The following factories will merge with another site: Barnsley, Birkenhead, Brynamman, Jarrow, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Pontefract, Redruth, Southampton, Stockport, Woolwich (London) and Ystradgynlais.

A final decision on their fate will be taken later this year.

Source BBC News Website

Garden Centre Contract Update

2007-05-22T16:19:00.000+01:00

I phoned Surrey PCT at 14.00 this afternoon for an update on the Old Moat Garden Centre contracts situation and was told someone would phone me back but no one bothered to.

The uncertainty over the future of the garden centre as a workplace , training centre , therapeutic resource and asset to the local community has dragged on for a year now so lets hope we get some clarity from the PCT some time soon.

I'm personally not very confident that the authorities can embrace the flexible varying status and multiple usage model that would be required to offer Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust's service users the greatest choice in training , employment and therapuetic activities here. And yes, its very complex and that's why these decisions should be openly discussed rather than dragged out over a year and decided by a group of ' experts' in a top down secretive way.

This 'Modernisation ' process has not been a local matter, it has been directed by quack academics who are operating at a national level with absolutely no boundaries between them, the DWP and the Government quango NIMHE. This process has also followed a national policy dictated from above that has been signed up to by most MH and LD charities which now have a vested interest as service providers themselves as they are picking up contracts from the state sector rather than keeping a healthy distance to ensure their independence and professional objectivity as registered charities.

In this way, some of the major disability charities are just becoming tools of Government . The Remploy workers had this fact driven home to them today.

If you want to chase up, the Surrey PCT the General Office and Enquiry number is 01372 227300 and the person to speak to is Dianne Woods. Perhaps someone will return your call.

A Message to Mr Brown

2007-05-21T21:46:00.000+01:00

Dear Gordon,

Well you have finally made head boy so when are you going to rein in the excesses of the brutal 'Wide Boy' Britain Tony Blair has encouraged over the last decade? Excesses that allowed people like Surrey & Borders NHS Partnership Trust Chief Executive Fiona Edwards and her Board to vote to cut her disabled garden centre workers pitiful £3 a day payments.

Apparently they were so full of their political ' Modernisation' dogma at the time to realise that what they were doing was pretty disgusting. They relented and reversed their decision eventually of course but only because there was a huge public outcry. Shamed into doing the right thing.

Thats the way it is today.

Nowadays the corridors of NHS hospitals are full of smug managers and consultants , they almost outnumber the patients and all seem to be able to afford to dress very smartly like you and strut round with latest laptops , PDA's and mobile phones to show how important they are . They certainly dont earn £3 a day that's for sure. In fact the consultants must do pretty well as Fiona Edwards husband Mark does a bit of work for her Trust on the side as well.

Nice work if you can get it huh? She's on over £120,000 a year too.

I guess the Edwards will be voting for you at the next election. New Labour have served them well...

Then there are the Wide Boys in the charity sector, the disability and poverty industries , like those who sat on the boundaryless Remploy Taskforce and made a top down decision to close Remploy factories simply because they are opposed to sheltered employment on the grounds of political correctness. Their own charities also run or fund useless employment and training schemes themselves so there was a bit of self interest at work their too.

'Wide Boys' like Dr Bob Groves , seconded to the DWP, who was involved in making top down decisions about the Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust's service users and Remploy workers and he was probably paid very handsomely for the priviledge.

No one's calling the money Dr Groves and his fellow experts are raking in a state subsidy though are they. Its only the public money thats actually going to disabled people - i.e. very little - that seems to be viewed in a negative light.

I know you recently admitted you had some trouble with math but do you honestly think
Professor Groves , Dr Helen Lockett and the other useless NIMHE bureaucrats are value for money? Someone within Government does as they keep paying these people to trot out the same old catapault them into the mainstream 'Social Inclusion ' crap .

Can you tell me what NIMHE has actaully achieved with the £60 million of public money it has had to date apart from converting it into so much ' Social Inclusionist' hot air.

My friend lost his pension after being tempted out of Remploy into 'mainstream' work. He hasnt worked for years now. The mainstream work lasted until the pension cut off date. The job broker got a nice bonus though.

How did that ' Socially Include' my friend?

How does harrassing people on Incapacity Benefit Socially Include them?

How does talking Lord Layard's daft bollocks about getting all the mentally ill into work and projecting about making £7 billion pounds in savings 'Socially Include ' anyone?

Most of the people with MH issues I know are too unstable to be in a relationship nevermind to hold down a full time job. They struggle to get through life and the patronising politically correct bulshit of people like Dr Bob Groves, NIMHE and DWP Ministers doesnt help them one bit.

It certainly pays Bob anf Helen to keep on at us though. I havent seen much evidence of them finding stable jobs for anyone but I have seen a massive increase in fly by night training and employment schemes that promise to but simply juggle disabled people around between each other to get themselves paid.

Wide Boy Britain.

I'm all for getting disabled people into mainstream jobs if they want and can cope with them but the way the Government and charities , who appear to have boundaryless relationships with Government now, are making top down decisions about disabled people behind closed doors just isnt acceptable.

Equality starts with people being able to speak up and make decisions for themselves as and where they can and want to.

I dont need faceless bureaucrats from charities and Government quangos to speak for me nor do the workers at Remploy. The management of Remploy should have talked to its workforce not a couple of quack academics and some 'worthy' parasites from the major charities they already knew agreed with them.

Thats not consulting anyone nor seeking independent advice. Its fraud.

The Surrey and Borders Trust also spent more time trying to manipulate its service users than consult them over the ' Modernisation' of its Work Services and it had an army of useless flashly dressed managers ready to bully anyone who dared question their approach.

Can you see a pattern emerging here Gordon?

Some of us can and it seems very much like ' Modernisation ' is just a shorthand term for top down decision making and bullying by managers.

When you are calling the shots are you going to let disabled people speak for themselves or are you going to continue to subsidise an affluent professional elite to make their minds up for them.

Regards

Ex Labour voter

Des

Taskforce ? - what Taskforce?

2007-05-20T13:51:00.001+01:00

These are the Turkeys who constitute the Radar/Remploy Taskforce, the body of professional fellow travellers Remploy establised with public money to provide it with ' independent advice' and network the outcome it wanted. Not any concrete outcome, just screwing around with peoples lives.

* Kate Nash (RADAR)
* Mike Buckley (RADAR)
* Andrew Crammond (Mencap)
* Agnes Fletcher (DRC)
* Sharon Collins (Scope)
* Alison Cobb (Mind)
* Matthew Lester (Papworth Trust)
* Kathy Makin (Employment Opportunities)
* Jane Mansour (Work Directions)
* Bob Grove (Sainsbury Institute for Mental Health)
* Bob Warner (Remploy)
* Stuart Knowles (Remploy)
* Karen Graham (Remploy)
* Marilyn Howard (Social Policy Analyst)

You'll note the inclusion of the illustrious Dr Bob Groves of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health who, with Dr Helen Lockett his untrustworthy sidekick, has just legged it from the Surrey and Borders partnership Trust with £41,000 of public money after completely botching the ' Modernisation ' process there.

For you numbers people, that means Bob Groves and Helen Lockett cost at least as much to subsidise a year as the average sheltered Remploy worker only Bob and Helen are seconded to or associated with so many other bodies their real subsidy is probably 10 times as much.

These Turkeys wont have to worry about Christmas again this year will they? Perhaps they can go and spend it with the Edwards family who seem to be doing very nicely out of the disability industry as well.

GMB Protests Remploy Factory Closures

2007-05-20T08:30:00.000+01:00

The GMB, Britain's General Trade Union, is campaigning to save Remploy factories from closure based on an alternative structure of efficiency, growth and success. The BBC are covering the story here. The GMB/Remploy factory workers webpage raises the issues here.

Remploy's own vision , buried on its website here , is based on cuts and an expectation that disabled people can be shoehorned into mainstream work.

Remploy's view is backed by charities like Mencap and Mind, organisations that are no great practitioners in the equal opportunities field themselves as in spite of all the rhetoric they cherry pick their own workers and believe in scrapping sheltered employment because in addition to claiming to represent disabled people they run their own mainstream employment schemes themselves and get a good income out of these whether they actually get people into secure and lasting meaningful paid employment or not.

In other words, political correctness aside, it pays the likes of Mencap and Mind to denigrate sheltered employment as they are part of a growing poverty industry which talks of thrusting everyone into mainstream employment.

Again its the same top down 'all or nothing' approach that we have seen the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust and the Surrey PCT waste money on over the last year.

This campaign blog will be celebrating its 1st Birthday next month yet its still not clear what the fate of the Surrey & Borders Old Moat Garden Centre and its disabled workers will be or if the centre will survive in any way shape or form at all.

Disabled people require and have a right to real choices around training, employment , benefits and having their treatment and support needs met.

This is simply not happening.

At the moment disabled people find themselves at the wrong end of a top down social engineering project which has organisations which dont even employ their own service users , such as the Surrey & Borders Partnership and South London & Maudsley's NHS Trusts being steered by Government quangos ( NIMHE etc ) and their kept academics ( Bob Groves, Helen Lockett - SCMH in this case ) to abandon their service users to corrupt Job Brokers and incompetent ' Employment and Training ' organisations with the view of catapaulting them into mainstream work irrespective of whether they can cope with it or not or what happens next.

I for one support the GMB and Remploy factory workers campaigning against closures because although I think there could be better policies in place at Remploy, sheltered employment is going to be the natural and right choice for some disabled people just as sheltered housing is. It is also ridiculous for Government and the increasingly toadyish major charities to think they can impose a shallow form of ' Social Inclusion ' upon disabled people from above. This doesnt empower anyone , it simply crushes choice.

Let the Weekend Take Care of Itself

2007-05-12T10:48:00.000+01:00

Sometimes as campaigners that's what we need to do. Here's a brill tune to let go of it to.

Softools - Disconnecting People

2007-05-11T08:55:00.000+01:00

Here are the incriminating changes Softools made when the issue was raised with the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust (SABP) that its Chief Executive Fiona Edwards was allowing her husband's Mark Edwards firm Softools to use her Trust as a case example to attract businesses from and serve as a reference for other NHS Trusts without him or Softools acknowledging his relationship with SABP's Chief Executive.

Before

After - SABP's name dropped.

Before

After Surrey PCT logo dropped.

Transparency

The Edwards' husband and wife relationship should have been made clear or they should have avoided this contract and/or form of advertising as NHS Trusts are funded by public money so transparency is an essential requirement.

The slick editing of the Softools website after Fiona and Mark Edwards had been caught on the backfoot is just not good enough. The public dont pay to be duped.

Softools also did work for the East Surrey PCT which had a professional responsibility , as does the Surrey PCT , the official body it merged into , to keep itself at a respectful distance from SABP. Its logo was also instantly removed when objections were raised about the Edwards were using SABP for their own ends while Fiona was officially overseeing the cutting of pitiful £3 payments to SABP's disabled garden centre workers.

The fact that service users themselves have had to flag up this abuse simply demonstrates that the SABP Trust Board, the Trust's PPI and the Surrey PCT have been asleep on the job.

We have asked Fiona Edwards to explain this abuse and are now asking the same quieston of the Surrey PCT.

Connecting People

2007-05-10T20:20:00.000+01:00

date May 10, 2007 8:17 PM
subject Softools Use of Nokia reference
mailed-by gmail.com

Dear Sir/Madam,

Your UK HR Director Lindsey Brook had this to say about UK software company Softools.

"You have consistently offered us leading edge tools and practices, backed up by world class challenge and support to help us utilise them".

Unfortunately Softools were using one UK NHS Trust as a case example of their expertise on their corporate website without Director and co-founder of Softools Mark Edwards acknowledging that the Chief Executive of that Trust was his wife.

This information is in the public domain.and as soon as it was placed there the Softools website was quickly edited to remove all mention of Mr Edward's wife's Trust. the Surrey and Borders NHS Trust.

As Nokia's successful marketing slogan is ' Connecting People ' do you consider witholding such information from potential clients part of the 'leading edge practices' Nokia so values from Softools?

Do you not think that advertising for more publicly funded contracts from other NHS Trusts, the reason Softools used Mr Edward's wife's Trust as a case example,should be a little more honest , transparent and ethical than this?

Softools is currently using your UK HR Directors comments to hardsell itself and I'm wondering if , under the circumstances , this adds any value to Nokia.

This communication has been blogged.

Des Curley

Now Public

2007-05-10T14:54:00.000+01:00

As Fiona Edwards seems most reluctant to apply or adhere to the NHS complaints process I have posted the following on a couple of news sites. If Fiona and Mark Edwards have any issues with this factual account I'm all ears.

Chief Executive of Cash Starved NHS Trust reluctant to explain Trust contract awarded to her husbands firm.

Fiona Edwards the Chief Executive of the Surrey and Borders NHS MH Trust Surrey UK, is currently stalling on investigating a formal complaint about how her Trust which recently moved to cut pitiful £3 a day payments to its disabled garden centre workers awarded a plum contract to her husband Mark Edwards IT firm, Softools.

Ms Edwards has insisted that the Trust Board were aware of the contract and ensured that there was no conflict of interest however as soon as a complaint was made Softools re-edited its website to remove all mention of work the company had done for the Surrey & Borders NHS MH Trust.

Mark Edwards is a Director and co- founder of Softools, a company which appears very adept at networking Government contracts. The company refused to comment on why it had re-edited its website or why when it was advertising the work it had done for the Surrey & Borders NHS MH Trust the relationship between Director Mark Edwards and Trust Chief Executive Fiona Edwards was not made clear to potential clients.

Softools is currently seeking contracts with other NHS Trust's.

A Slideshow to Fill in Until SABP Responds

2007-05-09T03:21:00.000+01:00

Networking A Redistributive Income ...Ooops I Mean Outcome...

2007-05-06T21:20:00.000+01:00

a snapshot of the MH poverty industry 2007

Back Story: NHS MH Trust run by Fiona Edwards claimed it couldnt afford to keep paying its Garden Centre workers £3 a day yet it can pay Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health Consultant Helen Lockett £41,000 for leaving its work services in total disarray and award Softools , on which Fiona's hubby Mark Edwards serves as a founding Director a plum IT contract.

Softools which advertises itself thus:

SofTools is a UK-based software company that develops and supplies web-based business improvement applications to leading corporations and public sector organizations

removed all reference to Fiona's Trust when a complaint was made about the Edwards family screwing over MH service users to live it up on NHS money. Check out previous post for ariel view of the Edwards snazzy rural lovenest.

Its amazing what public money can buy.

Please think twice before doing any business with Softools and if you work for Surrey and Borders NHS Trust or use its services ask about why the Edwards do ok off the NHS the next time SABP tells you there's no money in the pot for your pay rise or services.

SABP has declined to investigate this matter through the NHS Complaints Process

Patiently Waiting

2007-04-25T23:59:00.001+01:00

-
Originally uploaded by Paulo Vizeu.

Loved this pic by Paulo Vizeu on Flickr, reminded me of resolve . Have been bit ill over the last couple of weeks but I'm still waiting for SABP to formally acknowledge that I am not happy with its response to my complaint about Fiona and hubby Mark Edwards of Softools using the Trust for their own ends and Stanley Riseborough , SABP's User Involvment chappy no less, has yet to get back to me about progressing my complaint to next stage of the NHS complaints process. Stanley has been formally asked to do this and Fiona has been copied in so you have to wonder what the problem is.

Highcroft Lifebook Video

2007-04-03T20:47:00.000+01:00

While Surrey & Borders , the Surrey PCT and various unaccountable and largely self-interested mental health charities have been wasting time and public money dithering over the future of the Old Moat Garden Centre Paul Brian Tovey and a few other determined people up in Birmingham have got a user led Birmingham Arts group off the ground and Paul's own enabling work - the lifebook project - can be seen in the following video.

The Making Of The Highcroft Lifebook

For more details on obtaining the full video and getting more info on the Birmingham Arts group go here

SABP's Long Delayed Official Response to Conflict of Interest Issue

2007-04-02T16:10:00.000+01:00

I recently received the following from Stanley Riseborough , SABP's Director of Nursing and User Involvment. Mr Riseborough makes no attempt to explain why Fiona Edwards husband's firm Softools immediately removed all references to SABP from its website after I posted that the company was profiting from showcasing work undertaken for an NHS Trust ran by his wife.

This advertising was aimed at other NHS Trusts.

Unlike Mr Riseborough , Mark Edwards, co-founder and a Director of Softools, clearly saw that there was a conflict of interest in his firm citing work done for the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust as an example of its expertise without acknowledging that he was married to its Chief Executive.

There is also very little evidence that SABP now runs more efficiently, indeed the bodged reform of SABP's work services - how much has this cost taxpayers? - suggests otherwise as does the inability of the Trust to respond to FOIA requests for information and complaints within the deadlines set down by the NHS and Parliament.

Softools also did work for one of the PCT's connected with SABP extending the circle of officials who should have made sure that the husband and wife relationship was openly declared by both Softools and SABP to avoid suspicions of insider dealing , kickbacks and corruption.

If there was nothing wrong here, Mark Edwards would not have removed all mention of his wife's Trust from the Softools website to ditch the smoking gun.

Given the context of SABP originally cutting the pitiful payments it was making to its own service users and its official reluctance to help create real job opportunities alongside appropriate non work related activities , care and support for its service users I think its fair comment to draw attention to the type of business and employment opportunities that are available to SABP's Chief Executive and her family.

Farnham Road Hospital
Farnham Road
Guildford
Surrey

GU2 7LX

Tel: 01483 443516

Email: Stanley.Rseborough@sabp.nhs.uk

26th March 2007

Dear Mr Curley

Formal Complaint re Conflict of Interest

I write further to your telephone message and your e-mail, both dated 8 February 2007, in relation to the above matter. I understand that you have made a formal complaint upon the grounds that Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust (the “Trust”) have commissioned an IT service from a Company with whom the Chief Executive of the Trust may have a conflict of interest.

I was asked to investigate the issues raised in your e-mail, as I had no involvement in the procurement process.

I have been asked to review your complaint in relation to the procurement of the services from the software company, Softools, and in particular, the fact that Mrs F Edwards, Chief Executive of the Trust is the wife of Mr Mark Edwards, the Technical Director of Softools.

In investigating your complaint I have reviewed all of the procurement paperwork in relation to the commissioning of Softools, alongside numerous Board Minutes from the Trust Board meetings at which the commissioning of the work was discussed. Please find below a summary of the Department of Health guidance, together with the Trust’s local Policy in relation to conflicts of interests, upon which I have based my decision:

1. NHS Code of Conduct

The NHS Code of Conduct of Accountability in the NHS (2004) (the “Code”) provides guidance for NHS Boards as to how they should ensure accountability and openness in conducting the business of their Trust. The Code states:

“It is a requirement that chairs and all board directors should declare any conflict of interest that arises in the course of conducting NHS business. All NHS organisations maintain a register of member’s interests to avoid any danger of board directors being influenced, or appearing to be influenced, by their private interests in the exercise of their public duties. All board members are therefore expected to declare any personal or business interest which may influence, or may be perceived to influence, their judgement. This should include, as a minimum, personal direct and indirect financial interests, and should normally also include such interests of close family members. Indirect financial interests arise from connections with bodies which have a direct financial interest, or from being a business partner of, or being employed by, a person with such an interest.”

2. A Guide for NHS Boards

The Department of Health have also published “Governing the NHS: A Guide for NHS Boards” (the “Guide”) which provides guidance on effective Board Management and the Roles of Board Members. It draws on the recommendations of the Higgs Report and was published in June 2003 and states that “conflicts of Interest must be detailed and registered”.

3. Standards of Business Conduct Policy

The Trust have an internal Policy for ensuring standards of business conduct. The Policy, at paragraph 14 states:

“An employee has responsibility for declaring any relevant interests including:

(iii) whether their cohabiting partner has any employment business or other relationship that conflicts, or might reasonably be predicated to conflict with the interests of the Trust.

…A Declaration of Interests Form is attached to these Guidelines”

Procurement of Services from Softools

I have reviewed the paperwork in relation to the procurement of services from Softools and note that Mrs Edwards’ interest was declared at the initial meeting about IT development. Mrs Edwards complied with the Trust’s own policy by declaring her interest in Softools at the first opportunity, and an entry was accordingly made on the Register of Interests of Directors available on the Trust’s website.

Mrs Edwards also complied with both the Code and the Guidance by declaring her interest at the outset. Both the Trust Board and the Trust’s Audit Committee were made aware of the interest and it was duly noted at meetings.

I have reviewed all of the procurement paperwork in relation to Softools and can find no reference to Mrs Edwards’ involvement in the discussions. Once she declared her interest, there is nothing to suggest she took any further part in the procurement exercise.

Mrs Edwards complied fully with guidance and policy at both a local and at a national level to ensure that the procurement process was not influenced, nor could it have been perceived to have been influenced by her relationship with a Director of Softools.

Mrs Edwards played no part in the decision to award the contract to Softools and that the decision was made by the Transition Projects Team and the Trust Board based on the information that they were given. I therefore find that there was no conflict of interest in the procurement of services from Softools.

If you would like to discuss this matter any further, please do not hesitate to contact me at the above address.

Yours sincerely

STANLEY RISEBOROUGH

Director of Nursing and Service User Involvement

More Kafkaesque Excuses from SABP over FOIA Delays, Ommissions & Abuse

2007-03-16T21:25:00.000Z

According to Elaine Gould Head of Healthcare Services at Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust I am somehow responsible for the delays, ommissions and abuse her Trust applied to my FOIA requests.

Even so, Elaine is very quick to professionally reassure me that this matter is still being treated as a formal complaint even though if it is this complaint dating from February 2nd according to Ms Gould, has also ran some weeks over the time the NHS formally allots for dealing with complaints.

Still, lets not get bogged down with such minor contradictory details as in stark contrast to the official delaying tactics used against service users requesting information , the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust management clearly can act quickly when it wants to , as evidenced by Trust CEO Fiona Edwards and her husband very hastilly co-ordinating the removal of her Trust's name from his company's SOFTOOLS website in a couple of hours when I pointed out the obvious conflict of interest in Mr Edwards firm using the Trust managed by his wife to drum up business.

Still, we all tend to prioritise family matters over trivial work issues dont we...

Now if you dont mind Ms Edwards could you please provide the address of your accounts department , the third time I have asked for this information as an FOIA request, and leave it to the Courts to decide whether I have a legal right to submit an invoice and claim for the deliberate and completely unnecessary costs your Trust has imposed on me.

All monies recovered will be donated to a small local charity

Regards

Des Curley

Kingsfield Resource Centre

Philanthropic road

Redfhill

Surrey

RH1 4DP

Mr Des Curley

15th March 2007

Dear Mr Curley

I have been asked to review your Freedom of Information Act requests made to the Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust (the “Trust”), as was indicated to you in the letters from Fiona Edwards dated 2 February and 7 February 2007.

I am the Head of Healthcare Systems at the Trust and I have been asked to review, on appeal, your previous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) queries made to the Trust.

I have reviewed your previous FOIA requests dating back to mid 2006 and note that you have had a full response to the majority of these requests. I note from your correspondence with the Trust that you have not taken issue with information provided under these previous FOIA requests, but that you have made a formal complaint about the way in which your FOIA queries were dealt with.

From my review of the papers, there are three outstanding e-mails regarding your FOIA requests which have not yet been dealt with. These are your e-mails dated 24 November 2006, 5 February 2007 and 6 February 2007. Please find my response to these requests below;

1. E-mail requests

I have reviewed the file in relation to your three e-mails detailed above. I note from your e-mail dated 24 December 2006 that you have requested clarification that you had previously contacted Ms Young regarding your Freedom of Information requests. I have looked back at the correspondence in relation to this request and note that you did indeed e-mail Ms W Cox about this matter on 22 November 2006.

I understand from your e-mail that you were unhappy with Ms Young’s comments in the letter to Ms Goble dated 21 December 2006. After reading the letter I fear there may have been a misunderstanding in relation to Ms Young’s letter. Ms Young’s letter had been a response to Ms Goble’s FOIA query and her letter was stating that without consent from you, she would be unable to comment on your FOIA query.

Ms Young’s letter does incorrectly state that she had not received a response from you, for which I apologise. I do not feel Ms Young was trying to be misleading or obstructive in her response to Ms Goble or to yourself, as if she had released information about your request, she may have been in breach of the Data Protection Act.

( Damn, the Data Protection Act forced Jo Young to lie about not receiving a response from me....that makes sense...)

I understand that Ms Goble and yourself work for the same campaign, however Ms Young would still have required your explicit consent before releasing any information about your query.

As your most recent e-mails do not make any requests for new information, I would conclude that your requests for information have been dealt with, and the Trust are now to deal with your formal complaint about the way in which your requests were handled

2. Formal Complaint

Ms Edwards’ letter dated 2 February 2007 does correctly state that FOIA requests fall outside the scope of the NHS (Complaints) Regulations. Your email and following correspondence all make reference to a formal complaint about the way your requests were handled, rather than to you being dissatisfied with the information you were given.

I note that there was some initial delay in responding to your queries for which I apologise, however the Trust have provided you with the information which you have requested.

For your reference, I understand that this formal complaint is being dealt with and you will be contacted as soon as the complaint has been fully investigated.

3. Questions to the Board

I note from your e-mail dated 22 November 2006 that you were still awaiting the response to some questions which you forwarded to the Trust Board. I have looked into this matter and I note that you submitted some questions to the Trust Board Meeting dated 28 September 2006. The minutes of that meeting show however that your questions were addressed and answered in full.

4. Invoices sent to the Trust

I also note that you have several times requested an address to which you could invoice the Trust for the time spent on your FOIA queries. The FOIA does not permit applicants to charge Public Authorities for their time spent in preparing their request. I apologise for the fact that we cannot comply with your invoice, and I apologise for the fact that this was not made clear to you from the start, however there is no legal right under which you can charge the Trust for your time.

5. Conclusion

I now consider that all of your requests for information have been dealt with. Should you disagree, kindly set out the information, which you have previously requested, on which you have not received a response. If there is any information that you still require, the Trust will of course do all that it can to provide it to you.

With regard to your formal complaint (made 24 December 2006) about the manner in which your FOIA requests have been handled, the Trust will contact you as soon as you as they have completed the investigation.

Should you wish to appeal against the decisions made by the Trust in providing you with information, please write to the following address:

The Information Commissioner's Office,

Wycliffe House,

Water Lane,

Wilmslow,

Cheshire,

SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely

Elaine Gould

Head of Healthcare Systems

Appeal for crash tragedy survivor

2007-03-05T17:05:00.000Z

Paramedics from the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Service have launched a fundraising appeal for an eight-year-old boy from South Tyneside who survived a crash in which four members of his family died.

Paula Marie Gilbert, 29, her partner Neil Jex, 37, and sons Tristan, three, and Kaiden Gilbert, seven months, died in Saturday's accident.

Macauley Gilbert was airlifted from the scene on the A1 near Catterick badly injured but was in a stable condition in hospital on Monday . Macauley was airlifted to James Cook University Hospital, on Teesside.

Martin Eede, Yorkshire Air Ambulance chief executive said "

It's not often that something touches the paramedics the way this has " The Air ambulance crew gave the stricken youngster a teddy bear for comfort and he is still clutching it tightly in hospital and refusing to let go.

This is the first time the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Service have launched such an appeal.

Sgt John Lumbard, of North Yorkshire Police, said: "Two families have been totally devastated by this tragic road collision which has taken the lives of two parents and their two young children."A third child is in hospital after undergoing surgery and has other family members with him.

"But it's a miracle that he has survived at all.

"He is going to need an awful lot of support to get through this."

You can make a donation, a lot or a little as it all counts, on the Macauley appeal website.

The guys from the Yorkshire Air Ambulance also deserve a donation to keep them aloft. Donations can be made to their service fund through through their own website

NHS Staff Protest over Job Cuts & Closures

2007-03-03T09:33:00.000Z

Hot on the heels of news that the majority of the CEOs of the UK's NHS Trusts think that the Government is mismanaging the finances of the National Health Service - leaving us piggies in the middle of their 'blame game' again - NHS staff are today planning to march and rally in a number of cities across the UK over cuts to NHS jobs and services.

The events are being co-ordinated by NHS Together, an alliance of unions and NHS staff organisations. The alliance states that its aim to warn that services are under threat from deficits and "constant change".

Demonstrations are set to take place in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Belfast.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber is expected to tell a rally in Sheffield that the government is in danger of "squandering" the political credit it has earned for its investment in the NHS.

He said people were telling pollsters that the NHS had not improved since Labour came to power, although their own experiences of the NHS were positive.

Mr Barber is set to say: "We have a message to the cynics and opponents today. Stop trashing the NHS - join with us in celebrating the achievements - not just of doctors and nurses but the whole health team.

I have a message for Mr Barber and NHS management and staff, please stop trashing patients and carers as cynics and opponents when we simply want and expect a more user friendly , focussed and accountable NHS and maybe if we see, particularly within MH , genuine movement in that direction more of us will gladly rally alongside you .

Go here to sign Petition to support NHS Together

For further details of marches, rallies and events planned for today check out NHS Together Day of Action Events .

Enquiry into Govt buying or Commissioning services from Third Sector

2007-03-02T21:32:00.000Z

Paul Brian Tovey drew my attention to this enquiry and think it is pertinent to what this campaign has been about for the last 8 months and why there needs to be greater transparency, professional accountability , regulation and choice accompanying any transfer of public services to the third sector. If you have the time and the inclination, why not make a submission to the enquiry yourself.

There is a Third Sector Advisory Group - the website makes it clear that this is not a consultative group . There are two vacancies for this group. If you wish to apply to be a member of this Advisory Group you can do so here.

Public Administration Select Committee: Inquiry

Commissioning Public Services from the Third Sector

The Public Administration Select Committee today has launched an inquiry into the growing trend toward Government buying or commissioning services from the “third sector”: Charity or voluntary organisations and NGOs that do not fall into the traditional public or private sectors. The Committee is calling for interested organisations and individuals to submit evidence to the inquiry.

Since 1997 Government has increasingly emphasised the role of the third sector in helping to develop and deliver better public services, as part of the wider policy agenda of increasing competition and choice in public services. This is a key part of the role of the new Office of the Third Sector, established in May 2006 and reporting to Ed Miliband.

In some cases third sector organisations may be better able to provide a service or to innovate, or to involve groups which are traditionally difficult to reach. Conversely, critics suggest that the third sector’s independence could be compromised by becoming Government contractors and there are questions about how these “contracted-out” providers of public services can be held accountable.

The Committee’s inquiry seeks to explore the costs and benefits of the government’s policy - which may be different for the state, the third sector, and for those that use the public services - and to judge the effectiveness of the government’s approach.

Committee chairman Tony Wright MP said:

“More and more of our traditional state services are now being performed in the voluntary sector. There are real issues that need discussion here, and the time seems right for this committee to look into it. It’s an exciting new area for us as a committee, and I hope to hear from all kinds of groups and organisations we don’t usually hear from.”

Commissioning Public Services from the Third Sector
An Issues and Questions Paper

PASC – the Public Administration Select Committee – is inquiring into the role of the Third Sector in providing services directly to the public on behalf of the state, and the potential benefits and risks of the Government's policy of commissioning services from non-government bodies.
Background: The Third Sector and Commissioning
The term ‘third sector’ describes the range of institutions which occupy the space between the State and the private sector. These include small local community and voluntary groups, registered charities both large and small, foundations, trusts and the growing number of social enterprises and co-operatives. Since 1997 government policy has particularly emphasised the role of the sector in helping to develop and deliver better public services. The government’s push to do this is part of a wider policy agenda of contestability, or opening up markets for public services to new suppliers from the private and third sector.
Under this model, public, private and third sector suppliers compete for public service contracts on a truly ‘level playing-field’ without discrimination on the basis of their sector membership. Successful bidders will be those that can deliver value for money services, combining quality with cost-effectiveness. No supplier will have a permanent or assumed right to public contracts; regular review processes will ensure that the quality of service is maintained or, if quality declines, that a new supplier is brought in.
The third sector has a key role to play in this new atmosphere of competition, the government believes, because of its unique benefits: expertise in its specialist areas; its ability to connect with groups which are difficult for state organisations to reach; and innovation to develop new forms of public services. The government has looked to overseas models – for example, employment training services in Australia, where third sector organisations are the largest contractors with government – as a potential model of the future for UK public services.
Although many third sector organisations, particularly the larger national charities and the membership organisation acevo, have seen these signals from government as an opportunity to help shape and improve public services – ‘transformation not transfer’ - their enthusiasm is not universal. Many third sector organisations, particularly the medium-sized and small, regional and local operators, fear an increasing ‘polarisation’ of the sector between large national players operating as government contractors, and smaller, marginalised organisations engaged in a struggle for shrinking amounts of grant funding. Opponents of the ‘public service delivery agenda’ see it as a threat to the sector’s independence and ability to campaign: they ask how likely it is that organisations which are dependent on government contracts will ‘bite the hand that feeds them’ by criticising government policy.
The concept of contestability also gives rise to some interesting practical and operational questions. Many of the government’s policy initiatives on third sector service delivery have resulted in measures which remove potential barriers to third sector organisations competing for public contracts. However, some of these measures do not apply ‘one rule for all’ but allow special approaches to dealing with the third sector. For example, government has a commitment to provide payment in advance of expenditure, where appropriate, to third sector organisations that might otherwise have difficulty meeting the ‘upfront’ costs of their service delivery activities. This approach would not usually be applied in contracts with the private sector, where cash-flow management is generally assumed to be the responsibility of the supplier. In January 2006 the Confederation of British Industry published “A fair field and no favours - competitive neutrality in UK public service markets” in which it outlined the barriers it saw to a level playing field between state, private and voluntary sectors .
Lastly, commissioning services will potentially change the way in which service providers are held accountable. Contractual arrangements will replace direct political accountability, and there may also be changes in the way in which users relate to service providers.
Key questions
This inquiry will be considering the evidence for the benefits of commissioning and contestability. However, there may well be different costs and benefits for the state, for the third sector, and for those that use the public services which are being contracted out. Our key questions seek to probe the extent of theses costs and benefits of the government’s policy, and to help us judge the effectiveness of the government’s approach.
The services involved also differ greatly in nature, scope and size of operation, from school transport to major medical treatment. Evidence that points to specific examples will therefore be particularly valued.
1. What are the benefits of contestabilty to the users of public services?
a. Have services which have been transferred to third sector organisations shown improvements in quality?
b. Is loss of accountability a threat of commissioning services? If so, how can this best be managed?
2. Is the third sector more likely to provide better public services than the state or the private sector?
a. Is there evidence that where services are provided by the third sector, that they are popular with those that use them?
b. Is there evidence of demand for more services to be provided by the third sector? If so, who from?
c. Do public services provided by the third sector more accurately reflect the changing needs of those that use them?
d. Is there evidence that contracting to the third sector leads to greater scope for innovation in public service delivery?
3. Does commissioning benefit the third sector?
a. Will contractual relationships with the state improve stability within the third sector?
b. Will close involvement with service provision prevent third sector organisations retaining the ability to be critical of government?
c. Is there a risk that the service providers will become increasingly bureaucratic?
d. Is there a risk that third sector organisations will lose their independence, their identity or their distinctive ethos?
e. Might the third sector become polarised between large service providing organisations and more radical groups? If so, would this matter?
4. Does commissioning services from the third sector have any benefits for the state?
a. Does the state risk losing control of service delivery in a way which might be damaging?
b. What capacity will the state need to ensure that it can be an intelligent customer of services?
c. How is duplication of effort in order to monitor and manage contracts best avoided?
d. How good is the state at managing bidding processes and defining contractual obligations when commissioning services?
5. What are the financial implications of providing services through the third sector compared with directly provided state services?
a. Are services cheaper to provide?
b. Are there ‘hidden costs’ such as contract oversight?
c. Are the benefits of the third sector participation in public service provision so great that it is appropriate to have financial rules which encourage this, or should the aim be to have "competitive neutrality" between public, private and voluntary sectors?
6. Are the costs and benefits to the state the same when commissioned from the third and private sectors?

How to respond to this paper
PASC would like to receive responses to any or all of the questions in this paper. Although some of the questions could theoretically be answered by a simple yes or no, the Committee would especially value extended memoranda with background evidence where appropriate. Some respondents may wish to concentrate on those issues in which they have a special interest, rather than necessarily answering all the questions.
Evidence submitted should:
 be submitted as hard copy on A4 paper and as an electronic file also, by email to pubadmincom@parliament.uk, or on computer disk in Rich Text Format, ASCII, WordPerfect 8 or Word. Hard copies should be sent to Eve Samson, Clerk, Public Administration Select Committee, Committee Office, First Floor, Committee Office, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA;
 have a covering letter containing your full postal address and contact details;
 any memorandum of more than ten pages should begin with a one page summary;
 avoid the use of colour or expensive-to-print material;
 further guidance on the submission of evidence can be found at http://www.parliament.uk/commons/selcom/witguide.htm.
Memoranda will usually be treated as evidence to the Committee and may be published as part of a final report. If you object to your memorandum being made public in a volume of evidence please make this clear when it is submitted.
Memoranda should be submitted by 2 March 2007 as hard copy on A4 paper and as an electronic file also, by email to pubadmincom@parliament.uk, or on computer disk in Rich Text Format, ASCII, WordPerfect 8 or Word. Hard copies should be sent to Eve Samson, Clerk, Public Administration Select Committee, Committee Office, First Floor, Committee Office, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA.
The Committee expects to hold oral evidence sessions from March 2007.

Back to Square One as Surrey PCT Treats Future of Garden Centre as Official Secret

2007-03-02T01:13:00.000Z

From Jill Goble

Right. I have just spoken on the phone to Mr Emmanual Gbetuwa who is Comissioner and Service Development Manager Mental Health at the East Surrey PCT.

He said MCCH have pulled out and don't want the Old Moat Garden Centre.

He says that critical negotiations are now going on with other parties but he won't tell me who these are with. These may be completed by the end of the month. The transfer to anyone new won't take place in April but will depend on when any contract details are finalised.

Mr Gbetuwa seemed keen to stress that closure of the centre is the last option they want to look at. He also said we should not be on opposing sides as we all want what is in the best interests of the disabled workers. But when I questioned him on the viability of the garden centre as a commercial enterprise he said that the place was not set up as a business and the selling of plants etc was just a by product of the training and other activites that go on there. He didn't seem impressed by the need to create as many real jobs as possible for the disabled workers.

I said I would ring back at the end of the month to see if there is any news concerning negotiations on the future of the Old Moat.

So basically despite the MCCH report we are now no nearer knowing about the future of the Old Moat or what will happen to the disabled workers.

Jill's Initial Response to MCCH Report

2007-03-02T01:10:00.000Z

My next comment concerns the issue of the status of the Old Moat which Diane Woods wrote would be placed in the voluntary sector as the MCCH report says it is not viable in their time limits to be run as a social enterprise/firm. Also in this report,although we are not allowed to see proper accounts the problems of the high overheads as an obstacle in making a profit at the garden centre are seen as a reason for it not to be a social firm or enterprise. But I have been reading around and there is no reason why the garden centre could not have part of its activites set up as a commercial firm/enterprise and the other part in the voluntary/charity sector and so eligible for whatever grants they want to see coming their way. For example this is a quote from the Charities Information Bureau on Social Enterprise:

'Very often part of an organisations activites can be classed as 'social enterprise' but not all. For example, a charity in itself is not a social enterprise. However, the trading arm which sells donated clothes and other household good from a high street shop is definitely a social enterprise.'

I think the MCCH report and Diane Woods attitude at the PCT shows inflexibility in accepting potential organisation structures for the garden centre which could combine both job creation and profitability in the commercial side of the business as a social enterprise together with subsidies for the training and therapeutic rols which cause the high overheads and stop the centre itself being profitable now. I have only just started looking at the potential organisation structures available and have found a lot on this subject on the WWW. MCCH and the PCT have had since Spring 2005 to look at all the options but they have taken a rigid either/or attitude that does not need to be adopted.

Once again it is hard to be precise without the true facts of the accounts available to us but it is obvious that they do not need to be so inflexible.

MCCH Report Finally Made Available

2007-02-28T11:41:00.000Z

Earlier this morning Jill Goble sent me a copy of the long overdue MCCH report on the viability of Surrey & Borders Partnership's Old Moat Garden Centre in Surrey.

From just a brief reading I can already see that Sandy Hampson , MCCH's Project Development Manager wrote this report on the back of a lot of Jill Goble's work and I am dismayed that MCCH fails to acknowledge this. I am also saddened by the following claim that Sandy made under the reports Marketing and Advertising heading.

We approached Surrey Community Action for advice with marketing and advertising. They identified a mentor who has been working with Jackie for some months now. His background is that of National Sales Manager for Safeway. Various ideas have been implemented, and are already showing increases in product sales.

I'm saddened because I immediately phoned up the Old Moat Garden Centre to see how it had benefitted from the input of Safeway marketting and sales guru only to be told by two people who BOTH claimed to be managers of the Old Moat Centre, one was the Jacky mentioned above, that the garden centre did not have a website or product catalog.

I cant think of anything that more sadly demonstrates why we have been campaigning as what we have here is a garden centre with two managers but no way of advertising itself online or even a basic catalog and pricing list.

I think a competent independent body not a one time interested party should look at the business and therapeutic potential of the Old Moat Garden Centre again as MCCH's report is biased to the point, as demonstrated above, of being totally misleading.

In my opinion there needs to be less bureaucracy and game playing and more open communication over the future of the centre. In the meantime, I am sure Softools can knock up a basic site for the Old Moat Garden Centre to show that there are no hard feelings all round. Putting together a product catalog should be something the Trust can manage to do on its own.

Old Moat Garden Centre

Report on Viability of externalisation

Background

Sandy Hampson, (Project Development Manager, MCCH) has been working with Surrey PCT and Jackie Connelly at the Old Moat since April, to assess the viability of externalisation from the Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust in April 2007.

A steering group was set up comprising PCT and Social Services commissioning managers, MCCH and Old Moat managers. Individuals from the Trust and MCCH were identified to assist in the key areas of finance, HR, Health and Safety, maintenance and lease issues. Bi-monthly meetings have taken place to review progress.

Key Indicators that are likely to need consideration by interested voluntary sector organisations for externalisation

1. Strategic fit
1. A key issue will be to have confidence that there will be other opportunities to develop other such enterprises, perhaps as part of other modernisation programmes; which will avoid it being isolated, provide economies of scale in terms of management costs and additional career opportunities for staff.
2. It will be important to see where the service fits into the wider ld/mh systems in terms of referrals, potential partnerships and competition.
3. To agree a future that balances the needs of the business to increase income with the needs of each service user to achieve their aspirations, and the needs of the commissioners to achieve specific outcomes; all of which can be compatible but have the potential to conflict.

2. Financial Viability
1. Voluntary sector organisations are unlikely to be able to subsidise the cost of running and managing the service but could seek additional funding from a variety of sources.
2. Any contract would need to recognise and agree how financial risks are dealt with at an early stage.
3. The use of volunteers can augment the service but should not replace professional staff.

3. Lease Agreement
1. Needs to fit with revenue contract
2. Capital could potentially be accessed for purchase, improvements and/or adaptations but the cost would need to be repaid over lifetime of contract (or balance passed on to incoming provider).

4. Contract
1. Terms should be within the spirit of the voluntary sector compact.

5. Principles
1. Service users should be encouraged to actively influence the future direction of the service.
2. A strategy for ensuring that the service supports the employment of service users in line with regulation and good practice should be a cornerstone of the service.
3. It is anticipated that service users will not get stuck in the service but will have opportunities to move on to further training and open employment opportunities

Financial considerations

There are several key indicators that need to be considered and achieved for the Old Moat service to be transferred, but the main concern was initially that of a significant £90k deficit in the original draft budget, and this is one of the key areas we have concentrated on through a variety of measures.

We have reduced the projected deficit down from £90k to £57 in year one by deleting current vacant posts held by the Trust, and by increasing projected sales income through additional marketing and advertising activities, staff sales training and extended opening hours and contract work. The marketing and sales initiatives that have been implemented so far have already shown a positive impact on sales figures, and we project a conservative increase in sales income by 14% annually. This is reflected in the income figures in the draft budget. There will be increased staff and fuel costs associated with any increase in contract work due to the increase in staff hours worked and distance travelled, but we project that the additional income from the contacts will cover these costs.

We hope that there will be new income through placements for transition students from a local school and a 16+ service (estimate reflected in the income figures of the draft budget).

A formal partnership arrangement with the Shaw Trust, if it were to go ahead, could bring in additional income (estimate reflected in the income figures of the draft budget).

There are staffing salary conditions that may incur a further £13,610 pa pressure on the budget due to circumstances of protection, Agenda for Change outcome and volunteer opting to become an employee. We are still awaiting actual figures from HR.

Surrey SSD has indicated that it will not be referring new LD clients to the service, and instead will concentrate referrals to their own day services. We are likely, therefore, to see a decline in spot purchasing by Surrey SSD, and a subsequent reduction in income. The current unit cost based on the number of sessions provided per year is approximately £15.00 per session, or £30 per day. This is a particular concern as Surrey SSD would be considered the most likely source of new referrals and, with an expectation that some people will gain opportunities and move-on from Old Moat this leaves a real prospect of the service becoming unsustainable over time. It is suggested that SSD be approached at a more strategic level to ensure they appreciated the opportunities for their population to benefit from such a valuable resource, particularly as they are charged with modernising their own, in-house services.

Therapeutic Rewards were withdrawn by the NHS Provider Trust in July 2006, and have since been re-instated. MCCH was not involved in any way in either decision but sees the importance of ensuring that the service adopts a model of good practice in this area to ensure that people attending have their rights protected. The Trust has indicated that it will be assessing individual client roles at the Old Moat to identify who is deemed to be training, volunteering or doing work that should be paid at national minimum wage. It is felt important that the responsibility of any decisions taken by the Trust to continue with Therapeutic Awards or introduce a new system will be held and managed appropriately by them as soon as is practicable. MCCH remains prepared to offer its experience in this area where people have been able to move seamlessly to a situation where therapeutic payments can be replaced by proper wages without threat to benefits but with a real outcome of enhanced self-esteem and belief that this can lead to more hope for sustained recovery as we have witnessed elsewhere.

Staffing

The manager post is currently split across 2 services but we have costed this at 1 wte at Old Moat.

The staffing structure will be as follows:

Horticultural Services Manager 1 wte

Tech 2 Instructor 1 wte

Tech 2 Admin 0.56 wte

Tech 3 Instructor 1 wte

Tech 3 Instructor 1 wte

Tech 3 Instructor 1 wte (protected salary)

Tech 3 Instructor 0.47 wte

Bank weekends Ad hoc 05/06 400 hrs p.a.

Details of the driver post are not currently available from HR, but will be contracted for 4 hrs per week on band 2.

We have deleted the current vacant posts held open by the Trust.

Our proposal that the OT post continue for 1 day a week as a secondment from the Trust, to continue with Internal Verifying (IV), and to take forward the implementation of person centred plans and vocational profiling has been rejected by the Trust, as the funding for that post will cease in March 2007. For 05/06 this post used approx 120 hours for IV, which could potentially be picked up by the current manager if she had more capacity. This solution however, relies on the current person remaining in post.

Professional Volunteers are now being engaged to provide mentoring (to JC), and marketing and sales advice and staff training.

Service user opportunities

We recommend that any incoming provider should commit to identify a number of paid work opportunities within the service which service users will be able to apply for on a fixed term contract basis. These will be personal & skills development opportunities, and stepping stones to external employment rather than an end in themselves. This will ensure realistic progression opportunities for everyone who wants to move into open/supported external employment, and will ensure move on through the service so that places become available for new people wanting to access the project.

There is a clear demand for more garden and grounds maintenance in the local and surrounding area which will provide increased opportunities in contract work to more service users. Vegetable gardening will be extended to provide additional opportunities for service users to learn this new skill.

An informal arrangement has been set up with Shaw Trust who will help service users to find employment through their Workstep programme. Additional funding may be available via Shaw Trust (criteria applies) to service users who register on to this scheme to access relevant training courses and other support packages to enhance their chances of gaining successful employment in their chosen field.

Placements could be extended to students from local specialist schools (currently in discussion with a local school to pilot a scheme with Old Moat), which would enable 10 young students under 16 years with special needs to experience a horticulture learning environment for 6 weeks with the support of their teachers on site. Older students, 16-18 years, would also be able to access the service, with the option of completing an NVQ in approx a 2 year period. There is currently no indication from the school as to how many other young people may be interested in referral, however, the income shown in the draft budget assumes the continuation of placements at the level currently under negotiation. This is not guaranteed.

A 16+ service working with young people who are in, or are leaving Local Authority care has expressed an interest in working with Old Moat, and a young person has been referred on a 6 week assessment basis. If appropriate, we would be looking to offer the 2 year NVQ programme. There are currently no indications as to how many other young people may be interested in referral, however, the income shown in the draft budget assumes the continuation of placements at the level currently under negotiation. This is not guaranteed.

Additional funding streams

We have explored various additional income options which could potentially be achieved. Whilst these have been included in the income in the draft budget, it must be noted that none of this income is guaranteed, and will be dependent on the continuation of current Government training and employment programmes, local priorities, levels of funding and referrals.

On-going discussions with Surrey LSC have currently drawn a blank, although there may be opportunities to work with them as a direct provider to deliver NVQs once they have reviewed and distributed their tender specification in the near future. In the meantime Old Moat will continue to work with East Surrey College to deliver NVQs for a nominal income.

Initial enquiries to the Lottery Fund were about on going revenue costs, which they do not fund.

We have worked independently, and with Surrey Voluntary Services to research and approach various grant making trusts and foundations, but they are not able to consider applications due to the present status of the Old Moat. If it transferred to a voluntary sector organisation, it would be eligible to submit applications, however there are very few organisations which will fund revenue costs. Applications could be made for staffing costs for specific ‘new’ projects which can add value, and provide new opportunities.

An LDDF application for funding for a vehicle for offsite contract work was unsuccessful as there was no funding available for capital bids, although this information was not in the specification, and they more crucially would not fund a project with a mix of mental health and learning disability clients.

Our Fundraising Manager has also been researching alternative funding options, but has also found that the status of the project currently disqualifies it from submitting any applications.

Partnerships

Old Moat already works with Employability, where appropriate, to provide progression into employment for its LD service users.

The Shaw Trust provides training and employment support for disabled clients. Shaw Trust is currently working with the Old Moat to provide support for its service users and if a formal arrangement were to be agreed, the service could benefit from some additional income.

We have yet to explore the possibilities of how we could work with commercial garden centres.

Marketing and Advertising

We approached Surrey Community Action for advice with marketing and advertising. They identified a mentor who has been working with Jackie for some months now. His background is that of National Sales Manager for Safeway. Various ideas have been implemented, and are already showing increases in product sales. Marketing and advertising initiatives will continue, with increased product ranges, special deals and loyalty schemes. We will also look at sponsorship through other commercial garden centres and local organisations.

On going statistical analysis will be carried out to identify the number of customers, spend per day, spend by department/floor area, impact of marketing activity etc as an evaluation of new initiatives, and to ensure optimum gain from customer visits.

There is further planned development of new housing in the immediate area, and a leaflet drop will be a priority to those new houses with gardens that will need landscaping. It will be important to use volunteers to ensure a wider coverage of publicity.

Social Enterprise

We met with the Social Enterprise Adviser from Surrey Community Action to discuss the option of Old Moat becoming a Social Enterprise. His view was that the Old Moat as a model has the potential to develop into a true Social Enterprise, and would be willing to work with the service further on this if it becomes a viable option. There are, however, serious concerns around the level of income that would be need to be generated in order to sustain the garden centre as a social enterprise when it has relatively high overheads, which would inevitably increase the conflict between the centre needing to be business focussed and achieve challenging sales targets, but retain it’s training and support function.

Lease/maintenance

We have had site visits by a Health & Safety Advisor and Maintenance Advisor. Reports from both of these visits are attached at appendix 2. They have identified a number of areas of concern in relation to maintenance and health & safety. In addition there are issues regarding accessibility, and non-compliance with the DDA. In depth, detailed costings have not been done but on initial findings the costs for remedial action amount to approximately £32K.

The Trust allocated a manager to look at different options for the lease, which included providing rear vehicular access. Following a recent meeting, we have received feedback on this, however there are no costings available.

In order to reduce the deficit further, we recommended that the premises could be leased for a peppercorn rent of £1. In addition, it was proposed that the maintenance responsibility (labour and materials) be retained by the Trust. This proposal would have allowed the Trust to hand over the management and development of the service and the staff, whilst retaining a relatively small cost in relation to the site and the maintenance. These proposals have initially been rejected as the Trust do not see themselves as being the best placed provider to the small level of work services that will remain with them and they have no plans to retain any financial responsibility for any transferred work services after April 07.

The Barn is still a possible conversion project to a small business, however with the extremely high costs associated with conversion of a listed building we have looked externally for potential interest. We have passed the details to Business Link Surrey and they will give the information to any potential businesses that are looking for premises in the area.

Summary

In order to achieve the desired outcome of externalisation, the critical factor is the reduction of the budget deficit. However, the following proposals put to the Trust have been rejected:

* A peppercorn rent of £1 for years 1 – 3
* Provide all maintenance and repairs to the premises at their cost for years 1 - 3
* Second an OT post 1 day a week for the life of the contract

However, the PCT has confirmed that it could cover the projected budget deficit during years 1 - 3 to enable an external provider to identify and secure additional income streams in order to be financially sustainable from year 4.

It must again be noted that the income from Shaw Trust, 16+ service and local schools shown in the draft budget is not guaranteed, therefore leaving a further question mark over the financial viability of this budget. Any future grant income that may be successfully bid for would be time limited, and would therefore not be a secure or long term solution.

In short, the project is seen as offering excellent opportunities for people; it has the potential to develop more therapeutic outcomes for people attending and for more people; it can balance the business side without compromising the individual needs of people attending; it can attract additional funds; but…

…we believe this can only occur if the PCT continues to underwrite the risk and subsidise the deficit between income generation and the proper cost of providing such a service; that the individual payments to people attending are regularised so they are in line with good practice; that the SSD commissioners also see this service as an opportunity to modernise their day services and agree to open it up to their managers in terms of referrals.

We commend the PCT for working so hard to ensure the service can survive in spite of funding pressures and trust a way can be found to ensure it can further develop and thrive in the longer term.

Sandy Hampson

Project Development Manager, MCCH January 2007

Still Waiting

2007-02-26T07:57:00.000Z

Jill Goble has been desperately trying to get Surrey PCT, MCCH and the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust to provide a copy of MCCH's Report on the future of the Old Moat Garden Centre. As Fiona Edwards has already discussed its conclusions and recomendations with the carer of one of the garden centre workers she has entered into private agreement with perhaps its time that other service users and the public got to learn what is going to happen to the garden centre.

Jill Goble has also requested a copy of the oft quoted viability report on the garden centre, the one that limits business options, as a Freedom of Information request. Again there is a long history of FOIA requests being ignored both by the Surrey PCT and the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust. The charities involved in this bungled so called ' Modernisation ' of SABP's work services - MCCH , Richmond Fellowship and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health - are simply not professionally accountable to anyone so its no suprise that they are keeping so tight lipped.

MCCH's motto by the way is " Making Life Happen"

Provision of MCCH Report Delayed Again & FOIA Request for Viability Report

2007-02-22T08:11:00.000Z

From Jill Goble

Subject Re: Richmond Fellowship and MCCH Ltd Contracts

Dear Dianne Pullin and Diane Woods

Thankyou for your mail of the 7/2/07 below and the response from Diane Woods I received also below.

It is now over the 2 weeks that I am told in the response that the MCCH report would be made available to me. Could you please send the report to me immediately or if it is still unavailable tell me why there is a further delay and exactly when I can receive the report?

In the response below Diane Wood states:

"The option to keep the Old Moat as an NHS service and to be managed and run by service users has been considered. Options that have been considered for the services are: Social Enterprise, Social Firm, Closure, Remain with Surrey and Borders Partnership, transfer to Voluntary Sector. The viability report shows that the deficit that the service currently works with and is projected for the next 3 years is too high a risk for the service to take off as a social enterprise or firm status and so is not a viable option."

Could you please give me details of the 'viability report' mentioned above. Is it in the public domain? Can I have a copy of this viability report if necessary as a Freedom of Information request.?

I have other comments to make on this response but would prefer to make these once I have seen the MCCH report so could you please send it urgently.

Regards

Jill Goble

http://justice4sabtworkers.blogspot.com/

Dear Ms Goble

RE: Freedom of Information Act Request

I am responding following your e-mail of the 25th January where you are concerned that you have not received a response to your FOI request in October. There has obviously been some confusion as I forwarded by post to your address in Brighton the RFET contract and the Public Consultation and Outcome document that was done regarding all of these services that address the majority of the questions. I reattach these for your information and have broken down your questions and answered them below.

With regards to your request for the MCCH viability report on the Old Moat. There has been further information that needed to be sought in order for this report to be completed. The Commissioning Group met and received a draft report from MCCH this week and this will be available in 1-2 weeks following the inclusion of comments received from this meeting. I will forward this to you at that point.

The answers to the further questions you have raised are:

What Opportunities Will There Be for Further Consultation?

Public consultation took place last year. Local targeted consultation will take place with the service and the current service users on the outcome of the viability report and the recommendation for the Old Moat put forward from the Commissioning Group.

Will It Be Possible to Make Representation Concerning Alternative Options for Old Moat, &, Will the Option to Keep the Old Moat as an NHS service and managed and run by service users be considered?

This work has had, and remains to have local service user, staff, current provider and health and social care commissioning representation throughout the work. The option to keep the Old Moat as an NHS service and to be managed and run by service users has been considered. Options that have been considered for the services are: Social Enterprise, Social Firm, Closure, Remain with Surrey and Borders Partnership, transfer to Voluntary Sector. The viability report shows that the deficit that the service currently works with and is projected for the next 3 years is too high a risk for the service to take off as a social enterprise or firm status and so is not a viable option. It was agreed at the beginning of the work that with the externalisation of the services that Surrey and Borders Partnership would no longer have the expertise and appropriate infrastructure to support these services in the manner that they require to modernise and develop and so remaining with them in the medium to long term is not a viable option. This leaves 2 options; closure or transfer to voluntary sector. Throughout this work it has been an aim to avoid closure for services that were reviewed in line with national guidelines as appropriate to develop. The Old Moat is in line with this guidance and so we would not, where possible, wish to move to closure. This leaves the transfer to voluntary sector as the preferred option. However the service has been running with a deficit and more work was required to source further funding support and opportunities to reduce this gap and demonstrate viability. This is what has been taking place through 2006. There has been identification of new sources for funding and the PCT are able to put in a level of extra funding for a period of three years. The new sources of funding have not been totally secured as yet and so final financial calculations will take place as soon as this has been completed. If this shows to be successful and the consultation with the service and it's service users approve the recommendation then the preferred option of transfer to the voluntary sector will be taken forward.

What Group of Staff Will Be Responsible For Awarding the Contract

Surrey PCT Mental Health Commissioning will be the organisation and staff responsible for awarding the contract.

Are the WSOG Reports Made Public

These are minutes of the meeting not reports and do not get posted onto a public website

How is the Contract with RFET going To Be Monitored

There are regular monitoring meetings against the service specifications and outcomes. The frequency of these, the terms and manner in which they occur, and what is monitored is described within the contract that is attached. This is the template contract that the PCT use for all of the supported employment, social firm and community connections contracts in eastern Surrey.

Funding Concern for RFET

RFET funding for other services outside of Surrey are not connected to Surrey PCT funding. Surrey PCT funding is governed by the specific contract between Surrey PCT and RFET as attached.

Surrey County Council

In Surrey there has been aligned commissioning between health and social care in mental health. This means that we work to joint aims and approach strategic work and service development together. The work and day service review was jointly commissioned and the organisations are still pursuing a Section 31 for the commissioning budgets for these services.

Yours sincerely

Diane Woods

Director of Commissioning

Mental Health and Learning Disability

Reading Material

2007-02-20T05:38:00.000Z

River

I always take Charlie for a midnight walk along the riverfront and nowadays these late walks are the only times I feel at peace with myself on the island. I read somewhere that we originally came from the sea so maybe thats why so many people feel such an affinity with water. I love the river. Maybe I'm part fish. I definitely seem to be part everything else. I've always been surrounded by water. From the womb onwards. I like the darkness of night too because when it falls we are all naturally colour-blind.

It s also easier to think and reflect at night. Come on Charlie. Forward.

I was born on the Isle of Dogs in East London shortly after my parents arrived here as unwelcome refugees from Bangladesh in 1971. Leah on the other hand was born blind in Leeds in 1973 and never knew who her real parents were so I often wonder what people mean when they talk about accident of birth.

What's accidental about it? Having no conscious choice in the matter or the consciousness it gives rise to?

Yeah, I know some kids are born brain dead but regular people seem to go out of their way to develop that condition in later life and never fucking notice. Shadfield Social Services certainly seemed to employ a lot of braindead people who treated people like Leah as permanent accidents.

I first met Leah when the council employed me as her Home Care Assistant in 1991 and that wasn't exactly an accident either as back then, as now ,the council had a strict policy of targetting all it's shit jobs at the Bangldeshi community. To be honest , I didnt feel particularly caring or Bangldeshi at the time but a shit job is better than no job so I took out my earings, left my biker jacket at home , turned up for the interview and a week later started to train to do basic housework and wipe peoples arses.

My first client was an old guy called Ron who'd been paralysed in an accident in the Millwall docks when he was in his thirties. Apparently a crate of bananas being unloaded from a ship had dropped from the crane and broken his back. Ron was very bitter and anti-everyone and everything because he couldnt do anything for himself except talk, think and blink but we got on ok until his family, who hardly visited him anyway, insisted that they wanted someone white to look after their dad . It didn't bother me that much as I was used to it but I think old Ron was gutted as he had someone, maybe the white guy who replaced me, write me a letter with a ten pound note stuffed in it aplogising for what had happened and wishing me well. I spent the money on dope and never got round to replying.

Leah was my second client. Leah was white too yet her greatest disability was not her blindness but the fact that she'd grown up being shunted to and fro between various Care Homes and Special Schools.in different parts of the country. That's what my manager had told me anyway. Leah had ended up in a groundfloor council flat on the Isle of Dogs following some scandal at the her last place in Hertfordshire. Apparently, the home was shut down. The official line was that the move and a home of her own would encourage Leah to lead a more independent life in the community instead of becoming
completely institutionalised. On the other hand, the fact that she had absolutely no fucking ties to the local community meant that at least we had something in common as belonging had never been my strong point either.

On the first day I went to Leah's flat it was obvious that she was uncomfortable with me being there. After a while it really started to bother me so I just came out with it and told her that I was only doing the job because I needed the fucking money and felt even more uncomfortable with the situation than she did . She didnt react one way or the other, so I then suggested that maybe we should take her dog out for a walk and just look around the island. Jesus, I felt so embarassed the moment I realised what I'd said but Leah didn't take offence she just laughed and said I had a funny accent. It obviously wasn't the first time Leah had had to deal with someone who took seeing for granted but my stupid mistake broke the ice a little and at least got her out of the flat.

Back then Charlie was Leah's eyes and he was almost as fearful and jumpy as she was as he hated being couped up in the flat as he'd been trained to be a guide dog not a couch potato. After a while Leah got to appreciate our walks too. She also liked talking and it was like having an ordinary conversation was something completely new to her and I was totally fucking amazed by the things she didnt seem to know. Normal, everyday things. Simple things you just expect people to know, like how much things cost, what friends are for and how fucking pointless it is to sleep all day long. Real obvious things that soon had me asking myself and then Leah awkward questions.

Over the following months Leah opened up more and more and then one afternoon after we had returned to the flat with Charlie after walking along the riverfront as far as the Greenwich foot tunnel and back, and stopping off for a quick pint midway , she suddenly started to tell me about the
abuse she'd been subjected to. Up until then I'd thought her eyes looked the empty way they did because she was blind and that's what blind peoples eyes
looked like but it wasn't that at all, because as she sat facing me telling me everything, I realised her eyes simply looked dead because they were a
visible painful record of everything the bastards had done to her. But Leah didnt cry as she described what she'd been subjected to and how long it had gone on for.

Not once.

In fact, it came across as if Leah was calmly describing things that had happened to someone else, a Leah who was present as we spoke but not her.
Emotionally, I really didnt know what to feel about what Leah told me because I knew I felt so fucking angry it shut me down, which was just as well as I
instinctively knew that all she wanted and needed me to do more than anything else was listen.

Later when she was talked out Leah asked about me. I knew she wanted the truth so I didnt even try to bulshit her , I simply told her how I'd never been
able to identify with my family because I wasnt like them and how my life had been one long struggle and shit ever since my mum and dad had kicked me out of the house and disowned me because I fucked up at school and got in trouble with the police. I also told her about all the stupid 'Paki' stuff - yeah geography has never been the racists strongpoint - I'd had to put up with from a lot of the white and black kids on the island I imagined I had a lot in common with and how difficult I still found it trying to just be me in a place where other people, including other Bangladeshis had viewed or actually tried to force me to be someone or something I wasn't.

It was strange, saying all this to this white girl who couldn't even see the cause of most of my problems. It was stranger still for her to be telling me about her terrible problems as if normally I'd give a shit but despite myself I found that I did care and felt really sad that Leah had been fucked up far more than I had.The fact was, I knew nothing she'd been through was accidental whereas I'd always been vaguely aware of the consequences of a lot of the choices I had or hadn t made, yet the choices that had shaped her life had been made by the very people paid and trusted to see that she grew up fully prepared and able to make as many choices as she possibly could for herself.

That afternoon I recognised that , as deep as it went, I simply felt sorry for myself for making all the wrong choices whereas it was Leah, not me, who had
deliberately been denied the right to grow into herself and belong. In short, Leah had alerted me to my blindness.

Being around Leah through my job, you could say I felt overprotective towards her, and maybe I did feel that way at first, but as we grew closer over time we
openly talked about what was happening between us as a matter of course. There was also a sense in which Leah started to protect me from the shitty world I knew and what I'd become, it wasn't all one way, we just seemed to find missing parts of ourselves in each other but when the Social Services Department caught on ten months later that I had, in official terms, flagrantly abused the professional carer/client relationship, I was hauled up in front of the deputy director, immediatly suspended without pay and warned to stay away from Leah or face a court injunction.

We had no idea who'd blabbed - it certainly wasnt Charlie - but I'd always expected fireworks, we both had.however as we'd been completely open and up front with each other it was the sheer hypocracy of it all that got me as Maureen Myers, the Deputy Director of Shadfield Social Services wasn' t the slightest bit concerned about Leah at all she was simply looking out for the department. I called Myers a fucking hypocrite , told her to stuff the job and said if she had any genuine concerns about the relationship then she should call the police, adding that while she was at it, she should ask them to investigate how Leahhad been systematically sexually abused while in the Care of other Social Services departments down the years and why she had had ended up in a previously unlettable ground floor flat on the worst council estate on the Isle of Dogs in the first place .

Far from seeming shocked or in any way moved by my outburst Myers simply made a phone call and had two bastards from security frogmarch me out into the street.

When I continued to see Leah the Social Services department promtly sent round an in-house counsellor to ' talk ' to her and when she failed to provide the answers he wanted he submitted a report to Social Services suggesting that Leah had significant learning difficulties. The Department then attempted to make Leah a ward of the court and take out an injunction against me contacting her or coming within a half a mile of her flat.

We got legal aid to hire a local solicitor to fight the action.

Amazingly, the whole Social Services case turned on allegations and official evidence suggesting sexual exploitation on my part - people who can't see can't possibly make informed choices about sex right?- which was a real home goal as our affidavits made it quite clear , rather Mr Ryan the lawyer who had actually drafted them had, that we had never had sex precisely because Leah found it so difficult to deal with the sexual abuse she'd lived through. Mr Ryan took another statement from Leah, and she still didnt cry but shortly before the scheduled hearing Shadfield Social Services backed down and withdrew the case.

Even so, we had to move out of the flat to escape the unwelcome visits of yet more prying Social Workers.

As we had nowhere else to go and werent about to throw ourselves back on the mercy of the council, Leah, Charlie and I squatted a large groundfloor flat in an empty maisonette block over in Mudshute not far from the city farm. The block was due for demolition but Shadfield Council never got around to it so Leah and I lived there for about 18 months and it was beautiful. It meant going back to living on benefits but someone from the local advice centre helped us get an additional Carers Allowance - about half of my previous wage - so we got by.

In the Mudshute flat we created our own little world and decorated it with wonderful things you could feel as well as see and only let in those people we wanted to share it with. We also got married - we didnt want any of the legal shennanigans again - and had a frantic half hour in the street outside Shadfield registry office trying to pressgang the two witnesses required by law. In the end, we bribed two miserably sober looking drunks who celebrated the wedding reception with Charlie and us in the Rose and Crown pub next door. Leah also got a taste of real independence when - on the advice of a friend of Mr Ryan's - she enrolled on a sculpture course at the local college,

It turned out Leah had a real talent for seeing and shaping things with her hands and it wasnt long before her work started to attract attention. The squat had a spare room so we turned it into Leah's studio and suddenly the house was full of people talking about commissions and exhibitions.

I was also managing to turn my hand to some landscape gardening so things were really looking up. Even Charlie got caught up in all the excitement and was off bounding round the house and wildly chasing his tail every time someone new knocked at the door, Then as suddenly as Leah' s new purpose in life had arrived the whole Mudshute world cracked like dry plaster and everything started to disintergrate and slip away.

It s no accident that the river carved out this island, it's still doing it, it's dark waters simply seek out and wash away the weakest elements of whatever stands in its path and surge relentlessly on. I guess Nature has no time for accidents or words either .It just is and what happens happens in spite of our grand theories. Nature just fucking resists our attempts to contain it.

That's why the doctors who diagnosed Leah's Leukaemia when she complained of constantly feeling tired that summer could not explain why she - as opposed to anyone else - had developed it. The best they could do was describe what it was and how the millions of white blood cells that were rapidly reproducing themselves inside her body were forcing Leah's life out of her.

Charlie hid under the sofa and growled when Leah's hair started to fall out following the chemotherapy so we had to go out shopping for a hat. Leah wouldnt setlle for anything less than a wide brimmed Pink number because my favourite colour was pink so we spent about three days traipsing round every
department store and second hand shop and market in London until I found a pink one Leah liked the feel of. I told her she looked outrageous wearing it but Leah loved it so much she slept in it. But soon beneath that bright pink outrageous hat I started noticing Leah's beautiful skin yellowing and
tightening and smelling of wet metal. Maybe thats what had thrown Charlie, that smell.

Anyway, the chemotherapy proved useless.

In the garden one night, after we'd had a few friends round for a barbeque and they'd all left we sat at a candlelit table in the overgrown communal garden we had to ourselves and Leah suddenly said, 'Hussain, we're all dying, l'm just dying a little faster and sooner than you babe, please look after yourself the way you have me when I go'. I promised I would but immediately went back into the kitchen to refill our glasses and cry. Leah had always been so strong I just wanted to spare her hearing me break down but when I returned with our drinks she saw how I felt with her ears and I saw tears of pure love falling from her eyes and I suddenly hated myself for being such a coward and leaving her alone.
.
Leah wanted to stay at home as long she could, so we would sit up at night holding each other in the garden and later in our candle-lit scented bedroom , with Leah bravely fighting against the pain and the sickening side effects of the drugs, and me struggling against my selfish feelings and certain loss, each of us trying to condense an eternity of feeling and purpose into every last shared moment. But there was no way of prolonging the short time we had left together, as time was still flowing by so I just watched on helplessly as the woman I loved and needed beyond anything else in the universe slipped further and further away from us both.
.
When the medication became pointless and the pain unbearable the doctors decided Leah should be taken to hospital even though she had begged me and the authorities to let her die at home. I wanted to object but I felt powerless before their arguments that 'it was for the best ' so l just let myself be led out of the house by the arm, believing that it probably was.

In the ambulance Charlie whined and Leah's hands suddenly felt smaller and colder in mine. At the hospital two orderlies were waiting
in the car park to meet the ambulance. I looked up at the hospital , a huge grey bricked Victorian fortress and back at the two orderlies and suddenly started to think about what they were thinking about, how much they were paid and what Leah had told me that aftenoon so many months before.

Sometimes life throws up terrible choices and squeezes evey thing else out. When it does we just have to decide what's right and wrong there and then
and live with it. One of the orderlies kindly phoned a taxi for us but I was so afraid Leah would die on the way home. But she didnt, Leah clung to life and I
to her for 3 more days and just before she died in my arms in the Mudshute flat she whispered to me , " I can see the sun beneath my feet now Hussain " and for a moment I saw that life giving star flicker in her eyes then fade.

A week later, just before sunset as she'd requested, I lovingly carried Leah's ashes in the beautiful pink urn she'd made for the purpose down to the pier opposite Greenwich and scattered them in the outgoing tide and watched them drift downstream towards the sea. Then I again read the words she'd struggled so hard to inscribe on the side of the urn just before she'd lost the use of her hands, " To hold on to me you must let go "

Come on Charlie, home.

Resistance is Futile Earthlings, Socially Exclude yourselves

2007-02-16T10:56:00.001Z

I noticed from my Flickr account today that Resistance ,the above pic linked to the Justice for Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust Garden Centre Workers Campaign blog, rather than my photographs had had the most single viewings which left me with mixed feelings really.

The viewing figures showed that a lot of people cared about Surrey and Borders exploiting their own service users but it also told me that Dr Bob Groves and his allegedly world leading employment team at the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health are never going to socially include me as a photographer no matter how much employment focussed Cognitive Behavoiral Therapy they lash out on me.

In fact I asked another member of the SCMH team , Professor Jenny Secker for information on how a friend of mine , a fellow MH service user and really good artist could get help training to be an art therapist. Her mum asked me to as a favour.

I didnt even get an answer from, Secker! who, when it suits her, claims to have MH issues herself..

So there you have it, the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust draws public attention to itself through exploiting its disabled workers and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health team along with MCCH and the other MH charities involved talk up work and training and social inclusion but beyond training people to be ' Trolley Wallies' in Sainsbury's most of these claims are politically correct hot air paid for out of the public purse.

SCMH and MCCH are on a nice little earner though - no consequences for badly screwing things up even - and even Surrey & Borders Chief Executive Fiona Edwards can get her hubby's firm SOFTOOLS some cushtie work and/or free advertising behind the scenes even though SOFTOOLS claims to have improved efficency , performance and best practice at Surrey & Borders is clearly a load of baloney .

This pair certainly seem to have Socially Included themselves though!!!.

Then there's the well paid freelance consultancy work for Chris Carter, apparently SABP's Interim Director of Communications, who didnt even hang round long enough for the ink on the cheque to dry let alone to talk to SABP's critics as she promised to do at the pre AGM Board meeting last year.

Throw in some meaningless and unlawful consultation stage managed by Surrey & Borders and SCMH's unscrupulous managers and suddenly Social Exclusion starts looking more and more attaractive to this official top down corrupt web of exploitation, backhanders and lies?

Spot the Difference

2007-02-14T16:26:00.000Z

Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust Chief Executive Fiona Edwards appears to have acknowledged the conflct of interest of her husband using work undertaken for her publicly funded Trust as a Case Study on the website of the commercial SOFTOOLS firm he co-founded.

The SOFTOOLS website changed overnight with all references to the Surrey and Borders NHS Trust Fiona Edwards manages being removed but Andrew Edwards is still not professionally acknowledging his relationship to Fiona although his firm is still , without mentioning it by name , using work undertaken at wife's Trust as a Case Study.

So, this:

suddenly changed to this:

and the Surrey & Borders related Surrey PCT's logo here on Softools Welcome Page

Suddenly vanished from Softools Welcome page

Possibly due to the fact that Fiona had not bothered to tell her husband that the East Surrey PCT merged with the Surrey PCT back in October 2006.

Wonder if Softools are getting any more lucrative NHS work in the Surrey area as Fiona is still hiring the Old Moat Garden Centre Workers at £3 a day...

Strangely enough , that ' valued ' business doesnt even have a website anymore.

2007-02-13T00:55:00.000Z

The Machine is Using Us

While we wait for Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust's Chief Executive Fiona Edwards to draw her husband's attention to the glaring conflict of interest in him using work at her Trust as a Case Study on his firms SOFTOOLS commercial website here's a really interesting video from Michael Wesch .

Choice to Heavy a Burden for Some

2007-02-11T10:44:00.000Z

Some doctors are up in arms over the Government's plans to launch a new NHS CHOICE website this summer which as well as offering information about patient care and choosing which hospitals to be treated at will include a section given over to reviews and performance ratings submitted by patients, rather similar to the Patient Opinion website

Dismissing the exercise as a ' gimmick' Dr Hamish Meldrum, Chairman of the British Medical Association's GP's Committee said

" This seems a bit superficial and rather typical of this Governments policy. People tend to go to these things when they have complaints rather than when they are satisfied (and...?) so it may to favour the complainers rather than those in favour".

The CHOICE website will act as a gateway to other NHS services and in addidition to providing information will allow users to leave reviews.

The Department of Health believes the website will encourage doctors and hospital managers to improve their performance if they receive bad reports.A Department
spokesman said, ' The exact specifics are yet to be agreed upon . It will develop over time to provide a comprehensive resource for patients.

Feel free to give Surrey & Borders NHS Trust glowing reports .

Source Computeractive

Long Overdue Response to Jill Goble from Surrey PCT

2007-02-10T14:18:00.000Z

Dear Ms Goble

Please find attached letter from Diane Woods in response to your email of 25th January. ( asking what had happened to FOIA request made in October 2006 - Ed ) Also attached are the RFET Contract, the Public Consultation document and Outcome document.

Regards

Dianne Pullin

PA to Diane Woods, Director of Commissioning for Surrey Mental Health and Learning Disability Surrey PCT, East Surrey locality St John's Court, 51 St John's Road, Redhill, Surrey RH1 6DS DD : 01737 214848 Switchboard : 01737 780209

Dear Ms Goble

RE: Freedom of Information Act Request

I am responding following your e-mail of the 25th January where you are concerned that you have not received a response to your FOI request in October. There has obviously been some confusion as I forwarded by post to your address in Brighton the RFET contract and the Public Consultation and Outcome document that was done regarding all of these services that address the majority of the questions. I reattach these for your information and have broken down your questions and answered them below.

With regards to your request for the MCCH viability report on the Old Moat. There has been further information that needed to be sought in order for this report to be completed. The Commissioning Group met and received a draft report from MCCH this week and this will be available in 1-2 weeks following the inclusion of comments received from this meeting. I will forward this to you at that point.

The answers to the further questions you have raised are:

1. What Opportunities Will There Be for Further Consultation?

Public consultation took place last year. Local targeted consultation will take place with the service and the current service users on the outcome of the viability report and the recommendation for the Old Moat put forward from the Commissioning Group.

2. Will It Be Possible to Make Representation Concerning Alternative Options for Old Moat, &, Will the Option to Keep the Old Moat as an NHS service and managed and run by service users be considered?

This work has had, and remains to have local service user, staff, current provider and health and social care commissioning representation throughout the work. The option to keep the Old Moat as an NHS service and to be managed and run by service users has been considered. Options that have been considered for the services are: Social Enterprise, Social Firm, Closure, Remain with Surrey and Borders Partnership, transfer to Voluntary Sector. The viability report shows that the deficit that the service currently works with and is projected for the next 3 years is too high a risk for the service to take off as a social enterprise or firm status and so is not a viable option. It was agreed at the beginning of the work that with the externalisation of the services that Surrey and Borders Partnership would no longer have the expertise and appropriate infrastructure to support these services in the manner that they require to modernise and develop and so remaining with them in the medium to long term is not a viable option. This leaves 2 options; closure or transfer to voluntary sector. Throughout this work it has been an aim to avoid closure for services that were reviewed in line with national guidelines as appropriate to develop. The Old Moat is in line with this guidance and so we would not, where possible, wish to move to closure. This leaves the transfer to voluntary sector as the preferred option. However the service has been running with a deficit and more work was required to source further funding support and opportunities to reduce this gap and demonstrate viability. This is what has been taking place through 2006. There has been identification of new sources for funding and the PCT are able to put in a level of extra funding for a period of three years. The new sources of funding have not been totally secured as yet and so final financial calculations will take place as soon as this has been completed. If this shows to be successful and the consultation with the service and it’s service users approve the recommendation then the preferred option of transfer to the voluntary sector will be taken forward.

3. What Group of Staff Will Be Responsible For Awarding the Contract

Surrey PCT Mental Health Commissioning will be the organisation and staff responsible for awarding the contract.

4. Are the WSOG Reports Made Public

These are minutes of the meeting not reports and do not get posted onto a public website

5. How is the Contract with RFET going To Be Monitored

There are regular monitoring meetings against the service specifications and outcomes. The frequency of these, the terms and manner in which they occur, and what is monitored is described within the contract that is attached. This is the template contract that the PCT use for all of the supported employment, social firm and community connections contracts in eastern Surrey.

6. Funding Concern for RFET

RFET funding for other services outside of Surrey are not connected to Surrey PCT funding. Surrey PCT funding is governed by the specific contract between Surrey PCT and RFET as attached.

7. Surrey County Council

In Surrey there has been aligned commissioning between health and social care in mental health. This means that we work to joint aims and approach strategic work and service development together. The work and day service review was jointly commissioned and the organisations are still pursuing a Section 31 for the commissioning budgets for these services.

Yours sincerely

Diane Woods

Director of Commissioning

Mental Health and Learning Disability

Email : dianne.pullin@surreypct.nhs.uk

NHS in Crisis, Edwards Family Doing Very Well.

2007-02-07T09:33:00.000Z

Jill Goble has informed me that despite receiving an e-mail from Dianne Woods formerly of East Surrey PCT but now with Surrey PCT assuring her that her Freedom of Information request, dating back to October 2006, would be answered by ' end of play ' yesterday, she still hasnt heard anything.

I informed Jill that Fiona Edwards , Chief Executive of the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust was also jerking me around over my FOIA requests , playing bureaucratic games to further drag things out just because she can.

Jill has flagged up conflicting interests between Helen Lockett, MCCH and the Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust which have been ignored by the Surrey & Borders PPI Forum and the PCT's related to the Trust.

I think the following information helps explain Fiona Edwards reluctance to come clean about ripping her Trust's disabled garden centre workers off as she appears to view her position within the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust as a bit of a family business.

Click on images to enlarge and for perspective please remember that this campaign started when Fiona Edwards decided to approve cutting the pitiful £3 a day her Trust's disabled garden workers were paid and have them work for nothing.

Here is SofTools homepage - note the DWP and East Surrey PCT contracts, even though the latter has now been amalgamated within the Surrey PCT. Note as well as being out of date the SofTools site isnt fully accessible.

This is interesting too.

Company Register Information
Company Number: 03571184 Date of Incorporation:27/05/1998
Company Name: SOFTOOLS LIMITED
Registered Office: 17 BISHAM VILLAGE, MARLOW
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
BUCKS
SL7 1RR
Company Type: Private Limited Company
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Status: Active
Nature Of Business (SIC(92)): 7221 - Software publishing

Key Filing Dates

Accounting Reference Date: 31/05

Last Accounts Made Up To: 31/05/2006 (TOTAL EXEMPTION FULL)
Next Accounts Due: 31/03/2008
Last Return Made Up To: 27/05/2006
Next Return Due: 24/06/2007

Last members list: 27/05/2006

Last Bulk Shareholders List: Not available
Current Appointments

DIRECTOR: BRUCE, ANDREW JAMES
Appointed: 27/05/1998 Date of Birth: 21/09/1959
Nationality: BRITISH
No. of Company appointments: 4

Address: 17 BISHAM VILLAGE
BISHAM
MARLOW
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
SL7 1RR

DIRECTOR: EDWARDS, MARK ANDREW
Appointed: 01/07/1999 Date of Birth: 29/11/1968
Nationality: BRITISH
No. of Company appointments: 4
Address: COURT BARN HEYWOOD FARM ( not exactly living in squalour then )
WALTHAM ROAD
MAIDENHEAD
BERKSHIRE
SL6 3LL

Directors Renumeration for 2006 £143656

And still keeping it in the family, there's this:

So, Fiona Edwards the Chief Executive of the Surrey and Borders NHS Trust agrees to cut pathetic £3 a day payments to her Trust's disabled workers and have them work for nothing without even consulting them but has absolutely no objections to helping network work to her husbands firm and/or imposing huge costs on taxpayers with the bungled externalisation of her Trust's work services, a project which also appeared to be designed to transfer payments and /or assets to organisations which also have serious undeclared conflicting interests.

Softools states:

SofTools applications deliver three business benefits to clients:

# increased senior management visibility and control of operating performance
# improved operational effectiveness and efficiency through the consistent application of best practice
# continuous learning and knowledge sharing across diverse teams

Softools hasnt exactly given the taxpayer value for money here then, has it! Anyone noticed an increase in management visibility or performance?

We've seen a lot of over anxious top down control and spin but little else.

Has anyone noticed an improvement in operational effectiveness , efficiency and best practice?

Hardly, with Fiona instructing her staff to deliberately obstruct complaints and FOIA requests from service users and members of the public.

Has there been any continuous learning and knowledge sharing across teams?

Eh, nope all have had to be repeatedly reminded to address FOIA requests and/or provide other basic information and Fiona Edwards herself appears to have networked this deliberate obstructiveness to the PCT's and PPI Forum as well to ensure that service users and members of the public , who have put forward constructive suggestions for improving performance, are kept in the dark.

The Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust claimed it had the best disability employment advice available yet it completely botched its ' modernisation ' of the Old Moat Garden centre , alienated service users and the general public and the Trust and PCT now threaten - yes, Fiona has been selectively 'honest' about sharing information with a few individuals - to close the garden centre rather than seek real independent business advice to use the vaulable resource for the good of service users and the local community.

Fiona Edwards had Jill Goble and a Professor of Ethics and Business Mnagaement write to her requesting that the Trust and PCT do this yet this was ignored presumably because the garden centre issue was already a done deal.

This is fair comment.

Slideshow to Cheer People Up

2007-02-05T14:06:00.000Z

As the Chief executive and mananagement of the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust appear to have descended into their bunker again thought it would be more relaxing to display a slideshow of my pics on Flickr rather than fret about their latest antics. Relax and enjoy and remember, dont let the b*******s grind you down.

If you are having trouble viewing with Internet Explorer watch Slideshow here.

Tennyson Road Update

2007-02-04T22:44:00.000Z

Lat month we reported how Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust didnt have a monopoly on deliberately dithering over and delaying decisions at the expense of vunerable people and we can now report that thanks to the publicity raised about the threatened closure of the Tennyson Road residential home for people with MH issues by the Dunstable on Sunday newspaper including a scathing letter from fellow blogger Mandy who regularly comments on this blog, a decision has been made , albeit only a temporary one at the moment, to keep the Tennyson Road residential care home open.

Well done!

Its amazing what a little publicity can do to influence useless bureaucrats who excel in aquiring public money for themselves and making reckless and uncaring decisions in secret.

Response to Fiona Edwards , CEO of Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust

2007-02-04T16:23:00.000Z

Sigh! I have just received the following e-mail from Fiona Edwards , CEO of the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust.

What Fiona appears to be saying is that she and her staff do not have to act professionally or inside the law when dealing with Freedom of Information Requests from service users and members of the public as they can keep dodging their responsibilities by bureaucratic means as there are no consequences for them jerking people around like this.

Unfortunately, from the moment Ms Edwards and her managers voted behind the scenes to cut their disabled workers pitiful £3 a day payments without even consulting them and have them work for nothing they have been on a hiding to nothing and blaming everyone but themselves for their dumb and horrendously expensive PR disaster.

It seems Ms Edwards was never taught its bad form to rip off people less able and fortunate than herself. Ditto for Cawsey . Now, after taking more expensive advice from the Trust's lawyers , these two obviously think enough time has passed to start messing people around with their bureaucratic nonsense again.

Wilhelmina Cox
PA to the Chairman and Chief Executive
Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust
18 Mole Business Park
Leatherhead
Surrey KT22 7AD

Tel 01372 205821 Email: Wilhelmina.cox@sabp.nhs.uk

Our Ref FE/wc 2 February 2007

Dear Des Curley

Further to your email of 24th December to Wilhelmina Cox, you have raised a number of concerns about the way in which your FOIA requests have been dealt with, including the alleged distortion contained in my letter to Jill Goble.

Additionally you have also requested a formal apology and recompense for your time in submitting your FOIA requests and asked that this be acknowledged as a formal complaint.

FOIA requests fall outside the NHS (Complaints) Regulations. However if you are dissatisfied with the outcome of your FOIA requests, you have the right to appeal and in the first instance, this should be to the Head of Healthcare Systems, Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust, Elaine Gould on 01737 281046 or Elaine.Gould@sabp.nhs.uk

It is my recommendation therefore that we consider your e-mail of the 24th December as an appeal under the Freedom of Information Act. This would be forwarded to Elaine Gould, Head of Healthcare Systems to investigate.

If you are still not satisfied with the outcome you can write to the Information Commissioner, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF, Telephone No: 01625 545700.

I would be grateful of your confirmation to proceed in this manner.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely
Fiona Edwards
Chief Executive

Copy: Elaine Gould

Surrey PCT FOIA Request Update

2007-01-26T09:27:00.000Z

I received this email from Surrey PCT this morning :

From: Wendy Lockwood
Date: 25-Jan-2007 20:24
Subject: FOI enquiry

Thank you for your enquiry submitted via our web site which has been passed on as a matter of urgency to our Freedom of Information manager,Juliana Luxton and Director of Communications and Corporate Mananager,Helena Reeves who are now responsible for Surrey PCT FOI requests, and those relating to our predecesor organisations. Both can be contacted at their surrey pct e-mail address

firstname.lastname@surreypct.nhs.uk.

We will reivew our current front page freedom of information button to take account of the logo.

Yours sincerely,

Hope this helps.

Radio 4 Program asks People to Explain How NHS is Wasting Money

2007-01-26T08:59:00.000Z

Radio 4's Today programme this morning asked people who work within the NHS or have a good idea of how it works to contact the programme with details of how the NHS is wasting public money.

The Surrey & Borders NHS Trust has wasted tens of thousands on its botched Work Services Reforms and this is an ideal opportunity to flag up how the Trust has squandered public money through managerial incompetence and lined the pockets of an unscrupulous ' Consultants' for no good end.

Contact the BBC Today programme

Start a discussion on the Today Message Board

Translating Logos into Action

2007-01-25T13:58:00.000Z

I received the following mail from Jill Goble to Diane Woods , Service Manager for the East Surrey PCT. in which Jill repeats that she is still waiting for answers to questions she raised with Diane under Freedom of Information Legislation in October 2006. I note that the East Surrey PCT's website displays the Freedom of Information Logo prominently on its home page reproduced below.

The Freedom of Information Logo is displayed in a very prominent position isnt it? The East Surrey PCT is now part of the Surrey PCT which for some reason doesnt have the Freedom of Information displayed anywhere on its site.

Hope this helps speed up the response you are entitled to Jill.
.

Dear Diane Woods,

I refer you to my mail below which was sent back in October. The only reply from you I have received is a blank 32 page contract in the postal mail which I guessed was the contract awarded to the Richmond Fellowship. I have not received any answer to my freedom of information act questions in the mail below. I am supposed to receive a reply to such questions in 20 days and so the answers are now very late indeed.

I telephoned you the week before last and had to leave a message on your answephone but you have not replied to that either.

I am now concerned that our campaign has not received a copy of the MCCH Ltd report which was due out in December and which you told me on the phone in October I could obtain as soon as it became available. I also wanted to know what opportunities there would be for further consultation concerning the best plans for the Old Moat garden centre before any contract is awarded?

Please can you answer my FOIA questions below, send me a copy of the MCCH report and gives me the details I have requested without further delay.

Yours Sincerely

Jill Goble

To Diane Woods, Service Manager, East Surrey PCT.

Dear Diane Woods,

Referring to the telephone conversation I had with you on Friday October 20th I am writing to confirm the following details.

First that you told me there is currently no contract with MCCH Ltd to run The Old Moat Garden Centre but that they are doing a report on the options for this centre which will be with you in about a month. You agreed that I could obtain a copy of this report from you when it becomes available. I would also like to know what will happen once the report becomes available and what measures will be taken to ensure that there is sufficient consultation with services users, carers and other concerned parties before any contract is awarded? Will it be possible to make any representations concerning alternative options for the Garden Centre as we have already done to Ms Fiona Edwards, Chief Executive of Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust, who currently run the centre? Where and to whom can we make these representations and what group of staff will be responsible for ultimately awarding the contract? Will the option to keep the Old Moat , as an NHS service, which could be managed and run by service users themselves, be considered?

Secondly I confirm that you told me that The Richmond Fellowship have already been awarded a 5 year contract to run the other work schemes in the current Priority Enterprises although Queens Park, Craft and Art Matters and Assembly Matters will not transfer over to them until next year. You said that as a Freedom of Information Request you will email me a copy of the contract with the sensitive information taken out and that it is based on the Task Force/3rd Sector Model Document designed by the Department of Health. You said that the £3 a day payments to the workers which Ms Fiona Edwards at SABP has recently agreed to reinstate will not be continued by the Richmond Fellowship and that it is argued these are discriminatory and against the minimum wage act in themselves. My argument is that the contract with the Richmond Fellowship is not in the best interests of the disabled service users because it does not create any new job opportunities which pay at least the minimum wage or above and expects them to work as unpaid labour as volunteers in the kind of work non disabled people would not be expected to do for free. But because the Richmond Fellowship are a charity there are few rules to prevent long hours spent volunteering and the following guide from the government also supports the view that these schemes are exploitative :

From 'You can work it out. Best practice in employment for people with a learning difficulty' :

As services seek to help people find more meaningful activities than sitting around in day centres, employment is acknowledged as playing a crucial role in people's lives. But success in getting people in to paid work remains woefully inadequate. Instead, services have created a world based on work for which few people get paid. There is a growing variety of training, social enterprises, work-related projects, work experience and volunteering schemes. There are people who to all intents and purposes are working, but who receive little or no payment.
This is illegal unless there is genuinely no obligation to attend and no obligation to do anything. There are people who are described as volunteering- this conveniently gets around the issue of employment contracts and payments. These situations are exploitative.'This guide can be found at:

www.valuingpeople.gov.uk/EmploymentGuides.htm

There are many other reasons why our campaign does not think that the contract with the Richmond Fellowship is in the best interests of the disabled service users and our objections can be found in detail on the campaign site at http://justice4sabtworkers.blogspot.com/

Thirdly I quoted to you part of a document by Helen Lockett written in May 2006 which confirms that the contract with Richmond Fellowship would go ahead and that:

'The implementation and continued operation of these new services will be monitored through the performance framework by the PCT Commissioning Manager and through the Work Services Operational Group (WSOG) which reports to the Local Implementation Team'.

You confirmed that Emmanuel Gbetuwa Mental Health Commissioning Manager is on the WSOG group which is made up of people from each of the providers but you did not say if the reports that they make are public? I am still confused about how the new contract with the Richmond Fellowship is going to be monitored and hope you can give me more detailed information about how we can be kept informed about this and how we can make representations we consider necessary concerning the implementation and monitoring of the contract?

Fourthly we are concerned by a project on the Richmond Fellowship website which they run in Swindon .. This states that they are running out of funding and will have to cut back the project unless they find alternative providers. Are the services in Surrey also in danger of this happening? Can you please give me detailed information about the funding arrangements for the Richmond Fellowship regarding these new contracts as well as the amounts Surrey will be paying both to commission the services and to place service users in the projects once they are running?

Finally we are wondering about the role of Surrey County Council in the externatisation of these services. The contracts officer I spoke to at Surrey County Council told me that they currently do not want to take over the contract with the Richmond Fellowship from the Primary Care Trust.

Please can you treat all my questions as Freedom of Information Act enquiries and can I also thank you for your response to my phone call on Friday which gave us some clear information which previously we had found it very difficult to obtain despite all our enquiries and FOIA requests to Surrey and Borders NHS Partnership Trust and others including MCCH Ltd.

Yours Sincerely

Jill Goble
http://justice4sabtworkers.blogspot.com/

I can also be contected on Jill@goblej.freeserve.co.uk

Culture of Drugs and Neglect On Ward

2007-01-21T17:02:00.000Z

Mistreatment of its Garden Centre Workers isnt the only thing the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust seems to be hitting the headlines over recently as this story , flagged up by a regular contributor in the comments section, comes from the Woking New & Mail

SHAME OF OUR MENTAL HEALTH UNIT
18/01/2007

By ROB BROWN

THE mentally ill are abusing cocaine and alcohol in a psychiatric unit serving Woking, a former patient claimed this week.

Contrary to policy at Chertsey’s Abraham Cowley Unit, staff leave patients unattended for days and fail to search them as they enter, the patient said.

The woman, who spent six days at the unit in October and asked to be identified only as Sarah, said patients snorted lines of cocaine in their beds and boasted of possessing cannabis and vodka during her stay on the unit’s Blake Ward.

“I was horrified,” said Sarah, who lives in Woking. “There was a young lad in there in his early 20s who was going out for an hour’s leave every day and was bringing back a litre of vodka and coke.

“One guy I was talking to said he had cocaine and cannabis. Apparently he and his friend did a line of cocaine each in their dorm in Blake Ward.”

Cocaine, cannabis and alcohol are all known to exacerbate schizophrenia and depression — conditions commonly treated at the unit. Sarah, who suffers from depression, was admitted after she took an overdose — her third attempt on her life — in October.

She said: “I went in from A and E at a weekend and I was in a terrible state. I felt that I had just been dumped there. I hardly saw any staff. No one searched my bags, I could have had anything with me, sharp objects — anything. Even though I was told at A and E I would be looked after I was just dumped there until the weekend was over.”

Sarah said patients were left to their own devices and staff rarely strayed from their office to attend to them. “It was disgusting,” she said. “A girl in my dorm told me she was going to drink a bottle of vodka and overdose she was so distraught. She lay in her bed for two days and nobody checked on her.

“It’s totally inhumane. All they do is dope them up on drugs. They treat them like animals. The staff spent most of their time just sitting in the office talking to each other. How can they write up notes when they have no interaction with their patients?”

Sarah’s husband visited her at the unit every day she was there and said he too was horrified by what he saw. He said: “The patients were drinking and taking drugs. I talked to some of the other patients and they said it was nice to sit down and talk to someone.

“When I was there, X Factor was on the TV and all the staff came out of their office and started watching it but they didn’t talk to any of their patients. I couldn’t believe it.” Sarah and her husband contacted the News and Mail after they read our report last week about the death of schizophrenic John Hughes at the hospital in July 2005.

At his inquest, Surrey coroner Michael Burgess raised concerns over the level of care provided at the unit at weekends. Matron Audrey Keats said new policies governing the recording of health checks on patients had been implemented since Mr Hughes’s death.

Chief executive of Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust Fiona Edwards extended her sympathy to Mr Hughes’s family on Monday, a week after the inquest. She said since his death, “the trust has carried out a thorough review of the way his care was delivered and changes have been made based on the lessons learnt from this tragic incident.”

Following the fresh accusations of negligence at the Abraham Cowley Unit, a spokesman said the trust was “extremely concerned”. He said the trust has a “clearly expressed policy of zero tolerance” towards illegal drugs and alcohol and the allegations would be “thoroughly” investigated.

- Have you experienced life in the Abraham Cowley Unit? Call the newsdesk on 01483 755755 or email newsandmail@woking.co.uk

Make it Easy On Yourselves

2007-01-20T14:46:00.000Z

Mandy makes a very good point under the comments section about the need for people campaigning for change to make sure that they look after themselves as well.

We have seen over the last 6 or 7 months that the Chief Executive and management of the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust really dont care that they are dealing with people with MH issues and/or learning difficulties as making sure that the Trust gets its way , no matter how dumb and unthrough it is, is all and heaven help anyone who gets in the way, whether they have disabilities or not.

Well, the reality is we cant make these bureaucrats change their ways but we can sometimes make campaigning to make other people more aware of what they are up to easier on ourselves and more like fun than hard work.

I've created a SABP Toolbar - click on toolbar image in the footer section of this blog to download and install - that includes a dedicated search function, RSS feeds, streaming music, links to friendly sites and a simple messaging facility. This toolbar will sit in your browser and allow you to easilly check out stuff and listen to music as you surf .

Try it out , share it around. Give Surrey and Borders some more free advertising and if you want anything included in the toolbar , different feeds, a different type of music station, a link to your site or blog, etc, just holler.

Maybe even create your own toolbar to share your interests and concerns.

Have a great weekend everyone and take it easy .

Bungling, Deliberate Dithering & Mismanagement Not Unique to SABP

2007-01-16T10:03:00.000Z

Mandy , a regular contributor to our comments section and accomplished and witty MH blog Tzarina recently got the following letter published in her local newspaper. The letter , which is self explanatory , indicates that the bungling , dithering and mismanagement we've seen over the Surrey & Borders Garden Centre is not unique .

Well done for getting this published Mand and for reminding us that the local press is another way of getting the message out there. Stay well.

From Luton On Sunday Letters Page.

Letters to the editor

Mental health concerns

Madam – I was disgusted when reading the article informing readers that Tennyson Road will be closed down due to bickering between PCTs and Luton Borough Council over who is paying what. It smacks of utter incompetence and territorial behaviour by each of the three funding agencies who appear unable to speak to each other in ways that are beneficial to those on the receiving end of their decisions.

PCTs are always complaining that the government ties their hands and doesn’t allow them to make local decisions.

Well, no wonder because it has taken three years of non decision making to get to this point.

Those in power, who have abused it, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves and be made more accountable for their decisions.

Mandy Lawrence By email

Mikki Elvin - the Winds Whistling

2007-01-15T20:35:00.000Z

Over the holidays I learned that a colourful Birmingham UK mental health activist named Michael ' Mikki' Elvin had died in November of cancer.

Apart from the shock of hearing that Mikki - the name he preferred to use - had died I was, even as someone who had got on the wrong side of him a few times, really concerned that Mikki's body and personal belongings had been laying in a morgue for months because council officials had not been able to trace his next of kin .

Beyond the sheer human tragedy of this I was also concerned because Mikki Elvin had chaired the Birmingham, the UK's second largest city, MH Patient and Public Involvment Forum, and this had resulted in him getting embroiled in a year long wrangle with the Commission for Patient and Public Involvment ,the Government quango that oversees the management of the national PPI Forum structure, at the same time as he was involved in legal action against Birmingham City Council Social Services trying to access basic MH services.

How on earth does meaningful Patient and Public Involvment result in this horrendous outcome?

The system invited Mikki to contribute as a patient but as soon as he became overly critical or unwell it lost sight of him as a patient and person and simply labelled him as a problem to be swatted and squashed. The CPPIH and Birmingham City Council lawyers had no problem digging up dirt on Mikki in the courts or behind the scenes but services made no effort to find out anything about him.

Where was the care and support for this man?

This is a scandal and there should be an independent inquiry to establish whether the way the CPPIH and Birmingham City Council treated Mikki as a problem and failed to support him as a patient contributed to his death. I strongly suspect that it did.

Mikki's website Jarmi is still online. Let the man speak for himself.

Civil Rights in the 21st Century

2007-01-13T13:26:00.000Z

One of the things that this new technology does is allow anyone with a blog or website to check out who is taking an interest in their blog, site or, in this case, campaign and while browsing the log of site visitors recently I noticed we had interest from New York that resolved back to a Columbia University IP. Looking further I saw that the referring page was a lesson plan for Teaching matters which used this blog as an example of a citizen media campaign.

Teaching matters is a non-profit professional development organization that partners with educators to improve public schools, it is involved with over 600, and uses technology in the classroom to prepare teachers and their students for 21st century learning and achievement.Check out Teaching Matters Voices and Choices : Civil Rights,

the third unit of the Voices & Choices series , Social Studies for our 21st Century Democracy

I thought long and hard about whether to mention this as the 'us studying you studying us' thing may well weird some people out but then reasoned that two of the things that the Teaching Matters staff are clearly trying to instill into 8th grade students ( I hope I have the grades right here ) are that:

1.) how this technology works and can be used by just about anyone needs to be properly understood including the fact , flagged up by the Director of Teaching Matters below, that online learning materials are living documents

and , 2) the whole business of civil rights is a complex and ongoing set of relationships and questions not a passive dead academic subject like Latin ( apologies for anyone learning Latin ) but something very much alive and abroad in the world that, whether students realise it now or not, will almost certainly touch upon their own lives and life opportunities at some point.

As one of the people who has felt passionate enough about the issues campaigned about on this blog to keep posting away pushing for change ( yes , I often question why we bother to as well ) all I can objectively say to help anyone reading this blog develop their own ideas about civil rights is that often issues are not as clear cut as we think they are and that we really need to look at problems in the world - and there is no shortage of them - from as many different perspectives as we possibly can to try to figure out what is right and wrong and always be prepared to take on board new ideas and what the other guy says.

What other people think and have to say is really important , even if they totally disagree with us and we think that they are the problem as they are the people we need to convince and get onside if we think we have a solution on how to put right an injustice or to help uphold a group or individuals civil or human rights and we want them to understand and help us solve the problem.

The last word though goes to an old teacher who, although very meek in personality herself, took a passionate interest in teaching her students about making up their own minds . She had two words of advice for them. ' Question Authority'.

I'll let people figure out for themselves why she thought that her students should get into the habit of doing this and whether it is a good idea to or not.

And to all the guys from New York, good luck with your studies and lives.

New Year's Resolution

2007-01-13T10:32:00.000Z

We are well into the New Year now but all the holidaying and partying at the taxpayers expense appears to have taken its toll on the Chief Executive , Directors and managers of the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS MH Trust as none of them seem able to provide any meaningful information about the future of the old moat garden centre and its workers.

MCCH Ltd must have been invited to all the same parties as well as they were due to complete a report on the old moat garden centre in mid December but I suppose all those mince pies and thoughts of expensive gifts from their loved ones, commissioning bodies and contractual partners must have been a bit distracting.....

So what is the future for the old moat garden centre and its workers in 2007?

Is the Trust going to bother to let anybody know?

We'd certainly like Surrey & Borders, MCCH Ltd and all those involved in the commissioning of the so called ' modernisation' of the Trust's work services to start meaningfully sharing information with its workers, their carers and families and other patients and members of the public who have expressed concern about what is going on.

The Trust has now had over 6 months to come clean and it is both tragic and annoying that for the majority of that time Trust Chief Executive Fiona Edwards , her managers and the movers and shakers behind MCCH Ltd and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health have sought to conceal information from members of the public , information such as who got paid to do what, how much they got paid, what they actually did for that money and why if this public expenditure was fully justified and for a deserving and necessary end, an additional project , paid for by the public again of course, had to be setup after widespread condemnation of the outcome of modernisation on the garden centre and other disabled people involved with the Trust's work services.

To recap on that widespread condemnation in case the bureaucrats are still hungover from all their partying, a Surrey MP and local newspapers joined with service users and members of the public to condemn the decision to impoverish the garden centre workers in the name of modernisation as cruel and mean.

Since then the Trust has been asked to explain what guarantees are going to be in place to ensure that those people who are working at the garden centre receive the national minimum wage. The Trust has not answered this question.

The Trust has been asked to provide a viable business plan for the garden centre. It has declined to share its plans for the centre with us.

We have also asked what guarantees are in place to ensure that modernisation will not simply result in the Trust palming its work services off to charities like MCCH Ltd and the Richmond Fellowship which have a history of having disabled people work for nothing. The Trust has not answered this question.

Because of the involvment of Helen Lockett and Dr Bob Groves from the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health we have also asked what guarantees will be in place to ensure that modernisation doesnt simply result in service users being targetted to get them off benefits to hit Government targets

The Trust has not answered this question either.

We have also asked, just as importantly , what non-work related services are going to be kept in place for service users whose MH problems or learning difficulties rule out regular mainstream work ? The Trust has not answered this question.

There are many other questions that the Trust has ducked and weaved to avoid answering over the last six months.

We'd like to see the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS MH Trust turn over a new leaf this year and introduce a culture of sharing information and putting the needs of its service users first. Is this too much to hope for?

Lockett in Pocket

2007-01-10T16:16:00.000Z

From: Woods Diane (5P5) Surrey PCT
To: Paul Tovey
Cc: Duthie Angela (5P5) Surrey PCT
Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 3:29 PM
Subject: RE: Freedom Of Information Request

Dear Mr Tovey

For this programme of work 3 organisations/contractors were interviewed. Helen Lockett along with sessions from her affiliated Sainsbury Centre colleague, who are national leaders in this field, were selected. The rate of pay would have been compared in this process and have come in comparable to the other applicants.

The total amount paid for this consultancy was £41,170.20 over the period February 2005 to March 2006 this is inclusive of travel expenses which is the only other cost incurred by the consultant.

Regards

Diane

Which Superhero are you ?

2006-12-30T20:32:00.000Z

As a bit of fun over the holiday season I decided to take the Which Superhero are You quiz - see link below - and whadyaknow, I inputted a few porkies and got matched with ol Spidey here.


Spider-Man		90%
Green Lantern		80%
Robin		80%
Hulk		70%
Superman		60%
Batman		60%
The Flash		60%
Supergirl		60%
Wonder Woman		50%
Catwoman		50%
Iron Man		20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility. You are also a bit off the wall and loathed by bureaucratic corporate types who wear tights inside their sensible shoes rather than over their heads.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

Unanswered Questions about Lockett's Pocket Money

2006-12-26T12:36:00.000Z

To: diane.woods@surreypct.nhs.uk
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 9:04 PM
Subject: Freedom Of Information Request

Dear Diane

I have been able to ascertain that you will be able to help me. I would like to how much the PCT (previously called East Surrey PCT) paid for Helen Lockett to do her work in post as Project manager by the Work Services Commissioning Group (see email below for clarity and ease of understanding) . You will note the post was nationally advertised and publically paid for . MY understanding according to the email below is the PCT paid for the post .

Please be good enough to outline the costs of the Project Manager and any other associated costs with her role ..

Regards

Paul Brian Tovey

Independent Monitor Mental Health Matters ...

Email Sent to me below by : katy.turner@surreycc.gov.uk

Dear Mr Tovey

Thank you for your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act. Having examined your request I can now give you the following response:-

The Work Services Commissioning Group was a jointly commissioned service with Surrey County Council taking the lead commissioning role. The other commissioner was East Surrey Primary Care Trust (PCT).

1 What was the cost of this Post to the Council?

East Surrey PCT, not Surrey County Council, paid for the post of Project Manager held by Helen Lockett. The appointment followed a national advert for a project manager, which allowed the PCT to benchmark the costs of this post against other project manager posts. There was no specific budget allocated by the Work Services Commissioning Group for this post.

2 Were the costs of this Post shared with anyone else?

As stated above, East Surrey Primary Care Trust paid for this post.

3 Responsible Commissioners and their contact details?

Donal Hegarty (Policy & Commissioning Manager, Adult Mental Health & Substance Misuse, Surrey County Council):

donal.hegarty@surreycc.gov.uk 01483 517944

Diane Woods (Director of Mental Health & Learning Disability Commissioning, East Surrey Primary Care Trust):

diane.woods@eastsurrey-pct.nhs.uk 01737 214874

4 What kind of Democratic Mandate did the User and Carer Representatives on the Work Service Commissioning Group have?

The Commissioners were committed to have service users as part of the Group and although there was no Carer representative we did consult with local Carer groups. The service user representatives brought the user perspective to the Group and one of the representatives was mandated to keep service users in the area informed of progress. Because they represented the service user perspective they had a legitimate mandate to be part of the Group.

5 What was checked to ascertain that they were representative?

Both service user representatives came from East Surrey and had used services.

6 Did they receive Expenses or Payment for their time?

Both representatives were paid expenses for travel to attend meetings etc. This was paid by Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust whom I am sure have a financial audit trail of expenses paid.

7 What Evidence did the Health Overview Scrutiny Committee obtain and retain for record that there was in fact individual informed service users “evidenced” consultation done at services.

The Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee would have a record of what was submitted and discussed at the meeting in November 2005. I would suggest that you contact Derek Cunningham, Policy & Development Manager on 0208 541 7591 (email: Derek.Cunningham@surreycc.gov.uk) as he supports this Committee and will have a record of all the relevant information submitted.

I hope this response addresses all the questions you have raised but if you require further information please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely,

Donal Hegarty

Policy & Commissioning Manager

Mental Health & Substance Misuse

Another Christmas Delivery

2006-12-24T11:21:00.000Z

Dear Jill,

I apologise for the delays in sending you a reply to your request for information and refer to your emails dated 16th November 2006 and 7th December 2006 and our subsequent acknowledgements dated 17th November 2006 and 8th December respectively.

We refer to your email of 16th November 2006, and after further investigations we are now in a position to be able to respond to the questions:

In answer to your question regarding the discrepancy of 20 people who have had their £3 a day payments reinstated, we would comment as follows:

This has come about because during the period of time between Peter Kinsey’s response and my response, a number of people have left the service and others have subsequently joined. Additionally, Assembly Matters in Redhill and in Horley has amalgamated and Netherne Print has now been externalised. Generally the number of people in the service will always be changing.

In answer to your question relating to the number of disabled service users Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust employs across the trust and in what positions, we would comment as follows:

We do not hold contemporaneous information on the health status of our employees. We have now published on our website our Disability Equality Scheme 2006 –2009. In Part 7, Employment Duties section (page 29) it identifies that there have been general constraints in data collection influenced primarily by the merging of three Trusts in April 05. The action plan commits to meeting the collection of a minimum data (page 29) and publishing annually staff in post figures (page 31). Quarterly reporting, analysis and remedial action plans will also be provided. You can find this document via the following hyperlink: -
http://www.sabp.nhs.uk/news/folder.2006

In answer to your question regarding the Old Moat Enterprises account, we would comment as follows:

The information that you are requesting is enclosed within the Trust’s Business Case dated January 2006. Peter Kinsey’s letter to you dated 23rd August 2006 informed you that this document was exempt under Section 36 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, he also explained the reasons why this decision was made and why we were unable to disclose the information to you. This situation has not changed and therefore I have nothing further to add to this issue.

In response to your email dated 7th December, we have now addressed the questions you raised in your email of 16th November 2006. You also asked us to respond to issues that you raised about the content of a response sent in reply to a FOI request made by Mr Curley.

We have received no reply from Mr Curley to the response sent to him, or any indication that he had passed the matter to you to deal with. We would therefore require you please to clarify your position in relation to Mr Curley and his FOI request.

( To clarify, I repeatedly wrote to Jo Young and Fiona Edwards about Jo's failure to respond to or address my FOIA request and I have no objection to SABP answering Jill Goble's queations on this matter however I do have objections to Jo young implicating me in her distortions and lies and am copying this to her and Fiona as a formal complaint to let them both know this.

I hope this answers your questions satisfactorily however if you would like further clarity please contact me.

If you are dissatisfied with the outcome of your enquiry, you have the right to appeal and in the first instance this should be to the Head of Healthcare Systems, Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust, Elaine Gould on 01737 281046 or email elaine.gould@sabp.nhs.uk

If you are still not satisfied with the outcome, you can write to:

The Information Commissioner

Wycliffe House,Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

Telephone: 01625 545700

Yours sincerely,

Jo Young

Jo Young

Director of Services for People with Learning Disabilities

c.c. Elaine Gould, Head of Healthcare Systems

A Christmas Miracle

2006-12-22T10:47:00.000Z

And Lo and behold in a blinding light there suddenly appeared the following long delayed Freedom of Information Act response from SABP Fairy Jo Young.

Truly Christmas is a time of wonder.

Learning Disabilities Services
The Ridgewood Centre
Old Bisley Road
Frimley
Surrey
GU16 9QE

Tel: 01276 605553

Fax: 01276 605599

Email: Jo.Young@sabp.nhs.uk JY/ame

21st December 2006

Mr. Des Curly

Dear Mr. Curly,

We refer to the Freedom of Information Act requests in your email dated 21st November 2006 and our subsequent acknowledgement dated 22nd November 2006. We are now in a position to respond to your request.

FOI Question

I note that on the SCMH website see below - Ms Helen Lockett has no difficulty claiming ownership of the bungled 'modernisation' of Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust work services whereas the Trust itself appears to have some difficulty in remembering what its financial links to Ms. Lockett actually were/are.

"Helen has been an Associate Consultant with the Employment Programme for the past 5 years and carries out both research and service development. Helen has been working in the field of employment and mental health / disabilities for the past 10 years.

Helen's most recent work includes research into patients' experiences of a work rehabilitation project with Broadmoor Hospital and for the past 18 months Helen has been project managing the modernisation of employment and day services within Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust"

In the interests of establishing just how committed the Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust is to getting its service users into paid employment would you please explain how much Ms. Lockett was paid by your Trust or on its behalf for managing the modernisation of your Work services and also clarify what Helen's SCMH mentor/manager Dr Bob Groves was paid for his widely reported input.

Lastly, would you please acknowledge that you knew of Ms Lockett's prior relationship with MCCH Ltd and log and deal with this and the above questions as Freedom of Information requests.

Response

Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust does not hold any contractual arrangements with SCMH nor are we aware of any contractual arrangements between SCMH and the former Surrey Oaklands Trust.

However, in the summer there was training provided by Helen Lockett to our Employment Advisors in the north west of the county. This was paid for from grant monies which we attained through a bid jointly with MCCH from the Mental Health Capital (Revenue) Grant Scheme via Surrey County Council.

This training was separate and not related to the “Building on the Best” Work Services Review, Eastern Surrey.

The Building on the Best Work Services Review was a commissioner led programme jointly managed by the former East Surrey Primary Care Trust, the former East Elmbridge and Mid Surrey Primary Care Trust (now Surrey Primary Care Trust) and Surrey County Council.

It is our understanding that Helen Lockett was employed by these parties as the Project Manager for this review. She was at no stage employed by Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust. We therefore have no information related to this contract and pay.

We are informed that Helen did liaise with SCMH during this project, however this would not be unexpected as they are one of the the leading improvement agencies advising the government and others nationally on employment matters and mental health.*.

I am sure that as Helen was employed by the above organisations she was being paid for this work. However, as stated above we have no information related to this contract and pay.

I hope this answers your questions satisfactorily however if you would like further clarity please contact me.

If you are dissatisfied with the outcome of your enquiry, you have the right to appeal and in the first instance this should be to the Head of Healthcare Systems, Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust, Elaine Gould on 01737 281046 or email elaine.gould@sabp.nhs.uk

If you are still not satisfied with the outcome, you can write to:

The Information Commissioner

Wycliffe House,Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

Telephone: 01625 545700

Yours sincerely,

Jo Young
Jo Young
Director of Services for People with Learning Disabilities

c.c. Elaine Gould, Head of Healthcare Systems

Merry Christmas on £3 a Day or Less

2006-12-21T10:10:00.000Z

Regular readers who have commented on or contacted us with concerns about lack of posts in recent days need not worry about the campaign winding down, we are simply chilling out over the holiday period as the CEO and Managers of the Surrey & Borders Trust have probably not done a stroke of work to answer any of our questions throughout December and have no intention of doing so until well into 2007.

Work?

Bah humbug! Its only the general public picking up the tab anyway ......besides isnt our NHS the envy of the world?......

Once again we'd like to thank everyone who has been involved in or simply supported the campaign and wish you the all the very best over the Christmas and New Year period.

We'd also like to wish Fiona Edwards , Jo Young and the other members of the Surrey & Borders Trust Board a very Happy Christmas and hope this pic of warm hearted Fiona in her nightgown adds to the festive cheer.

Stay Well

Timely Reminder to Fiona Edwards & Mighty Jo Young

2006-12-08T13:41:00.000Z

Dear Jo Young and colleagues,

I would like to remind you that I am still waiting for the reply you promised below. I am also very concerned that the reply you have sent to Des Curley concerning the number of disabled people employed by Surrey and Borders NHS Partnership Trust is woefully inadequate. Basically you say that you do not know how many disabled people are employed by the trust because you do not monitor this information. Does the Trust claim itself to be an equal opportunity employer? If so how can you justify this claim if you do not monitor your own equal opportunity policies?

If this had happened in the United States in the 1980s where I studied at a Commission Against Discrimination your organisation would have been fined a great deal of money for not monitoring this basic information in order to show your
employment practices were not discriminatory and yet here we are at the end of 2006 and you are practically showing off the fact that you do not keep basic employment statistics to monitor your own equal opportunity practises. I find this situation quite archaic.

Bearing this appalling situation in mind perhaps we can make some sense of the information you do keep. You say that you only know if those employed by the trust are disabled if they mention this in their application forms. Well then please tell us exactly how many people employed by the trust have mentioned they are disabled in their application forms and in what positions they are employed? Then also please tell us how many people are employed by the trust in total. From these figures we will then be able to work out the percentage of disabled people employed by the trust and compare this with the percentage of disabled people in society. This will give us a basis for judging SABPTs record in employment for disabled people but considering you and the PCT have just awarded a 5 year contract to the Richmond Fellowship who have no intention of creating any new jobs for the disabled I doubt that your record can stand up to any scutiny.

Please give us this information immediately because we have waited long enough being fobbed off and we are tired of SABPT hiding behind these prevarications and excuses. Especially now with the new Disability Equality Duty it is time your policies and practises are open and accountable.

I will be waiting for your reply which under the Freedom of Information Act rules is already way overdue.

Yours Sincerely

Jill Goble

Disabled People Twice As Likely To Be Poor

2006-12-06T10:05:00.000Z

From Jill Goble

I found the following article in Community Care and it shows just how much this Disability Equality Duty is needed. Strong equal opportunity policies are needed but the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust does not even monitor where it is employing disabled people. Officially they do not even know if employees are disabled unless they mention this on application forms. That is Jo Young et als answer to making sure hey have good equal opportunity policies. They don't. They bury their heads in the sand and give a contract to run services to The Richmond Fellowship who will create no new job opportunities. And so we see below disabled people end up twice as likely to be poor:

Disabled people twice as likely to be poor

Helen McCormack writes

An assessment of poverty in Britain has found disabled people are twice as likely to be poor than the able bodied, and the gap has widened in the past decade.

The annual report by think tank the New Policy Institute found 30 per cent of disabled adults of working age lived on 60 per cent of average income levels.

Lack of access to paid work was cited as the main reason, with disabled graduates who wanted to work considerably more likely to be unemployed than an unqualified able-bodied person.

The report, funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, also found that benefits for out of work people without dependent children were worth 20 per cent less, relative to earnings, than in 1997

Disability Equality Duty

2006-12-04T08:53:00.000Z

The Disability Equality Duty for the public sector came into effect today.

For the best chance to achieve disability equality, public authorities should involve disabled people in the development of their Disability Equality Schemes and beyond.

Fiona Edwards and the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust have not been doing this, we have had to campaign to get our voices heard.

The involvement of disabled people requires active engagement of disabled stakeholders rather than purely consultation. ( which Fiona was none to keen on anyway)

It must also be focused and joined up to avoid involvement fatigue on all sides.

Disabled people can bring a wide range of knowledge and expertise. This campaign has shown this to Fiona and the Board of the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust and the new duty is a great opportunity to tackle inequality and allow the Trust to utilise the expertise on its doorstep.

Could we please have the equal Opportunities stats for how many service users SABP employs in manual jobs at the National Minimum Wage and above now Fiona as this just became a Disability Access to Public Services Issue.

Surrey & Borders Partnership trust Wastes Money & Still Expects More

2006-12-02T15:57:00.000Z

Unison is calling on the government to give more money to the NHS, amid fresh protests across the UK against plans to cut services but its now reached the point where the sheer amount of public money wasted on layers of NHS Trust bureaucracy and managerial shennanigans has engended compassion fatigue for the NHS from patients and the general public.

Unison says the Chancellor Gordon Brown should use next week's pre-Budget report to help NHS trusts tackle financial deficits.

Why should we support more money going to the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust when we've just seen Fiona Edwards waste tens of thousands of pounds treating service users badly and Jo Young still wishing to play stupid games at the taxpayers expense?

These people are flushing public money straight down the toilet.

Sure, we'd all like service users to get better treatment and care but the Surrey & Borders Partnerhip NHS Trust's costly lies , bungling and stupid games are not going to improve anything.

I dont think SABP should get another penny until Fiona Edwards and her staff start working with rather than trying to deceive and exploit service users and members of the public.

Please Help Campaign to Get SABP to Tell the Truth!

2006-12-02T02:35:00.000Z

Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust's Chief Executive Fiona Edwards recently instructed Jo Young to provide the campaign with the most provocatively evasive FOIA response to the question " How many service users does SABP employ in manual jobs at the national minimum wage or above".

Jo and Fiona seem to think its a bit of a giggle.

Fiona doesnt want to provide an honest answer because it will simply confirm that SABP has always treated its service users badly and that the Trust has been routinely discriminating against them as an employer.

If Coventry City Council can be up front with their equal opps stats then so can the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust .

It's important that we have these stats as service users are not simply being discriminated against in employment terms by Trust's like Surrey & Borders they are also being shoe-horned into unpaid work schemes run by organisations like the Richmond fellowship and MCCH Ltd , targetting that is often justified by questionable stats the Trust's and charities appear to have no problem conjuring out of thin air.

The Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust shouldnt be sitting on information here - lets see how successful it is at employing its own service users in non ' user involvment ' type jobs at the national minimum wage or above.

Lets have the figures.

Come on, give us the stats you pratts!!!

In search of Eternal Youth

2006-12-01T13:20:00.000Z

In what seems to be nothing more than a vanity driven tantrum MCCH Ltd have subjected their official website to a trendy makeover and pulled all those appallingly ugly photos of their directors and senior managers.

A source close to the charity tells me that MCCH Ltd's elderly Directors were considering using a new photographer but glumly realised that even new technology wasnt going to make them appear any more attractive so they decided to totally remove all their details instead.

Here's a Before and After sequence

Before

After

Thwy should haver sought Fiona Edwards advice. She's obviously had a nip and tuck job as every time she blinks her ears move.

Surrey County Council's FOIA response ref Work Services Commissioning Group

2006-12-01T12:31:00.000Z

Families Directorate
Adult Services
3rd floor Grosvenor House
London Square
Cross Lanes
Guildford
Surrey GU1 1FA

1 December 2006

Dear Mr Tovey

Thank you for your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act. Having examined your request I can now give you the following response:-

The Work Services Commissioning Group was a jointly commissioned service with Surrey County Council taking the lead commissioning role. The other commissioner was East Surrey Primary Care Trust (PCT).

1 What was the cost of this Post to the Council?

East Surrey PCT, not Surrey County Council, paid for the post of Project Manager held by Helen Lockett. The appointment followed a national advert for a project manager, which allowed the PCT to benchmark the costs of this post against other project manager posts. There was no specific budget allocated by the Work Services Commissioning Group for this post.

2 Were the costs of this Post shared with anyone else?

As stated above, East Surrey Primary Care Trust paid for this post.

3 Responsible Commissioners and their contact details?

Donal Hegarty (Policy & Commissioning Manager, Adult Mental Health & Substance Misuse, Surrey County Council):

donal.hegarty@surreycc.gov.uk 01483 517944

Diane Woods (Director of Mental Health & Learning Disability Commissioning, East Surrey Primary Care Trust):

diane.woods@eastsurrey-pct.nhs.uk 01737 214874

4 What kind of Democratic Mandate did the User and Carer Representatives on the Work Service Commissioning Group have?

The Commissioners were committed to have service users as part of the Group and although there was no Carer representative we did consult with local Carer groups. The service user representatives brought the user perspective to the Group and one of the representatives was mandated to keep service users in the area informed of progress. Because they represented the service user perspective they had a legitimate mandate to be part of the Group.

5 What was checked to ascertain that they were representative?

Both service user representatives came from East Surrey and had used services.

6 Did they receive Expenses or Payment for their time?

Both representatives were paid expenses for travel to attend meetings etc. This was paid by Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust whom I am sure have a financial audit trail of expenses paid.

7 What Evidence did the Health Overview Scrutiny Committee obtain and retain for record that there was in fact individual informed service users “evidenced” consultation done at services.

The Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee would have a record of what was submitted and discussed at the meeting in November 2005. I would suggest that you contact Derek Cunningham, Policy & Development Manager on 0208 541 7591 (email: Derek.Cunningham@surreycc.gov.uk) as he supports this Committee and will have a record of all the relevant information submitted.

I hope this response addresses all the questions you have raised but if you require further information please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely,

Donal Hegarty

Policy & Commissioning Manager

Mental Health & Substance Misuse

Coventry City Council Respond Promptly to FOIA Request

2006-11-30T18:36:00.000Z

Dear Mr. Curly

Thank you for your request for information about the number of disabled people with learning difficulties employed by Coventry City Council, which we received on 13 November 2006. Your request has been considered under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

My reasonable enquiries have included a review of your request, which is addressed below.

How many disabled people with learning difficulties Coventry City Council employs in manual jobs at the national minimum wage or above.

As mentioned in the letter acknowledging your request dated 16 November 2006, the Council holds information about the number of employees with a disability, but does not have a category that defines the nature of their disability e.g. learning difficulties. Therefore a figure for the number of disabled people with learning difficulties employed by Coventry City Council cannot be provided. However, a figure can be provided for the number of best value employees who have declared a disability. Best value employees are permanent employees or temporary employees with at least one year of service. As at 30th September 2006 this figure was 705.

Coventry City Council has implemented Single Status, which harmonises the working conditions of former manual and non-manual employees, which means that there is no longer a distinction between these groups of workers. However, in the absence of a definition of "manual" we have attempted to identify this group by making an assumption based on job titles. Of the 705 disabled employees, approximately 161 may have formerly been classified as manual. All of these people are paid at the national minimum wage or above.

Please note that most of the information that you request is owned by the Coventry City Council and subject to copyright protection. Under the Re-Use of Public Sector Information 2005 Regulations you are free to use this information for your own use or for the purposes of news reporting. However, any other type of re-use under the Regulations, for example; publication of the information or circulation to the public, will require permission of the copyright owner and may be subject to terms and conditions. For documents where the copyright does not belong to Coventry City Council you will need to apply separately to the copyright holder.

If you wish to apply to reuse the information you have requested or have any other issues relating to this request please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you are unhappy with the way the Coventry City Council has handled your request, you may ask for an internal review. Please contact the Information Governance Team, who will arrange an internal review of your case, at:

Information Governance Team

Customer & Business Services

Council House, Basement Room 5

Earl Street, Coventry.

CV1 5RR

If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:

Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely

Paul Harding

HR Adviser, Business Support

PinocchiJo the Puppet finally Responds

2006-11-29T22:51:00.000Z

Here's the two month delayed FOIA response from Jo Young.

Learning Disabilities Services
Old Wood Carvers Cottage
Surrey & Borders NHS Trust

Email: Jo.Young@sabp.nhs.uk

Provided on behalf of Chief Executive Geppetto Edwards

29th November 2006

I apologise for the delay in replying to your Freedom of Information Act request detailed below, and agree that the correct procedures have not been followed in handling this, however I am now able to give our formal response:

FOI Question

How many service users is the Trust currently paying the minimum wage or above to for manual work? I'm assuming this figure would have been made available during the "comprehensive review " of work services. If this information is not available because that review was not as comprehensive as the Trust claimed it was , please say so and address and answer this question as a FOIA request elsewhere.

Response

We do not hold contemporaneous information on the health status of our employees:

• Our information is limited to the declaration that people make on their disability status when they join the Trust or are appointed to a new post through the Trust’s recruitment process. This information would only indicate that a person considers themselves disabled – it would not include information on the nature of the disability, which would be held by our Occupational Health department.

• We do not classify jobs as ‘manual’ or ‘non-manual’.

• All Trust employees are paid above the national minimum wage. We apply the standard NHS pay structure, where the minimum hourly rate is approximately £6.00 per hour (£11,782 per annum for a standard 37.5 hour week).

In the circumstances we do not hold the information that you require in a published form and it would be a disproportionate effort to collate the information.

The Freedom Of Information Act 2000 states:

"Section 12 (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit."

If I can be of any further assistance to you, please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you are dissatisfied with the outcome of your enquiry, you have the right to appeal and in the first instance this should be to the Head of Healthcare Systems, Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust, Elaine Gould on 01737 281046 or email elaine.gould@sabp.nhs.uk

If you are still not satisfied with the outcome, you can write to:

The Information Commissioner

Wycliffe House,Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

Telephone: 01625 545700

Yours sincerely,

Jo Young
Jo Young
Director of Services for People with Learning Disabilities

c.c. Elaine Gould, Head of Healthcare Systems

Project Watch

2006-11-29T00:54:00.000Z

I guess we should all give Surrey & Borders Partbership Trust Chief Executive Fiona Edwards a big hug and sloppy kiss for finally agreeing to do what the Trust should have done in the first place.

All the same, we still need to keep a watchful eye on how the Therapeutic Payments project attempts to resolve things in practice and make sure that the ' External Expert 'the Trust is going to hire in isnt connected to the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health or its bungling academics as that would be a real insult to service users and taxpayers.

SABP's Work and Day Services ~ Payment Project Plan 1

2006-11-26T13:55:00.000Z

Work and Day Services ~ Payment Project Plan 1

Operations Directorate’s Work and Day Services: Payments Project Plan

1. Introduction
1.1. This paper sets out the planned approach to be adopted to ensure the Trust moves towards compliance with Benefits Regulations, Minimum Wage Act and Employment Law for all people using work and day services.

1.2. People who use the work and day services range from vulnerable to very vulnerable therefore the Trust has real obligation to treat people honestly and
properly.

1.3. People who use the service are not permitted by the European Law to suffer loss of their rights by virtue of their disability.

1.4. Once the individuals are paid anything, then “work” would be undertaken for
the purposes of the national minimum wage directive. Therapeutic work is not excluded from this framework directive.

1.5. Therefore it is hard to draw the line to distinguish at which point therapy would become work in the Trust’s work and day services.

1.6. The legal assessment of the work services indicated that unquestionably some people should be paid national minimum wage

1.7. At present no person attending the work or day services receive payment from
the Trust specifically for their services, nor does any person have a contract,
(implied, verbal or written) to provide such a service.

1.8. Therefore a comprehensive plan is needed which seeks to attain compliance whilst working to establish a proper agreement with people and / or their
representatives about any actual work done and any provision for disputes and
way of resolution.

2. Services Affected, People and Externalisation Dates

Number of people affected by the Trust decision Working Age Adults (WAA)
/People with learning disabilities (PLD)

Work Service Status Externalisation Date

Arts and Craft Matters Horley 40 WAA WAA April 2007

Assembly Matters, Horley 50 WAA/PLD Review WAA PLD Review April 2008

Netherne Printing Services 20 WAA / PLD WAA/PLD November 2006

Old Moat Garden Centre 34 WAA / PLD WAA/PLD April 2007

Queens Garden Centre 15 WAA April 2007

Gallwey, St Ebba’s 18 PLD No Plans

Geesemere, Ottershaw 36 PLD No Plans

Total number of people 213

* Number of people at time of posting letters

2.2. It is intended to prioritise the project plan to synchronise with the
externalisation dates.

2.3. People using the services already externalised before discontinuation of
payments have not been contacted

3. Apology and Reinstatement of Payments

3.1. All people who continue to use the services have received an individual letter of
apology and accessible information sheet explaining the decision to re-instate
payments.

3.2. All payments have recommenced using the previous payment formula.

4. Payment for Period of Stoppage

4.1. Services are currently collating details of the pay arrears people are entitled to
due to the stoppage of payments earlier this year.

4.2. Individualised solutions on how this money will be paid back will need to be
taken to ensure compliance with benefit allowances.

4.3. For some people it may take up to 52 weeks to repay all monies and stay
compliant with the benefits earnings limits.

4.4. It is recommended that people who did not attend, but have since returned,
should not be paid arrears.

5. Moving Towards Compliance Benefit Regulations

5.1. We need to protect the continued risk to benefit entitlement of people who use
the service by firstly gathering information on all people’s earnings, hours,
benefits and housing situation

5.2. It may be necessary to reduce hours of “work” to 16 per week (see section
5.12)

5.3. It will be necessary to establish “earning” limits for permitted work for each
person.

5.4. It is recommended that at this stage we do not contact Job Centre Plus until
our plan is agreed for each service and consent is attained from individuals.

5.5. People who use the services should be supported to understand their
responsibilities relating to benefits and earnings.

5.6. Services need to check with each individual any “work” in all places to establish
the total number of paid hours per week; total pay and additional expenses the
individual receives.

Existing Activity

5.7. The Trust needs to agree a process for assessing each service individually to
establish the nature of the activity being provided.

5.8. The “Tuck and Truck” model designed by MCCH should be used as a guide.

5.9. People who use the service and their representatives should be involved in
agreeing the criteria for this assessment.

5.10. Expert advice should be purchased to assist with this review.

5.11. A re-examination of the current payment structure should also be included in
this review.

5.12. The Trust will publish the findings of the review of activity for each service.

Review of Income Streams

5.13. Each service should produce a schedule of income, its source and the amount
paid per unit / product.

5.14. This should be reviewed against current market prices to ensure a fair price is
being received for the job.

5.15. Where the work unit is receiving less then the going open market rate for the
job then this should be negotiated.
6. Establishing and Implementing Plan (See Appendix One)

6.1. Set up guidelines:
6.1.1. For people working as volunteers including policies on subsistence
payments and notifying Job Centre Plus.

6.1.2. On Permitted Work rules and required procedures.

6.1.3. On payment of the Minimum Wage and employment law.

6.2. Work and Day Service should look at options for offering paid work at Minimum
Wage alongside voluntary work.

6.3. Timely negotiations with people who use services and carers will be required on
the new pay, and terms and conditions of employment (where this is to be
confirmed).

6.4. This will include the new pay and hours of work and the set up of appropriate
contracts of employment where it has been assessed that people have an
implied contract. Obtaining their agreement and signed terms and conditions.

6.5. Liaison with Job Centre Plus will then be necessary to ensure that there are no
misunderstandings over the terms and conditions, rates of pay and the
averaging rules.

6.6. Monitoring and support systems should be established and the provision of ongoing
support to individuals as needed should be made available during the
transition phase.

Jo Young

Director (PLD). 06 Nov, 06

Compiled with the assistance of Declan Flynn, General Manager. Working Age Adults and information
and references supplied by Charlotte Langridge, Surrey County Council.
Useful Reading

Lockett, H. and Scott, J. (2003) Work-Schemes and Compliance with the National
Minimum Wage: Moving from Project Worker to Employee (in press) Living Well
Brighton: Pavilion

Department for Trade and Industry (2003) The Minimum Wage and Therapeutic
Work London: TSO

Disability Rights Commission (2003) Submission to Green Paper, Pathways to Work:
Helping people into employment.

Department of Health (2001) The White Paper `Valuing People: A New Strategy for
Learning Disability for the 21st Century' Surrey County Council Employment Strategy, 2003

Appendix One
Payments Project Plan

Surrey and Border Partnership Trust Services

Background

Further to the cessation of therapeutic payments earlier this year, a paper was
presented to the Trust Board on 28th September stating that the Trust has not
treated people well in this decision and made the following recommendations which
the Board has approved:-

• Re-instate therapeutic payments and pay back payments
• Write a letter of apology to every individual affected by the cessation of
Therapeutic Payments

• Directorates will then undertake full reviews which will differentiate
between 'work' 'therapy' 'training' 'voluntary' work and assess each
individual situation and write an action plan

• This work will be carried out with people using the services, their families
and carers and care workers

This Project Plan describes what, how, who and when these recommendations will
be implemented.

What needs to be done How Who by When

Inform and apologise to affected people of services (MH & LD) of decision to reinstate Therapeutic Payments

Letters from Chief Executive Fiona Edwards sent to all affected people of services

Jo Young Via respective Service Managers
/ SeniorProfessionals By Friday 13th October ‘06

Identify affected people who use services who will receive Therapeutic back payments
Service Managers to provide precise information of all affected people of services for
their respective service areas – indicating sessions attended, benefits they are receiving,
income threshold, etc

Information to be passed to Jo Young

Respective Service Managers / Senior Professionals By Friday 24th November ‘06
Provide national definitions for ‘work' 'therapy' 'training' 'voluntary'
Liaise with Solicitors and people who use the service and their representatives on agreed
Definitions Jo Young & Service Managers By Friday 24th November ‘06

What needs to be done How Who by When

Appoint external consultant to assessment activity with respective Service Managers
and people who use the service Send to respective Service Managers Jo Young By Friday 15th December ‘06

Commence back payment of therapeutic Payments to affected people of services
Via normal payment arrangements at respective service Service Managers From Tuesday
2nd January ’07

Undertake reviews which will differentiate between 'work' 'therapy' 'training' 'voluntary'
work and assess each individual situation and write an action plan
Consultant / Service Manager /

Senior Professional to undertake assessments with individuals and their carers using agreed
assessment tool
Firstly to differentiate between ‘work’ ‘therapy’ ‘training’ ‘voluntary’ work

Secondly to assess each individual situation (via review meetings) and write actions plan
to reflect their specific needs and situation (involve people of services / carers
Communicate assessment to affected people of services (and carers) & support accordingly)
External consultant / Service Managers / Senior Professionals/relevant other

From Tuesday 2nd January ’07 Complete Friday 23rd January ‘ 07 Agree contracts, terms and
Pay Negotiate appropriate documentation, controls and supports for all people whether
workers or volunteers

Jo Young / Human Resources By February 2007

Declan Flynn and Jo Young ~ 31st October 2006

September Minutes & November Agenda Online

2006-11-24T00:37:00.000Z

Des curley

Rosemary Moore has flagged up that the minutes of the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust Board meeting of 28th September 2006 are now online along with the agenda for the next Trust Board meeting on 30th November 2006.

The Trust's Project Plan for Therapeutic Payments is also available

To see other Board papers reports go here

Lynda Bull's Response on Conventry City Council's failure to Consult, proposed £3 cuts, etc

2006-11-22T21:43:00.000Z

Des Curley

I received the following today from Midlands based Independent Services Monitor Paul Brian Tovey. Its a response from Lynda Bull , Head of Coventry City Council's Adult Social Care Group .I think its fair comment to say Ms Bull doesnt quite come across as a Freedom of Information champion and may appear to some to be a tad too anally retentive.

Dear Mr Tovey

Provision of requested information.

Thank you for your request for information regarding the Council's proposals concerning Learning Disability Service Users, which we received on 9th November 2006.

As you know there has been some subsequent E-Mail communication. Your request has been considered under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and a response to your questions given in your original and subsequent E Mails and also raised in your conversation with Jonathan Jardine is attached. I am aware that I have already responded to a number of these questions already and this response reflects this.

Please see Appendix 1.

Please note that most of the information that you request is owned by the Coventry City Council and subject to copyright protection. Under the Re-Use of Public Sector Information 2005 Regulations you are free to use this information for your own use or for the purposes of news reporting. However, any other type of re-use under the Regulations, for example; publication of the information or circulation to the public, will require permission of the copyright owner and may be subject to terms and conditions. For documents where the copyright does not belong to Coventry City Council you will need to apply separately to the copyright holder.

If you wish to apply to reuse the information you have requested or have any other issues relating to this request please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you are unhappy with the way the Coventry City Council has handled your request, you may ask for an internal review. Please contact the Information Governance Team, who will arrange an internal review of your case, at:

Information Governance Team

Customer & Business Services

Council House, Basement Room 5

Earl Street, Coventry.

CV1 5RR

If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:

Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely

Lynda Bull

Head of Adults Social Care Group

APPENDIX 1

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REF: 06-291 TOVEY

RESPONSES TO YOUR QUESTIONS:

1) What consultation took place with service users and their carers prior to the report to Cabinet on 31 October 06?
Response: We are consulting now - no decisions have yet been taken – the outcomes of the consultation will be feedback to Cabinet on 12 December 2006.

2) What exactly is the PCT's role in the provision of Coventry's LD service?
Response: Coventry Teaching PCT is now a commissioner of services. Specialist Learning Disability Mental Health services is now part of the Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust. Health Community Learning Disability services remains as part of Coventry Teaching PCT pending further service developments. The service is not a single integrated health and social care service. It is only partially integrated – e.g. social workers/nurses in community learning disabilities team. There are, however, Joint commissioning arrangements.

3) Is there a Section 31 agreement between Coventry City Council and Coventry Teaching Primary Care Trust for Learning Disability services?
Response: There is a Section 31 Agreement in relation to Learning Disabilities Development Fund – this is a small budget for development – it is not a commissioning or service budget.

4) To what extent does the close working on Learning Disability between Coventry City Council and Coventry Teaching Primary Care Trust imply a "section 11" Health and Social Care Act duty to consult demonstrably?

Response: We do not consider that there is a Section 11 requirement to consult demonstrably. That said, we are currently consulting and the outcomes of those consultations will be reported through a transparent democratic process. We also take the view that LAs have better track record in consultating on change and that a Section 11 duty (or similar directive) is not required.

5) Could you explain the nature of the involvement of the PCT with CROW ( an NHS body )

Response: CROW is a charitable organisation with a range of funding streams. The Council contracts with it for work based training as outlined in the Cabinet Report . There is no PCT involvement with CROW.
6. Would you please inform what Social Cares involvement is with the PCT broadly and on the 'Coventry Partnership Board'

Response: There are extensive partnership arrangements with the primary Care Trust from the Coventry Partnership at a strategic city level to joint working in specific social care areas. There are partnership boards for Older People, Mental Health, Learning Disabilities, Children and Young People and Physical and Sensory Impairment. Further information can be gained from the Coventry City Council Website where there are links to the Coventry Partnership and a number of the other partnerships.

Continuing Delays & Evasiveness in Responding to FOIA Requests

2006-11-18T11:41:00.000Z

Yesterday I received the following response from Jo Young, the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust's Director of Learning Difficulties Services

From Jo Young
cc Angie Ellis ,
Vicky Wattridge
date Nov 17, 2006 5:00 PM
subject RE: FOIA request ~ Work Service's Review

Dear Mr Des Curly,

I write to acknowledge your e mail and apologise for the delay that has occurred since the Board meeting ( September 28th 2006 )and you receiving my response. I thought that I was able to provide you with I thought was routine information relating to Work Services (that is the specific services that were subject to the review rather then the whole of the Trust). As this is not the case and you are seeking something other then this I have forwarded your request for information to our Information Governance Manager who will assist with our response.

I will be on annual leave next week so will follow this up with her on my return.

Yours sincerely

Jo

So, almost two months after I submitted my FOIA request to the Surrey & Borders Trust and it was read out by Chief Executive Fiona Edwards to the Trust Board it has finally been passed on to SABP's Information Governance Manager.

From Rosemary Moore , a Carer and Campaigner from Surrey

2006-11-17T13:19:00.000Z

Dear Jill

I think you are right to insist on proper answers before agreeing to have a personal meeting.

There are a lot of other things going on of course with S&B (as with all the Trusts) - the front page of a local paper today had a big story about the closure of the mental health unit at Ashford Hospital with a picture of a woman who is campaigning against this. She is one of the North Surrey reps on the FoCUS group so this should come up at the next main FoCUS meeting on 28 November.

We also have the ongoing inquiry into Daniel Gonzalez, the man from Woking who killed four people in London and is now in Broadmoor.

And today at the Old Bailey the "plea and case management" hearing for John Churchill from Surrey, who killed John McKenna within days of being discharged from the Abraham Cowley Psychiatric Unit in Surrey.

I have set up a blog for John Churchill to follow the progress of his case and to make sure that the information about him comes to public attention NOW.

Best wishes

Rosemary in Surrey

-------------------------------------------

from Des Curley

I would just add that the family of Denis Finnegan have said they want the officials responsible for John Barrett's health care sacked and that there are similar calls over another Care failure death where Maudsley Hospital staff turned away Andrew Howllett after he complained to them of hearing voices urging him to harm himself and attack other people and admitted he had a knife. Howlett later stabbed his neighbour Michael Gallagher to death in a totally unprovoked attack.

A Maudsley hospital spokesperson described the care Howlett received as "approproriate".

I think sacking a few Chief Executives to drive home public concern about widespread system failure and their dismissive attitudes towards it would be far more appropriate.

Follow up letter from Jill Goble

2006-11-16T15:12:00.000Z

Dear Jo Young and colleagues,

Thank you for your mail of November 10th below. I am afraid that there seems to be some confusion concerning the questions I have asked.

To clarify I will also summarise the questions that remain a problem.

First of all there seems to be a discrepancy of 20 people who have had their £3 a day payments reinstated in the 159 people you write about compared to the 179 disabled people Peter Kinsey stated were working in the Priority Enterprises in June. Could you please tell me what has happened to the other 20 people and their payments?

Secondly our question was not about the number of disabled people employed at the Priority Enterprises which as you see above was already answered by Peter Kinsey before he left. No our question referred to the number of disabled service users SABPT employs across the trust and in what positions? This is important for us to see what kind of an equal opportunity employer SABPT is and this is especially relevant given that the Richmond Fellowship which will provide no new jobs for service users has now been awarded a 5 year contract. I believe Des Curley has already written to you complaining we have received no answer to this question and our time is being wasted with the endless delays in receiving straightforward answers from SABPT.

Secondly I am also tired of not being given a straight answer concerning the Old Moat Enterprises accounts and sales figures. Before he left Peter Kinsey did tell me that the Old Moat makes a £150,000 loss but he did not give me the accounts or the sales figures or say how these figures were arrived at. I want to know the specific details of sales figures and staff costs etc so we can work out what alternative plans for the centre are in the disabled workers best interests. This is especially important considering MCCH Ltd are producing a report in December concerning their plans for the Old Moat. I do not see how this information can be kept from us on the grounds that it is commercially sensitive as we already know that the Old Moat makes a £150,000 loss. I just want more detailed information about the accounts which all commercial businesses have to make public knowledge anyway. Why should SABPT hide information from us on these grounds and why do you not know the information by now considering I originally asked the question months ago? Please let me have the accounts and sales figures without anymore delaying tactics.

As far as arranging a meeting with you is concerned I do not think this would be productive until we have answers to these outstanding questions and have also seen the MCCH Ltd report on the Old Moat which is not due until December.

Please can you answer our questions without further delays.

Yours Sincerely

Jill Goble

CONSULTATION RIGHTS & PCT ROLE AT CROW RECYCLING IN COVENTRY

2006-11-15T17:39:00.000Z

In addition to campaigning against the exploitation of Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust's disabled garden centre workers we have been following similar eventsin Coventry where disabled workers in various work schemes therehavehad their £3 a day payments cut and are now expected to work for nothing. As the Coventry and Surrey issues are clearly related Paul, who is based in the Midlands is doing some excellent follow-up work and keeping us posted.

To The Coventry Council OSC Officer Jonathon Jardine & Andy Bennett PCT Commsioner

CONSULTATION RIGHTS & PCT ROLE AT CROW RECYCLING

Dear Jonathon

Thankyou for your attention , reference my phone call to you today .

I do think it is a good idea to raise several matters with the Chair Of The OSC as you have suggested .

I would like to know whether or not the local PCT has any input into CROW Recycling and what the nature of that is ... I can ofcourse seperately ask them and so I will for ease include Andy Bennet NHS PCT Commisioner for Learning Disabilities into this email . Perhaps it a good idea to join everyone together like this because Andy is on a Partnership Board with Social Care according to documents I have seen.

There is another point here that according to Lynda , Section 11 rights of consultation does not apply to the Learning Disability Users of Social Care at CROW recycling works. Section 11 gives the right of "evidenced" consultation where it applies . Where social care services form contracts with the NHS within an overall section 31 agreement with the NHS which seconds them under the section 31 agreement there is a duty I would argue to Sect 11. consult where there is a variance of service . Having £3 a day taken away from Users is a significant variance for those affected.

From what Lynda states though Section 11 does not apply . Apparently there is no section 31 agreement existing in Coventry between NHS and Social Care Services Perhaps we can confirm that also with your help . As you know in other parts of the country Sect 31 agreements between Councils and Local Health Care has happened ..

However consultation of a high standard on an important set of Issues affecting vulnerable Users at CROW should be seen to be done ..

According to information I have received :

The time line for consulting CROW Service Users was :

24th Oct Letter received from Senior Learning Disablities Manager (Mark Godfrey) about Council intention to "modernise" etc

Service Users at CROW got it on the 26th

A meeting for Parents & Carers of Service Users at CROW was arranged then on the 27th

By the 31st Oct the Full Cabinet met to put through their proposals for cuts to the £3 a day payments

The feeling was that it was all pretty rushed ...

In fact that was about 5 working days and a weekend .... That is not good at all ..

I want to make this very concerned observation that vulnerable Service Users need time to take in their rights and a longer time to reflect on them. They are not as articulate as Social Care Officers or high powered Councillors. Social Care Services and the Council really should be less rushed to make determinations that appear to be systemically driven which alter levels of support without looking at individual impact on Service Users like those with learning disability .

Regards

Paul Brian Tovey

Independent Monitor Mental Health Matters

Swingeing Decision to Cut £3 disregard payments in Coventry to go before Scrutiny Committee.

2006-11-14T13:27:00.000Z

The Leader of the Labour Group on Coventry City Council has sent us the following message:

Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding the ceasation of the £15 per week disregard to people with learning difficulties.

I would like to inform you that all members of the Labour Group of Councillors voted against this proposal at the meeting of full Council. In addition to this we have "called in " the item and insisted that the Cabinet Member appear before Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee to answer questions and account for the decision.

The meeting will be held at 1-00 p.m. on Wednesday 22nd. November will be held in public ( at Council House, Earl Street , Coventry CV1 5RR , see map below and check room number on Notifications Board opposite 1st Floor lift on day ) which means that yourself and anyone else that is interested can attend and listen to the debate.

I hope that interested parties do their best to attend.

Yours sincerely,

John Mutton,
Leader of the Labour Group.
Coventry Council Council House

click to enlarge

The Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee & its Roles

The city council has established four Scrutiny Boards and an over-arching Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee. These are made up of Councillors from across the political parties. Some of the Boards include co-opted members of the public.

The roles of the Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee are to:

Develop and manage Scrutiny in the Coventry City Council

Co-ordinate and monitor the work of the four Scrutiny Boards

Undertake cross-cutting reviews

Consider 'call-ins' - where Councillors want to discuss in more detail decisions that have already been taken by the Cabinet.

Current Membership of Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee & Contact Details

Councillors:

M Asif

G. Duggins George.Duggins@coventry.gov.uk

N Lee

J. Mutton John.Mutton@coventry.gov.uk

B. Patton Brian.Patton@coventry.gov.uk

Here is the agenda from the Coventry City Councils CMIS webpages

Agenda - Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee

Time and Date 12:00 noon on Wednesday, 22nd November, 2006 PLEASE NOTE START TIMEDIFFERS FROM ABOVE
Place Committee Rooms, Council House, Coventry

1Public Business

1 Apologies and Substitutions
2 Declarations of Interests
3 Minutes of the meetings held on 25th October (attached)
4 Consideration of Call ins

4.1 Call ins Stage 2

To consider the following call in from the Members shown. In accordance with the
Scrutiny Procedure Rules, these Members have been invited to attend the meeting for
the consideration of their call in and at least one of them must attend the meeting or the call-in will fail.

4.1.1 Cabinet 31st October, 2006 (Councillor H Noonan)

Delivering Modernisation and Efficiencies in Social Care in Order to
Balance the Budget in Learning Disabilities Services Joint Report (attached)
Called in by:-(1) Councillors Mutton, Kelly and Clifford

The reason for the call in is, "To better understand how lowering peoples income helps to promote independence."

(2) Councillors Maton, Kelly and Clifford

The reason for the call in is, " To understand the impact of the day care
review for older people and its impact on service users given the anticipated
saving of £223,000. To assess the reality of being able to achieve paid for
real work opportunities for the client group – the availability of appropriate
jobs, access to appropriate training and the existence of agencies to provide
job brokerage and in-work support to enable this aspiration to be delivered.
To understand why there is anticipated to be a reduction in demand for
supporting people staff at a time when client group numbers are increasing.

To also understand the implication of the reduction in posts in the
Performance Improvement Unit at a time when savings are anticipated in
the Social Care budget through improved performance. To understand the
nature of Contract Efficiency Savings – when the report highlights the
difficulty in delivering such efficiencies in the past. To understand the
impact of cuts in services through withholding inflation allowances. To
review the implications of maintaining, through the increased management
of vacancies, more unfilled posts."

(3) Councillors Nellist, Windsor and Ms McKay

The reason for the call in is, " To question the strategy that 'independence
will be promoted' by the measures proposed and to explore the necessity of
the deletion of posts."

NOTE: (i) The Cabinet amended recommendation 2.1 of the report considered by
the addition of the following to the end of the paragraph:-
"subject to any further consultation with the appropriate Trade
Unions, and that any amendment to the proposals be submitted to
the Cabinet Meeting on the 12th December, 2006."
The Cabinet noted that Paragraph 5.8.1.5 of the report should be
deleted and replaced with the wording set out on report 4.1.1(a)
attached.

(ii) All Members calling in the decision indicated above have indicated that
attendance by the relevant Cabinet Member is required for the Stage 2
consideration of this item.

(iii) All Members calling in the decisions indicated above have indicated that
they wish the matter to be referred on to the relevant Scrutiny Board
after consideration by the Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee.

4.1.2 Cabinet 31st October, 2006 (Councillor Ridley)

Review of Library Buildings
Report of the Director of Community Services (attached)
Called in by Councillors Nellist, Windsor and Ms McKay
The reason for the call in is, "To further understand the rationale behind the
closure proposal and the suitability of alternative provision for the residents of
the area."

NOTE: (i) The Members calling in the decision indicated above have indicated that
attendance by the relevant Cabinet Member is required for the Stage 2
consideration of this item.

(ii) The Members calling in the decisions indicated above have indicated
that they wish the matter to be referred on to the relevant Scrutiny Board
after consideration by the Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee.

2 4.1.3 Cabinet 31st October, 2006 (Councillor Blundell)

Lease Terms for New Academy to Replace Woodway Park School
Joint Report (attached)

Called in by Councillors Nellist, Ms McKay and Windsor
The reason for the call-in is, "To understand why it is proposed to grant a 125
year lease on the Woodway Park Site."

NOTE: (i) The Members calling in the decision indicated above have indicated that
attendance by the relevant Cabinet Member is required for the Stage 2
consideration of this item.

(ii) The Members calling in the decisions indicated above have indicated
that they wish the matter to be referred on to the relevant Scrutiny Board
after consideration by the Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee.

4.2 Call ins - Stage 1
The Director of Legal and Democratic Services will report on any call ins that have been received.

In relation to each call in received:- a) to determine whether or not it is appropriate, using the agreed criteria. b) if it meets the criteria, to decide which Cabinet Members/officers should attend when the call in is considered.
5 Scrutiny Annual Report

Report of the Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee (attached)

6 Outstanding Issues Report of the Director of Legal and Democratic Services (attached).

7 2006/07 Work Programmes

7.1 To give consideration to the Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee's Work Programme
for 2006/07 (attached)

7.2 To note any changes to the work programmes for Scrutiny Boards (1), (2), (3) and
(4). 8 Any other items of public business which the Chair decides to take as matters of urgency because of the special circumstances involved.

Private Business

Nil
3
Christopher R Hinde, Director of Legal and Democratic Services, Council House, Coventry Tuesday 14th November, 2006

Notes: 1) The person to contact about the agenda and documents for this meeting is Alison Townsend, Council House, Coventry. Telephone 7683 3080, email alison.townsend@coventry.gov.uk.

2) Substitutes - Council Members who are not able to attend the Meeting should notify Alison
Townsend (tel. 7683 3080) as soon as possible and no later than 12 noon on Wednesday,
22nd November, 2006, giving their reasons for absence and the name of the Council Member (if any) who will be attending the meeting as their substitute.
3) Scrutiny members who have an interest in any report referred to at this meeting, but who are not members of this Committee are invited to notify the Chair by 12 noon on the day before the meeting that they wish to speak on a particular item. The Member must indicate to the Chair their reason for wishing to speak and the issue(s) they wish to raise. Membership: Councillors Asif, Bains, Clifford (Co-opted Member), Duggins, Lee, Mutton, Ridge (Deputy Chair), Sawdon (Chair) and Williams

If you would like this information in another format
or language please contact us:-
Telephone: (024) 7683 3080
Fax: (024) 7683 3024
e-mail: alison.townsend@coventry.gov.uk
4

SABP's Delays & Evasiveness in Dealing with FOIA Requests

2006-11-14T12:40:00.000Z

After Jill Goble was forced to remind Surrey and Borders partnership MHS Trust to respond to outstanding Freedom of Information requests I got a long delayed and completely evasive response from the Trust .

The following picks up where we are now.

from Jo Young
to Des Curley
cc Wilhelmina Cox ,Jill Goble
date Nov 13, 2006 3:14 PM
subject RE: FOIA request ~ Work Service's Review

Dear Des

I write to acknowledge receipt of your e mail as requested.

My response to your FOIA request was not intended to be evasive ~ and I will look at this again and provide you with a response.

I am uncertain why you think it would be appropriate for you to invoice the Trust as you suggest and would appreciate further clarification in that regard.

Thank you
~ Jo

Jo Young (Director PLD)
T: 01276 605 555 M: 07770 876028

Ms Young,

The Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust's attitude to answering FOIA requests has not only been evasive , the requirement to respond to requests within the timeframe set out in the FOIA legislation has simply been viewed as optional, most notably by you.

My written FOIA request was submitted in late September 2006 and I have now waited almost two months for a simple answer Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust's Chief Executive Fiona Edwards probably already knew when I discussed the question, and my reasons for asking it , with her in front of the Trust Board and you at the Board meeting on 28th September 2006.

Following this discussion , your fellow Trust Board member Roshan Bailey also made it clear to the Chief Executive that she thought it was very important for the Trust to answer my question precisely because it related to the Trust's own record as an Equal Opportunities Employer and , potentially, Barriers to Employment and Employer Discrimination.

Your failure to apply and adhere to the FOIA procedures in your handling of my FOIA request - and there appears to be a pattern of this - imposed work on and cost me time and money so rather than wasting more of my time assuming that you have some right to demand I explain myself to you, would you kindly provide the address of whichever department deals with invoices please because if I am forced to waste more time going around you to find out , I'll invoice for the Trust for this as well. In the meantime, would you please answer my question.

I trust this clarifies matters.

Please acknowledge receipt

Desmond Curley

Protest About Closures & Lack of Consultation in Epsom

2006-11-12T05:10:00.000Z

It seems service users arent the only ones questioning cuts, level of consultation and externalisation of services as NHS staff and members of the public plan to demonstrate in Epsom. Any information on this would be warmly welcomed as might be interesting to hand a few leaflets out on day.

"Thousands of people have taken to take to the streets of Leeds to protest over NHS cuts.

Demonstrations like this have drawn enormous support at events across England, prompted by concerns over job losses and possible cuts in services.

Many politicians and activists are scornful of the public consultations over these changes.

Just why is there such deep public mistrust?

Last month thousands of demonstrators packed the centre of Guildford. There have been similar protests in Hayward's Heath and Worthing.

I think it's fantastic that local people care so much about the health service
Candy Morris , South East Coast Regional Health Authority

There is another coming up in Epsom - all about saving local hospitals.

Rumours are rife about cuts in services. There is going to be a consultation, but protestors were wary of a stitch-up.

"I'm hoping this rally will do something," said one, "but I don't think that it will have much effect because I think it may be a fait accompli."

Another said: "I don't trust them. I think it's all done and dusted. I think it's all about money."

Big deficit

Surrey has five major hospitals. It is easy to see why campaigners fear the worst.

The local NHS region is heading for a deficit of more than £90million. Yet services have to be financially sustainable.

Surrey & Borders Refuses to disclose how Many service Users it Employs

2006-11-11T13:24:00.000Z

Des Curley

Yesterday I received the following delayed and totally evasive response to my Freedom of Information requestof September 18th 2006 which I also put in person to Surrey and Borders Chief Executive Fiona Edwards and Trust Board at the pre-AGM Board Meeting the following day.

I asked how many service users the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust employed in manual jobs at the national minimum wage.

Ms Edwards, who dodged answering the question at the time although she was clearly aware of the figure , and the Trust Board were clearly aware that I was not limiting this question to the Trust's work services but trying to establish what the Trust's track record was as an employer of its own service users as we already obviously knew the Trust expected those involved in its exploitative work services to work for nothing as this is the reason why this blog exists.

The Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust is desperately trying to conceal the fact that it is guilty of employment discrimination and prefers to have people with mental health and learning difficulties do odd jobs around the Trust like filling envelopes for nothing rather than pay them the national minimum wage and employ them under the same terms and conditions of employment as non-disabled employees.

This campaign has managed to help restore the pathetic £3 a day payments that Fiona Edwards on a salary of around £120,000 deemed it necessary to deprive from the 150 or so disabled workers using her Trust's work services but we need to move on from there to get any disabled person working for the Trust or its work services externalised to or still being greedilly eyed over by MCCH Ltd and the Richmond Fellowship paid at the national minimum wage level or above.

We should not view helping to get the exploited disabled workers their £3 a day back as a victory as it is totally disgusting that they were expected to work for so little in the first place .

There is no excuse for Surrey and Borders ,the above charities or anyone else to force disabled people to work for nothing or £3 a day while triggering massive payments for themselves for doing this.

Take a look at the people in the pictures scrolling by above, these largely elderly professionals grew up in a society where it was commonplace to simply pity and infantalise people with disabilities while viewing working on their behalf as somehow virtuous in its own right.i.e.These people are good people because they work with people with disabilities.

In fact they are exploiting and living off the very people they claim to ' care ' for since their disability employment schemes are an unwaged ghetto walled in by barriers to mainstream employment that these people and their organisations have erected to ensure that they not their service users generate an income.

Barriers like the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust not bothering to employ its own service users , barriers like MCCH Ltd and the Richmond Fellowship basing work on imposed volunterism to fund and perpetuate themselves and create impressions of success that simply do not bear up to scrutiny .

The huge growth in the disability employment industry with its prevailing model of workers engaging in work preparation , work placements , work opportunities and other jargonistc variants of unpaid work is exploitative and that growth has only occured because there is a ready political supply of funding unattached to any meaningful requirement to audit these schemes for effectiveness rather than any real demand for these fraudulent exploitative schemes from service users.

Disabled people who are able and want to work should be able to do so without being exploited and abused by these self-serving parasitical organisations, they should have access to professional recruitment and employment agencies and real paid employment training and work.

This is not available instead we see millions of pounds being wasted on the useless disability employment sector as organisations like MCCH Ltd , the Richmond Fellowship and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health fall over each other to shunt service users , whether they are able to or want work or not, into useless unpaid disability work schemes to pay themselves nice salaries or, in SCMH's case, to make fraudulent claims about being academic disability employment experts.

Its funny how Helen Lockett and Dr Bob Groves, who both made sure thay took a cut out of the Surrey and Borders externalisation project, never commented on the barriers to employment and employee discrimination the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust clearly maintians in place and continues to try to conceal.

These people are simply targetting service users with their useless unpaid disability work schemes - which also route funding away from non-work related provision - because it funds their status, careers and lifestyles rather than provides disabled people who are able and want to work in real jobs at the national minmum wage or above the law says they are entitled to.

Here's the response from Surrey & Borders totally avoiding the question of how many service users it pays the minimum wage or above to for doing ordinary manual work these exploitative disability employment schemes make them do for nothing.
.

from Jo Young

Wilhelmina Cox ,
Angie Ellis ,
Vicky Wattridge
date Nov 10, 2006 4:59 PM
subject FOIA request ~ Work Service's Review

Dear Desmond

As the Director now responsible for leading on the 'Payments Project' I am contacting you regarding your question raised at our Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust Board on 28th September 2006. Your question was with regards the numbers of people who use the services currently being paid the minimum wage or above for manual work and this was specifically related to the work services.

I can tell you that as of the 28th September 2006 we wrote to 159 people who attended Netherne Print, Assembly Matters, Art and Crafts Matters, Old Moat Garden Centre and Queens Park

Garden Centre. All of these people were previously receiving "therapeutic payments" for their attendance. All of these people have had these payments re-instated.

None of these individuals are employed by Surrey and Boarders Partnership NHS Trust

Please contact me if you require anything further.

Jo Young

Director (PLD), SABP, Ridgewood Centre, Old Bisley Road, Frimley, Surrey. GU16 9QE

T: 01276 605555 M: 07770 876028

jo.young@sabp.nhs.uk

..but wait there's more, a legalstic disclaimer that could have been written by the Monty Python team. These people would have made great Nazi's as they are paying lawyers to draft this shit to intimidate their own service users.

Is this the modern face of professional care ?

This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are notified that any use, dissemination or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error please notify the sender and delete it immediately.

Any information, statements or opinions contained in this message (including any attachments) are given by the author. They are not given on behalf of the Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust unless subsequently confirmed by an individual, other than the author, who is authorised to represent Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust.

Coventry City Council Bombs on TV over Stingy £3 Cuts

2006-11-10T21:29:00.000Z

Paul Tovey

BBC Midlands Today have run the Coventry Story about the swingeing cuts of £3k + ref the recycling charity CROW on Teatime TV...

Nina Jones reported :

Barbara Cowling for the Charity has written to all the Councillors in the Coventry Council protesting about the cuts .

Two Service Users on camera spoke up to BBC about their feelings and were unhappy about the situation ..

Councillor Noonan when interviewed put forward the argument that the cuts of £3 a day to the 'workers' was also a measure to help them become independent workers.

Letter from Jill to Karen Wooding of MCCH Ltd

2006-11-10T21:21:00.000Z

MCCH Ltd

Dear Karen Wooding,

Thank you for your mail of October 25th below.

A short time before your mail I did find out from the Primary Care Trust that MCCH Ltd have been doing a consultation on the Old Moat garden centre and have not yet been awarded a contract to run the place. I understand that a report following your consultation is due in December and I have put in a Freedom of Information Act request for our campaign to see this report as soon as it becomes available.

I am glad to hear that MCCH Ltd have never been involved in a situation where service users become worse off financially as a result of any action you have taken. I hope that therefore your report will recommend the disabled workers at the garden centre receive at least 3 hours employed work paying at least the minimum wage or above each week. This would mean that none of them become financially worse off as a result of any new regime that is adopted at the centre. Less than 3 hours paid work a week and they would be better off continuing to receive their, already derisory, £3 a day payments..

As far as your ‘Paying a Real Wage’ guide is concerned it is the extensive use of volunteer labour that is advocated which I consider to be exploitative rather than a model of good practice as you claim. I think that volunteer labour in these work projects is itself a loophole which is used to avoid paying the minimum wage or above. For example in the guide the project Tuck by Truck is used as a model of good practice. In this project the workload is divided into jobs which pay the minimum wage and jobs which are done by volunteers.. Quoting from the report: ‘ The most significant change was to separate the tasks service users carried out into paid and volunteer jobs, so that working at the base preparing the snack trays, stock rotation, pricing etc would be volunteer work, whereas all aspects of delivering the trays to customers would be paid work.’

From this I see no valid reasons, other than avoiding paying the minimum wage or above, why the work producing snack trays, stock rotation and pricing should go unpaid?

It very much sounds like exploitation to expect this kind of work to be done by disabled people for free and I cannot imagine a situation where non disabled people would be expected to volunteer for such tasks. My thinking that this is exploitation is shared in a government guide which I found on the Valuing People website and keep quoting in this campaign. It reads as follows:

From 'You can work it out. Best practice in employment for people with a learning difficulty’:

"As services seek to help people find more meaningful activities than sitting around in day centres, employment is acknowledged as playing a crucial role in people's lives. But success in getting people in to paid work remains woefully inadequate. Instead, services have created a world based on work for which few people get paid. There is a growing variety of training, social enterprises, work-related projects, work experience and volunteering schemes. There are people who to all intents and purposes are working, but who receive little or no payment.
This is illegal unless there is genuinely no obligation to attend and no obligation to do anything. There are people who are described as volunteering- this conveniently gets around the issue of employment contracts and payments. These situations are exploitative."

This guide can be found at: www.valuingpeople.gov.uk

On another matter I do appreciate that the Paying a Real Wage guide does go a long way in explaining the rules concerning working and the impact this has on benefits. This has been an area of some confusion and I believe it would be helpful if MCCH Ltd published this information on the web for those who would find it useful. In this campaign the guide is the only document I have had to send for by snail mail and could not just read freely on the internet. Could you please tell me why MCCH Ltd has failed to put the information concerning benefit rules from the guide onto the web?

The useful information about benefits does not detract from the essential problem of exploiting disabled workers by making them work hard as unpaid volunteers. This seems to be a national problem and a recent report suggested disability is widely being used as an excuse not to pay at least the minimum wage or above.

As far as a meeting with MCCH ltd is concerned we are reluctant to do this in view of your refusal to have the meeting taped as we like to have all communications open and up for everyone to see on the campaign site. However there may be much more to discuss once we have seen a copy of your report on the garden centre in December. We would therefore like to leave your offer of a meeting open for the time being.

It has been the consensus of opinion among campaigners to leave the photos on our site up and the reasons for this you can see in the blog comments online.

Finally can I stress that at the camapign we seek to see that any changes at the Old Moat garden centre will be in the best possible interests of the disabled workers.

Yours Sincerely

Jill Goble

> Message Receiv

First Surrey, now Coventry For Shame! :"We earn £3 a day - and we're going to lose that"

2006-11-10T01:51:00.000Z

By Dayle Crutchlow

PEOPLE with learning disabilities working at a Coventry-based recycling charity are furious over a decision to strip them of their £3-a-day earnings.

John Gatter, Rachel Wells and Andrew Farrington work several days a week at Crow Recycling, in Sparkbrook Street, Hillfields.

And for their efforts, they have been receiving a £3 daily allowance from Coventry City Council.

The Coventry Telegraph reported last week how councillors had voted to scrap that to save money - but the workers say they are being treated unfairly.

Rachel Wells, aged 28, from Bell Green, said: "I'm not happy. I work hard here and I deserve that money."

John Gatter, aged 59, from Chester Street, in Coundon, said: "I think they should still pay us the money.

"People working in factories wouldn't stand for it so why should we? We are more vulnerable."

The workers will also lose their subsidised lunches - council bosses say this will encourage 'independent living'.

John Bolton, director of adult services for the city council, said the cuts were necessary to plug a £2.2million shortfall on next year's budget in learning disabilities.

But centre manager Barbara Cowling described the money it cost to pay Crow Recycling's five placements as "peanuts" and said letters of protest had been sent to all 54 city councillors.

The plans still need to go to full council on December 12.

Letter to Wilhelmina Cox

2006-11-09T03:11:00.000Z

Letter from Jill to Wilhelmina Cox,PA to Fiona Edwards, Chief Executive of Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust.

Dear Wilhelmina,

Thank you for your email of the 23rd October below. I welcome the offer you make for our campaign to discuss our outstanding issues and concerns with Jo Young. However we also expect our Freedom of Information Act questions to be answered in writing by Fiona Edwards and/or the other relevant managers, as is legally required. We believe that answers to these questions will influence our future discussions with Jo Young and others.

In particular we are still waiting for an answer to the FOIA question asked at your board meeting in September about the number of service users Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust (SABPT) employs and in what positions?

Since writing to you last I have been very disappointed to find out from the Primary Care Trust that a five year contract to run the Priority Enterprises work schemes, excluding the Old Moat Garden Centre, has already been awarded to the Richmond Fellowship, although some of these schemes will not transfer over until next year. I understand this means that the disabled workers £3 a day payments will not be continued and neither will any hope the workers could have had of opportunities to hold down real jobs paying at least the minimum wage or above be fulfilled under the Richmond Fellowship regime. This is one of the reasons our campaign believes that the contract with the Richmond Fellowship is not in the best interests of the disabled workers. I am still waiting to see a detailed copy of this contract that has been awarded to the Richmond Fellowship.

I have also found out from the Primary Care Trust that no contract has yet been awarded to run The Old Moat Garden Centre. MCCH Ltd has been doing a consultation on the centre and their report is due in December. My original FOIA questions asked for details of the accounts of the Priority Enterprises and in particular I want to know details concerning the Old Moat Garden Centre sales figures and running costs. In view of the fact that a contract has not yet been awarded it is essential we see detailed accounts of the Old Moat in order to be able to compare alternative plans for the centre.

Other campaigners such as Mr Des Curley and Mr Paul Tovey have put separate FOIA requests to you and these also need to be answered in writing as is legally required.
As I say, we welcome the opportunity to discuss outstanding matters with Jo Young but we also expect our FOIA questions to be answered in writing as soon as possible bearing in mind that some answers are already months late.

I am sending copies of this mail to Fiona Edwards, Jo Young and other relevant persons.

Yours Sincerely

Jill Goble

Letter from Surrey County Council NOT explaining how service users were officially manipulated & lied to by SABP & ended up worse off .

2006-11-02T22:48:00.000Z

MENTAL HEALTH& LEARNING DISABILITY SERVICES
3RD floor Grosvenor House
Cross Lanes
GUUILDFORD
Surrey GU1 1FA

30 October 2006

Dear Mr Curley

Transfer of Old Moat Garden Centre

You wrote to David Davis, Chairman of Surrey County Council on 23 October 2006 making a formal complaint about the handling of the externalisation of the work services in East Surrey. As the Head of Service for Mental Health and Learning Disability I have been asked to respond formally to your complaint. Having examined the content of your correspondence I can give you an outline of the involvement of Surrey Council Council and an overview of the process that lead to the externalisation which I hope addresses the issues you raise.

Surrey County Council is the joint commissioner of the work and day services in partnership with the new Surrey Primary Care Trust for the services provided by the NHS Trust as well as those provided by the voluntary sector in East Surrey. The services run by Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust (formally Surrey Oaklands NHS Trust) had been under review for over five years. There was a lack of clear direction for many of the services and the Trust was questioning whether these type of services should be the core business of the NHS. Referrals to the services were low and there was concern about the morale of service users and staff.

There was a concern from Commissioners that these services, although valued by the people who used them, were not meeting many other people’s needs and were not providing best value for money. The services provided by the NHS Trust were part of a much larger service level agreement which made it very difficult to establish accurate reporting and accountability for the services provided.

In our role as joint Commissioners, Surrey County Council and the former East Surrey Primary Care Trust and East Elmbridge & Mid Surrey Primary Care Trust commissioned a review of these services with the intention of re-tendering the services. This in our view was a process that would seek to ensure that services were value for money and of the highest quality for service users. The NHS Trust was eligible to participate in the tendering process but early on in the review process they decided not to do so as they did not see the provision of day and employment services as part of their core business.

Having established the commissioning intentions, the primary drivers behind the change process were to:-

* Gain better outcomes for current and future service users, particularly

o Support to gain and maintain employment
o Support to take part in the local community

* Modernise the services in line with the National Service Framework for Mental Health, the recommendations of the Social Inclusion Unit Report (2004), Valuing People (2001) and Our Health, Our Carer, Our Say White Paper (2006).

* Offer co-ordinated and flexible services which would allow individuals to create their own care and support pathways

* Be more responsive to individual’s needs in local areas, ensuring equality of access and an increased range and choice of services

* Attract new funding sources

* Bring in specialists in the area of employment from the voluntary sector building partnerships with the voluntary sector in line with Surrey Compact

* Involve service users and carers in the design, running and evaluation of services.

A Work Services Commissioning Group was established to oversee the change process comprising of representatives from the main organisations including service user and carer representation. Surrey County Council was represented on the Group by Donal Hegarty (Policy & Commissioning Manager, Adult Mental Health & Substance Misuse Services). This Group advertised for a Project Manager and following formal interviews Helen Lockett was appointed.

The Work Services Commissioning Group oversaw the review of the services, the development of new commissioning specifications, the tender process which was lead by Surrey County Council, the shaping of the final proposal and the public consultation process. Service users and carers were involved in the interviews for the Project Manager, developing the new service specifications, evaluating the tender submissions and shaping the final proposal.

The Work Services Commissioning Group also took the case for change to Surrey County Council Procurement Review Group (December 2004), the Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee (November 2005), East Surrey Primary Care Trust Board Meeting (November 2005) and Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust Board (January 2006).

In terms of the concerns you raised about monitoring the new Contracts we now have clear commissioning specifications which are based on what service users and Carers told us they wanted from the services. All contracts have delivery targets which include regular service evaluation. The recent appointment of a NHS Commissioning Manager for Mental Health in East Surrey will strengthen the performance monitoring process.

You also raised concerns about Helen Lockett and her past work with MCCH, particularly the Paying a Wage Guide. The Work Services Commissioning Group was fully aware of the curriculum vitea (CV) of Helen Lockett and were particularly impressed with her work with Bob Groves who acted as her Mentor throughout ( he's actually her line manager at SCMH ) the project management. Bob Groves is a national expert on employment issues and as such we were delighted with Helen’s appointment as Project Manager. For your clarification Helen was not involved in the evaluation of the tenders or the selection of any of the new providers.

With regard to the assertion that the organisations are making a profit from the work, can I reassure you that the new voluntary sector providers are all not for profit providers and all their spend on services is both transparent and accountable.

Finally Surrey County Council and Surrey Primary Care Trust are committed to ensuring this service becomes a model of good practice in Surrey raising the profile of work opportunities for vulnerable people with mental health problems,. That is why we have committed to a five year contract with Richmond Fellowship and any comparisons with service cuts in Swindon are not relevant to the situation in Surrey.

I apologise for the rather lengthy and detailed response but I felt it was important that I addressed all the issues you raised demonstrating that the externalisation of the work service in East Surrey was a transparent and inclusive process that will benefit vulnerable service users with mental health problem both in the short and long term

I hope this response addresses all the issues you raised but if you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Dave Sargeant

Head of Service - Mental Health & Learning Disability

Families Directorate – Adult Services

Cc David Davis, Chairman SCC

Andrew Webster, Strategic Director for Families (for information)

Sally Marks, CC & Executive Member (for information)

Donal Hegarty, Policy & Commissioning Manager, Adult MH (for information)