I suppose that this is my territory in the sense that, over the past 15 years, we have been experiencing the gradual commercialisation or marketisation—call it what you will—of a lot of what the voluntary sector does under contract to local government. I think that the method of commissioning is part of the problem. I do not see enough of a cultural shift away from people saying, “We need to write a contract for it and have different groups competing. That’s the way we’re going to get best value for the public pound.” When we apply that method to the kind of issues and interventions that we are talking about this morning, we realise that it is just not the right method. The public sector needs to find new interventions beyond make or buy—that is, if we cannot throw more professionals at a problem, we will have a competition to see who gets the money—because neither of those strategies really works.
First, in public policy terms, we need to better appreciate the contribution that the groups make and that people make to their own health and wellbeing. Secondly, the state has to nurture—that is my word for it—and support the initiatives that are out there in a much more strategic way. I do not know whether European procurement rules get in the way of that—that is the kind of stuff that is thrown back at us, and I was never a great believer in it. We need to get round those barriers and support the fantastic things that go on.
The committee heard recently from Michelle McCrindle of Food Train. I had the privilege of spending a day at Food Train’s Dumfries operation, during which I went out with the drivers and met the housebound people. What a fantastic service it is. What an extraordinary experience it was, not just for the recipients, who were really appreciative and engaged, but for the people who were volunteering for Food Train, too. Some three weeks later, I learned that the volunteer driver that I was with had been sanctioned by the Department for Work and Pensions. Because he was volunteering for Food Train, he was considered unavailable for work. That little microcosm of a story tells us that we have a long way to travel.
Food Train is an interesting operation. In a way, community transport has the same problem in that its method of operation—what delivers the real benefit—is not the subject of competitive tendering locally to decide who can deliver the most efficient service. It is about not numbers but the quality of the relationship. You cannot write a contract for that, and you cannot transfer staff under the TUPE regulations from one organisation to another in order to deliver that. What is required is long-term, secure funding that enables Food Train, community transport and so on to deliver their services over a long period and to build up quality relationships with communities for a fraction of what is spent in other areas.
My last point relates to why I was so interested in coming to the committee this morning. The challenge for us in the voluntary sector is to encourage community transport, organisations such as Food Train, the local befriending and lunch clubs and the other things that go on to work more closely together to deliver a more joined-up approach. We direct older people to 20 different organisations that do not really connect up. It may be possible for somebody who has a problem in one area or in their relationship with one organisation to be helped by another organisation, but the current system does not encourage that kind of collaboration. We need to build that ourselves from the bottom up.