A Social Value report that changed the law
The Situation
My client, Phoenix Futures’ National Specialist Family Service (NSFS), had noticed that referrals into the service had completely stopped, and they didn’t know why.
NSFS works with parents who are addicted to substances, but who face having their children taken away because their addiction means they can’t take care of the children. They need help to become clean (definition of addiction), but they’re highly motivated to become clean because they love their children. They’re a last chance service – most referrals are made by courts and if they don’t work out (or the referral isn’t made) then the children are taken away. However NSFS is very expensive (£20,000 per adult for 6 months, and £20,000 per child for 6 months), and a local authority’s adult services and children’s services departments both have to decide, at the same time, that they’re going to spend their money on this service.
The Task
NSFS decided that the problem was that they were too expensive. So they contracted a Social Return on Investment (SROI – now often termed Social Value) accredited practitioner to write a report that demonstrated the value for money of their service. The SROI framework and process involves talking to a lot of people to elicit facts, then triangulating to make sense of them. During this process, often completely different answers are found and SROI reports have a habit of going in a slightly different direction. None such a different direction as this one!
The Action / Approach
Dr Hugo Minney was the selected SROI Accredited Practitioner. A quick survey of published literature revealed that the alternative to NSFS (child into fostering or care, parent into community drug rehabilitation) not only delivered a much worse quality and length of life (few drug addicts live beyond 40 years old), but was much more expensive to the local authority. However the extra costs bled out over a longer period (we used a 5 year timeframe so as to limit costs and be more certain of their magnitude), and impacted different departments and different organisations (eg NHS), so they hadn’t been correctly quantified.
The financial case was quickly established, along with a lot of new publicity and positive public relations for NSFS with local authorities who had forgotten they existed. By this point it emerged that Social Workers were frightened to do something different, make a referral into a different service, for fear that something would go wrong, they would appear on the front page of the Daily Mail, and would lose the career they loved. So I managed to establish a longitudinal study (theoretically impossible under Caldicott regulations) which demonstrated with hard evidence the effectiveness of the service – 70% “graduation” from the service, and 80% still clean after 4 years.
In the course of these interviews and analysis, it emerged that courts had stopped referring because of the Children and Families Bill then progressing through parliament. I took it upon myself to phone the Ministry of Justice and seek out the author of the parts of the bill dealing with child protection, to convince her that changes needed to be made. She was surprised to have the impact of the bill explained, and over the course of a few phone calls, we re-wrote key sections of what was to become the Children and Families Act 2014 (the big Act of 2014).
The Result
There were two key changes to the Act. 1) instead of child protection cases involving substance addiction going straight to court and then deciding on rehabilitation programme, rehabilitation should be completed before the case goes to court so that it can run its course without constant changing (stability is important); and 2) instead of the evidence being a Family Assessment Centre (12 weeks in a room with a video camera), the gold standard for evidence is 6 months on a rehabilitation programme.
As a result of the change in the Act, 3/5 cases don’t go to court because the children are kept with their parents, and of the remainder, the evidence is so clear that they are decided within 2 hearings. The Justice Minister got their desire of cases no longer than 6 months (previously they averaged 53 weeks); and my client and their competitors got such a boost in numbers of referrals that they opened more facilities.
Local authorities, NHS and enforcement services all made huge savings on the cost of children in care, of community drug programmes (which generally don’t make enough difference to people who are addicted), and the various health needs. These are huge savings which vastly outweighed the costs of sending families to NSFS.
And of course parents were able to overcome their addiction and keep their children, and children were able to grow up with their natural parents. Fostering and adoption are wonderful services, but children said repeatedly during interviews that they wanted so much to be with their natural parents that they would look after them if they had to.
The full report is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/National-Specialist-Family-Service-Forecast/dp/1291663703
