Curriculum Vitae

Name: Kate Wareing.

Job: Supporting People manager, Oxfordshire.

Qualifications: BA politics, philosophy and economics, Oxford University; membership of the Chartered Institute of Housing.

Last job: Business manager for a housing association.

First job: Auditor with the National Audit Office.

Independence can massively improve the quality of people's lives. However, to have a decent shot at independence, vulnerable people need their own long-term, safe and convenient place to live.

To address this, the government launched Supporting People in April 2003. Councils were given commissioning budgets for housing-related support services for vulnerable groups and developed working partnerships with local government, service users and support agencies.

One such partnership in Oxfordshire, comprising the county council, three district councils, and health and probation services, is now so effective that it has been awarded beacon status.

"We were particularly praised for our approach to partnership working," says Supporting People manager Kate Wareing. "We had been working on these structures for a couple of years before becoming operational last year but a lot of our success is down to everyone at the table being an equal partner and having a real role."

Essentially, Wareing understood that, to be effective, the partner representatives who sit on the commissioning body needed the delegated authority to make decisions - and, despite difficulties, this has been achieved. She says: "It may not sound like a huge deal but it has been a big step for some of them. And now we have a group who can meet and who can decide. Their decisions are open to scrutiny in the normal political way but they haven't got to go via six separate executives to be agreed. What we have now is a group of people who can take a view on how to spend our £21m annual budget for Oxfordshire rather than being swayed by individual organisations' interests."

Nationally, anecdotal evidence suggests that probation and health have been the more difficult partners to involve. For Wareing this may be because housing is seen as peripheral to their main business. "Whereas for housing and social care it is very much core business - so it is far more obvious to them why it is worth putting in the time," she says. "We have made sure that health and probation realised how useful it was for them to become involved.

"From a probation perspective there's a strong correlation between people having support and stable accommodation when they leave prison and re-offending, so it's vital that these are available for them. From a health perspective, we fund services for teenage mums, and services that can help prevent falls for older people and aid hospital discharge. Taking the agenda to partners in a way they understand has been critical to getting them involved."

Another successful aspect has been the working relationship with providers. "We did a lot of work to help them get ready for Supporting People and to make sure they were involved," Wareing says. "We have a provider forum which is independently chaired. This gives them a voice - a way of lobbying back, if you like."

Significantly, the forum elects two representatives to sit on the core strategy group which recommends policy and plans to the commissioning body.

Wareing adds: "This has worked well. Our provider sector has behaved in an constructive and supportive way. They have been willing, for example, to share quite detailed financial information about their costs structures enabling them as a group to work more transparently."

Inevitably, the enterprise has relied on everybody's ability to compromise. "There are people around the table who have individual priorities, but we have to reach a consensus - it's not done by majority voting," Wareing says. "So far we have always managed to reach that consensus because we have a group whose agenda is to maximise the benefit we can get out of the money we've got for the people of Oxfordshire." 

TOP TIPS

• Give people the delegated power to make decisions without having to refer back to their organisations.
• Be aware of the political context that the partnership is working in.
•  Agree objectives that all partners can subscribe to wholeheartedly.

RUBBISH TIPS

• Aim low with your objectives so that everybody will feel that only a minimum of effort is required.
• Expect people to look after their own interests first.