Managing public money well
As a DASS, you are likely to spend more of your time talking about finances than anything else. These conversations are never easy. You must understand your financial position well, assume there may be little understanding of the social care financial landscape outside of your department, and develop the ability to explain things as simply as possible.
Adult social care may be under-resourced, and demand is growing. In most councils, it is the biggest single area of spend. When money is tight and savings have to be made, your council colleagues will look to your department to contribute. This is when you have to demonstrate competence in the evidence-based management of significant sums of money and clearly articulate what is possible and what is not.
If savings are proposed by others that you assess to be undeliverable, then you must say so to key stakeholders, such as the chief executive, chief finance officer, and relevant councillors. Do so with a clear rationale and before it becomes a public commitment. If a savings target is incorporated into a corporate report without your agreement, you will have to explain in writing to your chief executive and chief finance officer why you do not think it is deliverable. It is, however, best to avoid this situation in the first place.
While you can have any number of financial planning documents and reports explaining the vision for your service developments and the aligned financial strategy, these are only successful if they are underpinned by a joined-up approach between practitioners and managers. This is because the real financial decisions are made by practitioners and front-line managers, who commit to the costs required to meet care and support needs, so the culture of the organisation and its employees is everything. If the culture is just to ‘provide care’ then your plan will not succeed. There has to be a common understanding of how to do this in the right way and this includes taking account of the views of local people.
If you are to be an effective DASS, you must understand practitioners’ decision making, understand their frustrations and get staff and first-line managers on side, to create the approach that best supports local people and is financially sustainable. It is important to find out what internal cultural issues are adversely affecting your ability to make sustainable changes. Work on these as a cornerstone of your plan to achieve a common purpose and goal, and gather further insight from the local people who draw on support.
For example, do you have frustrated social workers who really want to use community resources more creatively, but a commissioning team that is focused on home care and residential care developments?
Conversely, does your commissioning team have endless examples of trying different things, but practitioners always default to using home care hours and care homes as the main approach to facilitating support? You should try to understand the reasons behind issues such as these and try to resolve them. This will help to align plans across your service areas, which could help you to deliver improved and more financially sustainable service models.
Develop and maintain your aligned operational and financial strategies. You can do this by challenging and re-challenging your own and your teams’ operational assumptions and forecasting regarding demand, supply, costs, workforce stability, caseload levels and other information that underpins the adult social care budget strategy. Focus on continuous improvement.
Your senior team should use benchmarking data, modelled assumptions and local knowledge to gain a good understanding of the number of people you should be supporting, the reasonable cost of an average package for your area (for different care types) and brief you accordingly.
As the buck stops with you, you should be your own harshest challenger of any assumptions or views you hold and be aware of the evidence you have used to form them.
Get your financial decisions into proportion and ensure you understand the full consequences of any change, so that you can support your management team to focus their attention on the right things. For example, you may save £200,000 by closing a day centre but it might take a year and draw in significant team resources to deliver. It is also likely to attract adverse publicity from the local community. At the same time, has the under-pressure social work team explored all the options when spending £220,000 on unnecessarily large care packages for six people with learning disabilities?
Make sure your approach resonates with the corporate direction of travel: prevention and supporting independence, people doing more for themselves (where appropriate), and the value of communities are all now common features of a corporate plan. You can support these intentions and demonstrate you are a strategic corporate player.
For example, good planning and housing, adult employment support, public health and effective support for children and young people through special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) services can all result in better outcomes for local people and less demand on more intensive adult social care services.
In a democratic organisation, money and politics are naturally intertwined and you have to be attuned as one of the council’s senior leaders.
You may work with a local administration of a different political persuasion from the government and it may be more willing to take a vocal position on the need for more resources or different solutions for adult social care. Alternatively, you may work in a council where local and national politics align and you need to work with stakeholders to ensure adequate funding for delivery of the statutory responsibilities associated with adult social care.
It is important to consistently think ahead and anticipate the next national or local direction shift and being ready to respond. It may be tempting to be drawn on the politics but always remember that you are an officer: when dealing with money, deal in facts.
You will want to be a good partner and work in a way that supports partner organisations that, like all of us, will always want more. Engage in the partnership world carefully by understanding the reality of the situation and share any ideas you have that will positively impact early and clearly. Where there is pooled money, be open to a partner’s suggestions but be clear where the limits of flexibility are and what can only be funded if something else stops and how that shift would be managed. For more on working in partnership see the chapter: Partnership with the NHS: working together for the public good.
The building blocks of a simple and relatable budget strategy are:
- Prevention: being clear on what you are trying to prevent (pre-social care). What are the interventions that support people to stay well and independent? Where is the money taken from to fund these? Where is the pay back delivered?
- Delay: interventions to ‘nip things in the bud’ and prevent deteriorations that would otherwise lead to more dependence for people, and higher costs for adult social care, e.g. reablement and signposting support people to maximise independence.
- Support: all the support and services provided should focus on supporting wellbeing and independence. Challenge yourself and your senior team about the assumptions you hold and how accurate they are. For example, ask: ‘Do the people you support really have more complex needs than in other places?’ ‘Are you too reliant on care home placements as a solution, or could commissioners identify better alternatives, including more impactful early interventions?’
- Review: monitor, check and adapt. Changing your mind based on data and new evidence is a strength. If you are delivering a plan and new evidence emerges that throws doubt on what you were doing, don’t be afraid to change tack. Promote a culture that supports trying something different with your practitioners and ask them to use evidence to change their minds, too.
There are some key strategies you should embed across the council:
- Clear financial management procedures and operational controls on activity, expenditure and income, ensuring they are fully understood by staff, managers and other key stakeholders.
- Ensuring the relative position compared to other councils is reported to you. This leads to a shared understanding across your management team about why any actions were taken to refine your commissioning and/or budget strategy.
- Effective working arrangements between you, your chief executive, chief finance officer and monitoring officer. Invest in those relationships.
- A clear model of corporate support, advice and challenge, with a joint understanding on why the support is important to deliver adult social care services and savings.
- Reporting the financial position regularly to public meetings of committees of the council, with appropriate explanation of the adult social care financial position, any risks and how they are being mitigated.