Report of the Director of Public Health attached

The Executive considered a report of the Director of Public Health, which set out the context and rationale for the proposal to bring back into Council control the provision of the community development service to be delivered by the Neighbourhoods Directorate.

Community development brought people in a community together to take action on what was important to them.  Good quality community development formed the basis of the “communities and power” theme of Manchester’s Building Back Fairer action plan and would also be critical to the success of the entire plan.  This would be achieved by helping communities to organise, and to identify the issues they wanted to address or the opportunities they wanted to explore. The intention was that community groups would be supported to use their skills and experiences and make the most of local assets to bring about positive changes and improve community life.

The Council currently had a contract with Greater Manchester Mental Health (GMMH) Foundation Trust, to deliver the Buzz neighbourhood health and wellbeing service (the service has two elements - community development and knowledge and information). The contract with GMMH was scheduled to expire on 31 December 2022.

Although a lot of good work is already happening, many of our current approaches, while well intentioned, still focus on providing some form of service to a community, providing them with information/signposting, or supporting a community to set up a service based on a need we have identified. More could be done to focus on equity, strengthening the focus on what is important to communities and enabling them to take action, and facilitating this way of working across all the social determinants of health.

The ‘new’ community development approach would sit within the Council’s Neighbourhoods Directorate and link with current activities to enable and embed a resource that released the capacity of the whole system to deliver the Building Back Fairer action plan. This proposal sought to strengthen and add value to the work already happening to support a community development approach that was appropriate for Manchester and build capacity to deliver the action plan with local communities. It built on the knowledge and experience of the Buzz Neighbourhood Health and Wellbeing Service, whilst recognizing the civic leadership role of the Council and the new place-based leadership arrangements under the Integrated Care System.

A ‘task and finish’ group had been established to support the design and implementation of the new approach.  All relevant stakeholders, including key staff from Population Health, the Neighbourhoods Directorate, Performance Research and Intelligence, the Manchester Local Care Organisation, Human Resources and Legal Services, VCSE sector and Buzz staff would be consulted, and formal processes undertaken. The Senior Responsible Officers would be the Assistant Director of Population Health and the Head of Neighbourhoods.

Decisions

The Executive:-

(1)      Approve the proposal that the delivery of a Community Development service will be provided by the Council’s Neighbourhoods Directorate when the current contract with GMMH for the Buzz Health and Wellbeing service ends on 31 December 2022.

(2)      Agree that the current funding for the community development element of the Buzz service (£1 million in total, including staffing costs of £850k) will fund the community development service in the MCC Neighbourhoods Directorate.

(3)      Agree that GMMH staff currently delivering the Buzz Neighbourhood Health and Wellbeing (community development) function, who are eligible for TUPE, will transfer from GMMH to the MCC Neighbourhoods Directorate to form part of the new community development service, from 1 January 2023.