Strengthening the Relationship Between Norfolk County Council and the VCSE Sector

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I was a member of a Working Group at the County Council that set out to look at how the Council works with the voluntary sector (VCSE sector) in Norfolk when it comes to supporting people through social services. I made the following submission to the group:

I’m aiming to offer a broader context, particularly in light of Local Government Reform, and how the Council can work more effectively with the VCSE sector across adult social care, children’s services, and wider community support.

I write as a ‘critical friend’ of both the VCSE sector and the County Council, drawing on:

  • Nine years as a Norfolk County Councillor (including work on Children’s Services)
  • Ten years working in the VCSE sector in Norfolk
  • Experience as a charity trustee and within sector leadership structures

My central argument is this:

Norfolk County Council can achieve significantly better outcomes by adopting a place-shaping approach that actively enables the strengths of the VCSE sector.

  1. The strategic importance of the VCSE sector

The VCSE sector is a major economic and social asset in Norfolk in terms of employment; income and inward investment for the County; volunteering; provision of a diverse source of services that are commissioned by the County Council; and, most importantly, impact on beneficiaries. It is made up of[1]:

  • Around 10,000 organisations, including over 3,000 registered charities
  • Annual turnover exceeding £800 million
  • Approximately 7,000 FTE staff and 77,000 volunteers

It is also highly diverse:

  • 70% of organisations have incomes below £25,000 while less than 1% account for more than 50% of registered charity income
  • Over half receive no public funding
  • 42% operate at neighbourhood or parish level

This diversity is the sector’s strength — but also creates challenges for commissioning systems designed around scale, consistency, and control.

  1. Understanding the nature of the sector

A key distinction is between:

Community-based organisations

  • Small, local, often volunteer-led
  • Rooted in lived experience
  • Agile, trusted, and place-based
  • Limited capacity for bureaucracy

Commissioned VCSE providers (“VCSE businesses”)

  • Larger, professionalised organisations
  • Deliver contracted services
  • More similar to commercial suppliers in structure if not in ethos

Both are important — but current systems tend to favour the latter.

The risk is that the system unintentionally sidelines organisations best placed to deliver preventative, community-based support.

  1. A sector under sustained pressure

The VCSE sector has faced a violent storm of external challenges in the 2020s:

  • Volunteering has been hit by the COVID Pandemic and the pressures of economic uncertainty. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) estimates that 110million hours of support were lost between 2019 and 2024
  • Individual giving has suffered from the cost-of-living crisis. According to the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), there are 6 million fewer donors compared to a decade ago, with, in money terms, 10% less given in 2025, compared to 2024
  • The ‘trust and fund’ giving environment has changed significantly: divestment (following the Black Lives Matter campaign) and emergency spend on the COVID crisis led to many funds emptying their accounts and closing or retrenching. At the same time, with the reduction in funding from other sources, applications to funds from charities and voluntary organisations have grown by 30%
  • A decade of political drift, with nothing to match the Big Society or New Labour’s investment in social programmes, has robbed the sector of big-scale policy support.
  • Cuts in public spending from national government and Local Authorities, increases in the Minimum Wage, increased energy and supply costs and other legislative pressures.

There has been some good news.

It is understandable that the sector has struggled to come to terms with all of these challenges. However, there is a growing sense that the ‘good old days’ are not coming back and that has led many in the sector to re-evaluate the way they work.

We have seen the acceleration of an existing trend for mergers and take-overs that had already been happening for a decade or more; and the trend for larger organisations to hold a larger portion of the Third Sector funding ‘pie’.

Anecdotally, it seems that some commissioned entities are beginning to push back against what they see as unreasonable demands from commissioners, rejecting the opportunity to bid for work and moving to alternative funding models.

In the health and social care space there have also been two policy developments that need to be noted: within the NHS, the moves towards ‘parity of esteem’ for mental health support alongside physical health; and the growth of Social Prescribing as health and care providers seek to manage demand for ‘upstream’ services by creating healthier living conditions for people.

  1. The central challenge: commissioning in a fiscal and structural straightjacket

Current commissioning approaches often:

  • Prioritise cost, scale, and manageability
  • Focus on narrow KPIs rather than outcomes
  • Reinforce organisational silos
  • Exclude smaller, innovative providers

This can limit both impact and value.

Five anecdotes that illuminate the problem

  1. Neighbourhoods That Work (Great Yarmouth)

A highly effective, community-based programme struggled to demonstrate value within rigid KPI frameworks.

I mentioned in one of our meetings attending the wash-up meeting for the brilliant Neighbourhoods That Work programme in Great Yarmouth. I still refer people to it as an example of community-based working done well. But at the wash-up meeting I was sat with a senior member of the GYBC Housing team who said ‘this all sounds lovely but I don’t see how it affects my KPIs’. This is a huge problem to overcome because of the number of agencies involved in the delivery of services in any one area. But also a massive opportunity for existing Local Authorities (and the new ones coming under LGR) to look at their own working model and to adopt policies and practices that remove internal silos, bring in performance criteria that prioritise wider social gain and that restore councils as proactive makers of place rather than passive deliverers minimum service standards set by central government.

 

Lesson:
Success at community level is often invisible to siloed performance systems.

  1. Norwich Opportunity Area

Commissioning excluded smaller specialist providers, and evaluation focused on process rather than impact.

A programme intended to tackle blocks on social mobility at its source through commissioned interventions run in schools. Musical Keys – the charity I led at the time – tried to engage with the programme but the commissioning structure excluded smaller providers providing relatively niche services. That’s one problem but the real message is what came at the end – reading the report into the impact of the report it focuses almost entirely on the impact of the programme on internal working practices and makes almost no assessment of the impact on children and families and their potential for social mobility. The lesson for Local Authorities has to be to focus on outcomes for the people they are serving in all they do, even if it means not engaging with centrally funded programmes if the demands of those programmes don’t fit local need.

Lesson:
Systems must prioritise outcomes for people, not just programme delivery metrics.

iii. Children’s Centre re-commissioning

The shift to large, county-wide contracts improved efficiency but reduced diversity of provision.

Many of us will remember the political battle around the closure of Children’s Centres across Norfolk. I don’t want to revisit the politics of that decision but what came next carries an important lesson. Prior to the closures, Children’s Centre Services were run by a patchwork of providers each delivering local and limited contracts. It became clear quickly that the commissioners looking for suppliers under the new contracts wanted a single provider to cover the whole county. We can see the advantages of this for the County Council (cheaper and easier to manage) and potentially for families (consistent provision, easier to assess outcomes). But the impact on the VCSE sector is also clear (including the closure of at least one prominent charity that provided a range of services in Great Yarmouth). Commissioning processes could – should – encourage the contract holder to involve community groups in provision and to innovate in delivery, something that small, agile VCSE organisations are well equipped to do.

Lesson:
Scale can come at the cost of local knowledge, innovation, and sector resilience.

  1. Short Breaks

Move to family-controlled funding improved choice but exposed:

  • Poor information systems
  • Lack of proactive market development

I joined Musical Keys not long after the major change in the funding structure for Short Breaks had been introduced. The old model of contract funding demanded that the charity invest heavily in meeting the admin requirements of the scheme. It delivered services that were not necessarily matched to need or demand. And it created a dependency on the funding that created huge problems for the charity when it ended. The new model – where Short Breaks funding sat with the families – created huge-short term funding problems for the charity but potentially worked far better for families. There is an important message for charities not to become too dependent on commissioned income. But for the County Council there is a need to hugely improve the information available to families (the Local Offer website is impenetrable and jargon-filled leading to a number of private alternatives that try to make it easier to navigate). But there is also scope for the Council to engage in meaningful market research – to find out from – in this case families with SEND – what they actually want to have available rather than leaving it to providers to find out through declining demand or for families to be stuck with choices they don’t really want. Being obliged to ensure provision should mean more than passively promoting existing suppliers – the council could be imaginative and proactive in promoting a vibrant market for services of all types across adult and children’s support services.

Lesson:
Market-based approaches require active shaping and support from the Council.

  1. CAMHS review (Rethink)

Barriers included the scale and complexity of statutory systems compared to the agility of VCSE organisations.

When Rethink was engaged to review CAMHS in Norfolk, I was involved in the early reference-group work. Political changes on the County Council meant I wasn’t able to see the work through to the end but the case I made to the group then was that it is not enough to simply talk the talk about VSCE engagement and involvement in service delivery. The NHS is huge and remote (I often quote another example from another workplace in Norfolk where I could have used up the whole of our project funding for support for maternity services in West Norfolk on meeting time with NHS teams if I had charged my time into the project, leaving nothing for delivery). Councils are also large corporate bodies with teams of people focused on specialist areas of work. I proposed to Rethink that one solution would be to take advantage of what small VSCE organisations are good at – local delivery, being agile and innovative – and potentially have a small fund available to support small new programmes with absolutely minimal reporting and bureaucracy involved.

Lesson:
Engagement must go beyond rhetoric — systems must be designed to enable participation.

  1. The opportunity: a shift in approach

It is important that the Council doesn’t ‘bake in’ structures that are a poor fit for need  – society is changing and the VCSE sector needs to adapt to that. However, the Council – and the new unitary councils – should look at innovative ways of funding projects that lean in to the strengths of the sector. Small scale funding for innovation that is easy to apply for and light touch on reporting I have already mentioned.

From service deliverer and contract manager → to place-shaper and system enabler

This involves:

  • Breaking down internal silos
  • Aligning performance measures with real-world outcomes
  • Actively shaping local service ecosystems
  • Creating space for innovation
  1. Recommendations
  2. Shift to outcomes-led commissioning
  • Focus on impact on residents, not just delivery metrics and recognise the cross-department impact of actions and policies (lowering speed limits on busy roads improves mental health for older residents)
  • Allow flexibility in how outcomes are achieved
  • Avoid participating in national programmes that constrain local responsiveness
  1. Enable smaller VCSE organisations to participate
  • Break up contracts where possible
  • Require larger providers to partner with local organisations
  • Simplify procurement and reduce administrative barriers
  1. Invest in innovation and experimentation
  • Create small, flexible funding pots for new ideas
  • Use light-touch application and reporting processes
  • Set up a “Dragon’s Den” style innovation fund
  1. Actively shape and support the market
  • Improve information systems such as the Local Offer
  • Conduct meaningful user-led market research
  • Identify gaps and stimulate provision
  1. Align systems and incentives internally
  • Review KPIs to encourage cross-cutting, preventative work
  • Incentivise collaboration across departments
  • Enable officers to support wider system goals
  1. Reconsider infrastructure and representation
  • Ensure VCSE representation reflects the whole system, not just health integration
  • Avoid locking in structures that no longer fit evolving needs
  1. Explore new funding models
  • Prize-based funding for innovation
  • Adapted social investment approaches rooted in place-based outcomes[2]
  • Broader, more ambitious models that mobilise local resources
  1. Conclusion

The VCSE sector is not simply a delivery partner — it is a core part of Norfolk’s social infrastructure.

However:

If the Council focuses only on process, efficiency, and minimum statutory delivery, it will fail to unlock the sector’s full potential.

A shift in approach — towards:

  • Outcomes
  • Place
  • Partnership
  • Innovation

…could deliver significantly better results for residents while strengthening the sector itself.

[1] These figures are drawn from the Sector Led Plan, published more than ten years ago by Community Action Norfolk and funded by Norfolk County Council. The figures will have changed since that time but they are still likely to be in the same ‘ball park’ and they still widely referenced.’

[2] For example, the Council could look at adapting the Social Impact Bond model. Not replicating the narrow, prescriptive model which has produced mixed results in trials in the UK. Rather something bigger, more open and more ambitious – closer in nature to the War Bonds that funded military efforts in the World Wars. Grounded in place-shaping solutions and aiming to tackle big problems with a wide range of solutions with investors rewarded by changes in the fabric of society in the County which benefit everyone.