A beginner’s guide to Gobbledeegook by Charlie Weinberg, Executive Director of Safe Ground

Sometimes don’t you just feel that everyone is talking a language you don’t speak?

OLASS, LARA, SPO, BIS, NOMS, DfE, SFA, AQA, NOCN, G4S, A4e, there is a whole world of acronyms out there just waiting for non-sector specific conversations to happen. #WTF?

At least ‘Commissioning’ is a whole word. The tricky thing is, (take a deep breath), ‘commissioning’ isn’t really commissioning. Not as we know it. It seems to me we use or hear the word ‘commissioning’ used to describe a process of what is actually, procurement.

Let me be clear. Commissioning is the process of designing services- identifyingneeds and designing services (hopefully in collaboration with people who may use the services, people who may not but have an interest, and people who will deliver the services). Commissioning is a process of understanding what it is that needs to be achieved and how best to achieve it- by spending time to talk to people in the local community (be that a prison, a hospital, a geographic area, a group) and all the surrounding and connecting communities. Commissioning is about getting the structures and frameworks for a service right- by designing the service with the very people who will be responsible for its success down the line.

For example, if I were to commission a family relationships skills programme for adult men in prison, I would want to talk to adult men in prison, their families, prison governors, prison officers, education staff, organisations who already do similar work and organisations that provide relevant but indirectly connected services. I would want to make sure the staff team I work with were on board with the idea and I would want to make sure the Board of Trustees was supportive. I would want major funders to understand and I would publicise the development to the wider audience of supporters and interested parties. I would need to work out how much it would cost and the process and timescales for designing it.

If I were lucky enough to have a development budget, or to be successful in raising funds on the basis of my brilliant piece of commissioning, I would then want to find someone to do the work of actually writing and trialling the programme. I would need to procure a worker to do that.

Procurement is the process of finding services to fulfil the commissioning brief.

Often, what happens is the word ‘commissioning’ is used to mean both commissioning and procurement; and that, for the sake of commissioning, cannot be a good thing.

Is procurement an uglier word than commissioning? Does it have some unfavourable connotations? What’s wrong with procurement? I have no idea where this language comes from- why commissioning can’t just be called ‘design’ and why procurement can’t be called ‘purchase’ I don’t know.

I am part of a learning set commissioned by the Ministry of Justice. Our grand title is Academy for Justice Commissioning Pilot Learning Group and we meet regularly to discuss the impact and meanings of commissioning and procurement on our work. The group is made up of voluntary and private sector providers (Safe Ground, St Giles Trust, A4e) and a large number of statutory sector colleagues (all from Probation Trusts around the country).

Our work together is about creating an analysis of the processes of commissioning and procurement in terms of frontline service delivery, partnership working, localism, sustainable structures and the impact of all this on people who use our services and, on our organisations. We feed our findings back regularly and will be presenting fully in January.

What is emerging so far is, basically that:

  • Commissioning is less inclusive a process than it might be
  • Procurement is underfunded- so services are commissioned and can’t then be procured to the same specification

Despite rigorous rules and procedures, voluntary sector organisations often find they can’t participate in commissioning (particularly smaller organisations) because they’re not invited or considered) for procurement processes because they require so much capacity and are often run to very short timescales.

The full impact of changing commissioning and procurement processes is yet to be felt across the criminal justice sector. As services within the sector are increasingly parcelled out to external providers, procurement will surely take hold. How ‘commissioning’ is actually going to impact us all, I am slightly less clear about, to be honest. I am still working on understanding ICPR’s REA for NPC/NOMS; the NRC regs for PNC access and the DWP/BIS OLASS 4 spec.