End of project perspective: Kevin Walsh

This summarised interview with Kevin Walsh took place on 17 March 2008 and has been approved for publication.

Perspectives on regeneration: Kevin Walsh, 17 March 2008

Development of the Regenerate project since Wigan Extreme, 2007

I think [it] developed [as] we anticipated, bearing in mind we changed our thinking after about six months. The point is that what has remained is the focus on creating social enterprises, but [there’s] also a recognition that there are other things that came out of that piece of work that are valuable in their own right.

The Wigan Extreme event is an interesting part of that because it was a recognition [that] if we need to achieve our target [of] creating social enterprise, helping develop social enterprise, we need to adopt almost a radical approach which is what Wigan Extreme certainly seemed like. In fact it seemed like a barking mad idea to take over a place for 20 days and expect people to turn up every day and to participate in some really intense pieces of work. But at the end of it you either trust people to deliver or you don’t, and we trusted that they would deliver and they did deliver. I think the feedback that we’ve got from various people who participated in it was extremely positive - to the extent that the current Wigan Extreme [in March 2008] is a result of the faith we have in the whole process. Afterwards I said this is something we should really look to repeat at least on an annual basis [so it] becomes almost like a major event in the calendar for Wigan.

Positives from Wigan Extreme

The commitment that people made from the community was one positive. It was 20 days, there were people working there and working weekends and coming in at weekends. I think the really encouraging thing was it wasn’t the same old faces who were participating, it was new groups, new people who’d never been involved in the community activities that have been traditionally supported in the borough.

What came out of that was Pulse, which is an interesting by-product. It’s not what we actually commissioned [Regenerate] to deliver but I think you have to recognise that you cannot just create social enterprises and business plans without some form of support network in there.

I think the other thing that has come out of it is a recognition [that] some of the approaches that have been taken do have value in other areas. We’re looking to think about how we could use some of those approaches in other areas. We know worklessness is an issue and incapacity benefit in particular, but there’s no shortage of provision to help people get back to work. What there is a shortage of is people going into that provision. There’s not a shortage of people in terms of community action and community engagement, but I call it community engagement with a purpose. I think in the past a lot of local authorities have done community engagement because they have been funded to do community engagement. You need an end product.

There has to be a recognition that there needs to be some way of referring people into this process that will hopefully either improve their skills so they can get a job or take them through confidence building or whatever it takes. If you look at the traditional way of working, you get some money, you decide to fund some work. At the front you’ll do some engagement work to try and recruit people into your programme. Then you might do some information, advice and guidance work to try and define what kind of help they would need. Then you give them the help that they need, and then you have some employer engagement at the back end to try and help them secure employment. You could have 20 projects in an authority, all working in that silo without any cross referencing and cross referral.

Reactions to the Regenerate project

There’s people who very quickly can switch onto what it is that is being talked about here and they very quickly recognise the value of it, and there’s people who don’t. It’s a binary thing, there’s no mid way on this. There have been instances where there’s negativity towards the project and that has been quite vocal at times. There’s been conflict in terms of what it’s about and the approach.

Success in meeting targets and objectives

I think it started off with one way of working and we recognised very quickly that it wasn’t working the way it should do, so we’ve changed it, which is the result of things like the Wigan Extreme events. From the reports we’ve had they will hit the targets of creating the social enterprises that we’ve asked them to create. But what it’s done that wasn’t in the actual service level agreement was this undercurrent almost of social enterprise activity, which is really what we wanted to see, but it’s difficult to put that into a service level agreement that’s got hard and fast government targets. It’s a softer outcome that’s come out of this and that’s very good.

I think individuals [within the local authority] are pleased with the outcomes. It’s a question of recognising the value of a social enterprise and I think there’s a lot of people in Wigan who don’t quite understand the value of what a social enterprise can bring, or a strong social enterprise sector. I think government decided to bring that higher up the agenda. Wigan is a very pragmatic, traditional, down to earth sort of place and I think social enterprise is almost seen as something that’s not the kind of thing that Wiganers do.

What a lot of people don’t get or feel uncomfortable with [is that] using community engagement [to get people into work] is not the traditional way of doing things. I think there is now a recognition within the authority that the traditional way of doing things has not worked. So we do have to look at different approaches, different ways of doing things.


Reflections on Listening Matters

I think people said, yes, we might benefit from the training, but we still need to have our own agenda because at the end of the day people are funded to deliver things. It’s that leap of faith almost to say we need to get away from that. It’s that silo approach again. I think there’s going to be resistance, it’s a different way of thinking and you know, it might turn out that is not the way we should be going anyway.

The project’s achievements over 18 months

Obviously it has achieved what it set out to achieve in terms of the hard and fast service level agreement. What we paid them to do, they have delivered in terms of social enterprise development. Social enterprises [are] being supported to set up, that side of it was not part of the remit but does seem to have emerged from this work, which is good. It’s not just applicable for creating social enterprise, it can be applicable in other areas as well and that’s the key benefit to us that’s come out of the project. I think we’re very keen to retain the support and services of Regenerate, in a different capacity obviously, moving forward.

Going back to this community engagement with a purpose type of approach, [it’s] to help us develop and support us in implementing that. I think our biggest problem is participation: how do we solve that? Potentially Regenerate has a big role to play, in first of all defining what it is. I’m not so sure about actually delivering it. It’s having that good relationship and the feedback that’s been coming back to say this has worked, this has not worked, can we sit down, have a coffee and discuss various things? It’s that informal continuous dialogue that’s been ongoing.

Obviously we have a quarterly monitoring report and quarterly invoices and there’s a very formal reporting structure, but that informal dialogue has been so valuable and in terms of managing this kind of thing [that] is really, really important. If you start putting things down on paper and a template as to how it should be done then you lose the softer information, the softer intelligence that really is what does make a difference. You need flexibility but you need the dialogue to get that intelligence.

What would you do differently?

[Staff] have a day job to do - we’ve got to accept the fact that a lot of stuff that people are doing within the council has a statutory obligation. You can’t say we’ll stop doing that because we have to do it as a council. So if we’re going to do it again, perhaps we need to consider how we resource it and how we guarantee that we’ll have the people we need to deliver it.

Has there been evidence of successful delivery?

An NRF project is quite prescriptive in terms of what has to be delivered and the evidence for that delivery. There is a team of people who independently monitor that. Quarterly reports come in which I then see and incorporate into various reporting structures within the council. So if the people who are presenting me with the evidence are happy with the evidence that’s been provided then that is OK. They would have highlighted to me to say [if] the evidence isn’t there, and at the end of the day we always have the option of going back into the project and saying well, yes, you might be saying you did these 25 social enterprises, but you need to prove it to us. We have the option of doing some form of auditing process.

How happy are you personally with the project?

I feel very good about it. I think there’s been some really interesting and pioneering work. Stephen keeps putting my name forward for other local authorities to say what I think of the work that’s gone on. I always give an honest assessment to those people so it’s good to be associated with the project, it does have a recognition as being a successful piece of work, and that’s accepting the fact that other people have been critical of it. [It’s] a publicly funded piece of work and it should be open to scrutiny.

How can wider buy-in be achieved?

I think if we did take the community engagement type of approach forward and we looked to employ people specifically to go out and recruit people into programmes, and your judgment of success is the number of people who get referred into something, [that] would be an interesting thing to take forward. So you could go out and say, your job is to get people to volunteer for Pathways to Work and we’ll measure you on that. But we’ve no guarantee that at the end of that process they’re going to get a job, and that is quite a difficult thing. But we do have some option to use discretionary money for that kind of thing - and that may well once again cause people to say, is that really a good use of resources, should we not be focussing on the end product rather than the beginning? That’s a debate we have to have.

Regenerate I think have informed our thinking as to how we should approach this, but how we take the work forward would have to be subject to a separate commissioning exercise.