In our April e-bulletin, we noted that the Council was interested in pursuing two specific areas for greater collaborative working with and within the voluntary sector - (1) transport and (2) homelessness.

A wider working group is being established for transport to bring together both transport providers and also some agencies who work closely with people who need transport to access adult social care. Meanwhile following initial fact-finding interviews, an event is being organised for 28 July to bring together commissioners and agencies who work with homeless people to see how a more collaborative approach can improve services for those single homeless men for whom there is no statutory obligation upon the local authority to be housed.

Both these initiatives will lead to operational improvements to achieve more with the increasingly limited resources, and both will feature at a national personalisation conference to be held in Coventry in November. It is hoped that either or both of these may be suitable for establishing greater collaborative working through consortia of service providers. Greater collaboration between providers is becoming increasingly key in order to access larger and / or more complex contracts, and a number of providers are interested in setting up new mechanisms for supporting this including a formal consortium model.