As we launch the CCLA/Room151 Impact Awards, finance officers from around the country reveal how their work, past and present, has made a difference to people, place or the environment. To find out more about submitting an entry to the awards and it will create lasting legacy on best practice, follow this link.
Sarah Pickup: A ‘vital’ contribution
Finance departments in councils have played a vital role during the Covid-19 pandemic. What are often seen as “back-room” functions of revenues and benefits teams have been crucial to the distribution of grants, benefits and reliefs individuals and businesses including the social care sector.
An ever changing mix of pots of money covering differing, and not always clear, time spans have been handled with a big focus on getting money quickly to those that need it while undertaking sufficient checks assuring that public funds are properly dispersed. This work has made a vital, practical contribution to ensuring people have been supported through the pandemic.
Finance teams are not normally on the front line of service delivery, yet their contribution is vital and makes a difference to individuals and communities. As with the work during the pandemic there is often a tricky balance to strike between empowering and supporting people with minimal bureaucracy and assuring the good use of public money.
In the area of direct payments for social care there is a particular tension. The rules regarding how direct payments can be spent and the monitoring of their use can directly affect the quality of life of a recipient. In Shropshire the finance team has recently been heavily involved, in reviewing and changing how they do direct payments, all in coproduction with their people who use direct payments—which has the potential to improve outcomes and deliver better value for money.
Finance teams that work closely with service departments and the people they serve support the delivery of better outcomes and best use of limited resources.
Sarah Pickup is chair of the Impact Awards judges and deputy chief executive of the Local Government Association.
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Chris West: ‘Pivotal’ moment for CVLife
CVLife is a Coventry-based charity that works to deliver community participation in sport and other activities, and which operates a number of leisure centres across the city. It has a unique culture of trying to be self-financing and not reliant on council revenue grants.
For many years as assistant director for education and then as director of finance/resources I worked with CVLife to protect and enhance its services through years of cutbacks and austerity, while also delivering savings to the council’s leisure services bottom line.
A key battle came in the early 2000s as the charity sought to deliver a large new community leisure centre at the heart of a deprived community in the Coventry. It involved a secondary school handing over some land for the facility in return for free access to the facilities for pupils. I spent a long night at a governors’ meeting getting agreement. But still the complex cocktail of capital funding was £0.3m short.
We managed to unpick this by identifying a new grant that had come in for youth service capital spending for a project we had already funded. By switching funding through the programme I could free up the funding needed for the centre, and I was able to negotiate agreement to this with councillors and the youth services manager.
There was a golden moment when I told the CVLife chief executive it was sorted. It was a cold Sunday morning, we were both watching our teenage sons play junior league football, for different teams on adjacent pitches. We talked facing opposite directions, but standing together side by side.
The centre has now been up and going for 12 years, delivering a wide range of services to the a needy locality. Most recently through the pandemic this has included food parcel distribution, Covid testing, and vaccinations.
As usual for a finance professional, although my involvement was pivotal, it was also invisible to all but a few. That sort of credit, is, ironically not usually available to FDs.
Having left the council, I am now proud to serve as a Trustee of CVLife. The CEO and I still occasionally joke about that winter morning as we sit in board meetings in the centre.
Chris West is a former section 151 officer at Coventry City Council, trustee of CVLIfe and a non-executive director, CCLA.
Richard Simpson: Building a ‘game changer’ with the London Cancer Hub
The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden currently form one of the leading cancer research and treatment centres in the world in Belmont, Sutton. The London Borough of Sutton and the Institute for Cancer Research aim to build on this to create the London Cancer Hub—the world’s leading life-science district specialising in cancer research, treatment, education and enterprise.
Between 2015 and 2018 Sutton Council invested more than £30m to acquire six hectares of derelict land at the London Cancer Hub from Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust. The first building developed by Sutton was a £40m secondary academy accommodating 1,275 students—the first secondary school in the UK to be built to the internationally recognised Passivhaus standard which completed in 2019.
The council launched a competitive process in 2019 to secure an investor—developer to bring forward the remainder of the site, but a suitable partner could not be appointed.
Meanwhile, Sutton Council secured £8.38m from the Strategic Investment Pot, a pilot fund through which business rates are retained and used to fund strategic investment across the capital. This funding enabled Sutton to rethink its approach, so it could continue to progress delivery and unlock the economic potential of the site.
The council is now acting as a direct developer for the first phase on site. It is refurbishing an existing building on site into laboratories and collaboration space to create the Innovation Gateway.
Once it is open in summer 2021, this will provide a home for life-science companies to work alongside world class scientists from The Institute of Cancer Research.
This will provide an important proof of concept for the creation of enterprise space, and a pipeline of future occupiers. Feedback from the investment market indicates that in the wake of Covid there is unprecedented demand for biotech and med tech start up space.
To prepare the site for development, vacant buildings are being demolished and public realm improvements are being delivered. The site is poorly served by public transport, and the partnership is bringing together key transport stakeholders to provide impetus for significant public transport improvements.
Once fully realised, The London Cancer Hub will deliver significant and wide-ranging benefits.
It will:
- Attract UK and international businesses and world-class researchers, bringing high-value investment, skills and knowledge to London;
- drive economic growth locally, regionally and nationally—generating a projected £13m in business rates and £1.2bn GVA to the UK economy annually;
- create jobs, generate revenue for the borough and help drive broader changes that will benefit all local residents;
- offer more than 280,000 square metres of life-science buildings, including facilities for cancer research, diagnosis, treatment, education and commercial collaboration;
- be a game changer for UK cancer research–increasing the number of drugs that the Institute of Cancer Research and its partners can discover, develop and commercialise and increasing the chances of transformative new cancer treatments reaching patients.
The London Cancer Hub is a partnership between London Borough of Sutton and The Institute of Cancer Research, London, with the support of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, Epsom and St Helier, the Mayor of London and One Public Estate.
Richard Simpson is strategic director of resources, London Borough of Sutton.
AWARDS INFORMATION
Read about the awards here.
Read about the seven categories here.
For submissions click here.
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