Previous blog posts ‘Service User Involvement in North Wales’ and ‘We
Control All The Outcomes’ describe how there is no effective or genuine
representation for ‘services users’ and carers in north Wales and
indeed never has been. If anyone at any time had ever ‘listened to’ a
service user or carer the ‘services’ would simply not be in this state.
For years, ‘service user involvement’ was left to completely ineffective
bodies like the ‘Independent Advocacy Service’ or the ‘Gwynedd and Ynys
Mon Users Forum’ (which were staffed and managed by people who were
terrified of the staff and managers of the lethal services whom they
were supposed to be holding to account), or Unllais (whom I knew were
refusing to make representation regarding the mental health services
even when they were being told of the most serious abuses). Until March
2016 Unllais held the contract for service user involvement in north
Wales. Considering how hopeless Unllais had been at representing and
involving service users, the ending of their contract would have been
the most wonderful opportunity for the Betsi to begin some real ‘service
user and carer involvement’. Readers will know that this never happened
and instead a new nightmare is promised, as the ‘contract’ was
subsequently given to CAIS/Hafal, who have now formed another vehicle,
CANIAD (please see blog post ‘Introducing Caniad!’).
So Dr Dafydd Alun
Jones and Lucille Hughes, who sit on the Board of Trustees of CAIS, are
now responsible for ‘service user involvement’ in north Wales. We can
assume that the outcome from this will therefore be truly grim. Many of
my previous blog posts describe the unethical and criminal behaviour of
Dafydd Alun Jones – and Lucille Hughes was named in the Waterhouse
Report as knowing that a paedophile ring was operating in Gwynedd Social
Services whilst she was the Director of these ‘Services’ but that she
was failing to act. Dafydd and Lucille are now in their eighties, they
have never protected the interests of service users and carers before
and I very much doubt that they are going to start now.
As soon as I heard that CAIS/Hafal had landed this ‘contract’ from
the Betsi, I was interested to find out exactly how this had happened,
particularly as there seems to massive conflicts of interest in many
other ‘contracts for services’ being handed out by the Betsi. Blog post
‘A Total Lack of Transparency’ details how the whole process has been
shrouded in secrecy.
So I recently put in a FoI request to Wrexham County Borough Council
(who were inexplicably allowed by the Betsi to ‘lead’ on this whole
travesty) in an attempt to find out exactly how CAIS had landed this
contract and the identities of the people involved. Last week I received
a reply from Wrexham Council which didn’t answer all my questions but
did provide a lot of enlightening information. Wrexham Council told me
that I wasn’t allowed to reproduce ‘copyrighted’ information without
permission and although I’ve written to them requesting this permission I
haven’t received a reply. So I cannot reproduce the wonderful
information that I have been provided with in it’s entirety, but I can
blog about the salient points within this information.
The first surprise that I got was how much this ‘contract’ was worth.
It was worth 1.5 million. That’s right, the Betsi have channelled 1.5
million quid to Dafydd et al for five years worth of ‘service user
involvement’. The Betsi are currently nearly bankrupting the Welsh Govt
so bad is their financial position. But CAIS have been given 1.5
million. The information given to me also confirmed that a grand total
of FOUR unidentified service users were ‘involved’ in this process. And I
bet they won’t see much of the 1.5 million that has been handed over –
indeed, I was sent a rather simplistic ‘presentation’ allegedly designed
by one of the ‘service users’ regarding what ‘involvement’ means to him
and he mentioned that he was able to claim his expenses. So he gets his
bus fare and the price of a lunchtime sandwich reimbursed and Dafydd et
al net 1.5 million.
The information provided told me that there were only two ‘bids’ put
in for the ‘tender’, one from Unllais and one from CAIS/Hafal. The fact
that ‘service user involvement’ was subject to a ‘tendering’ process
alone excludes nearly all service users and carers. How many patients
and carers are ever going to ‘bid for a contract’? How many even knew
that all this was happening? I didn’t and I actually try to keep aware
of what is going on in the mental health services in north Wales. But
people on the ‘professional’ networks will have known all about it,
because the information sent to me revealed that ‘from January 2014
onwards, the Health Board’s Commissioning Manager…attended all the Local
Planning Groups in North Wales’. Well you won’t find many service users
and carers in them, but ‘professionals’ know all about these planning
groups, who sits on them and when they hold their meetings. It was also
mentioned that the Commissioning Manager attended ‘Third Sector’
networks (CAIS is a Third Sector organisation) and Service User and
Carer networks. Now in a region that was not blighted by corruption and
criminal activity in the mental health services, the Commissioning
Manager attending Service User and Carer Networks would be a positive
sign. But in north Wales, most ‘service users’ experiences of the
‘services’ are so bad that when they finally wave goodbye to the
services (if indeed they ever manage to obtain a service in the first
place) they want no more to do with them. They do not join a ‘service
user network’. Furthermore, in my experience the ‘service user networks’
in north Wales have always been manipulated or indeed completely
controlled by the ‘services’ themselves or the lame third sector
organisations such as MIND who have for years colluded with the abuses
of the mental health services. And some of the service user groups are
run by CAIS. So it’s highly unlikely that any grassroots service user
and carer groups would have encountered the Commissioning Manager who
was allegedly publicising the commissioning process.
But what if north Wales happened to have a really enterprising group
of service users and carers who did know that a commissioning process
was happening and who were even prepared to form a group to bid for this
contract? Well the information provided to me suggests that they would
have found such bidding very difficult indeed. For a start, the
information regarding the bidding process and what needs to be done to
land the bid successfully is littered with acronyms with are never
explained. I have a PhD and a research background in social policy and
sociology in the Welsh context and I didn’t know what most of those
acronyms meant. But it gets worse. Even if a group of service users had
managed to plough through all this and somehow decipher it, at the ‘Meet
The Buyer Event’, in the ‘procurement information’, provided by Rachel
Glynn-Thomas (‘category manager’) there was a reference to a preference
for the bidders to make use of technology – specifically to submit the
bid via e procurement, ‘utilising the Bravo Solutions etenderWales
software hosted by the Welsh Government’. Well that will be familiar to
every service user and carer in Wales won’t it, they’ll use it daily.
Service users wanting to bid will have needed a good accountant as well,
because they had to complete one of the most taxing spreadsheets that
I’ve ever seen, worse even than the spreadsheets that I used to complete
when I wrote research bids for the research councils that fund academic
research (and I had the University accountant to help me). Now, even if
our hypothetical service user group did contain a social policy expert,
an accountant, someone who was familiar with procurement procedures
used by the Welsh Govt as well as someone who knew how to install and
use the specialised software used by the Welsh Govt for procurement,
there was something interesting about when the ‘Meet The Buyer Event’
was held. I don’t remember seeing it being advertised anywhere.
But if I
was someone who might have been looking out for an opportunity to bid
for a Welsh Government contract and was familiar with the procedure of
bidding for these contracts, I’d have been looking at the website
Sell2Wales. The contract was advertised on Sell2Wales – but not until
nearly a month after the ‘Meet The Buyer Event’ had been held. So anyone
attending that ‘Meet The Buyer Event’ (the only opportunity to receive
information and ask questions) could have only known about it from an
inside contact.
The ‘Meet The Buyer’ event was held in the Boardroom of Optic St
Asaph, a location virtually impossible to get to by public transport –
so interested service users who did know about it will have needed their
own cars to get there. The people making up the panel at the ‘Meet The
Buyer’ event included Wyn Thomas (Assistant Director, Community
Partnership Development, BCUHB), Vicky Jones (Regional Substance Misuse
Commissioning and Development Manager), Jane Jones (Partnership Manager,
BCUHB), Rachel Glynn-Thomas (Category Manager, Wrexham Borough County
Council) and Sion ap Glynn (Business Support Wales). These are not the
sort of people that your average service user would know – but I bet
people from CAIS knew them, particularly as CAIS already provide
‘substance misuse services’ on behalf of the Betsi and thus work ‘in
partnership’ with them.
There were also two ‘service users’ on this panel, a David Holmes and
an Andrea Hughes – however at least one of the powerpoints supplied to
me allegedly presented by the ‘service users’ contained a number of
highly complex flow charts. I have yet to meet a service user who would
ever include such things in a presentation on ‘What Involvement Means To
Me’. These managerialist flow charts were also noticeably inconsistent
with the rest of the presentation material from the ‘service users’,
which pivoted around claiming expenses, supporting others, feeling like a
valuable human being, undertaking an entry level education course and
no longer being sectioned. I suspect that the managerialist flow charts
had been added to those presentations by someone else.
The information supplied to me also suggested that someone might have
been expecting a bid from CAIS/Hafal. The information is littered with
references to ‘substance misuse services’. Indeed mentions of ‘substance
misuse services’ were being prioritised – again and again they were
mentioned in the remit after ‘service user involvement’. But there are
other rather big clues as well. One slide sent to me in response to my
FoI request was a presentation by Jane Jones, Partnership Manager,
BCUHB. She certainly seems to gearing up for a partnership with
CAIS/Hafal – her presentation states that ‘we would welcome bids from a
consortia or partnership but partners must be clear about their
partnership arrangements before submitting an application’. No doubt
Jane Jones wanted to ensure that any such partnerships contained the
word ‘CAIS’ in their ‘arrangements’. The biggest clue however is
contained on the slide prepared by Rachel Glynn-Thomas regarding
‘procurement information’: ‘WCBC [Wrexham County Borough Council] on
behalf of the Six North Wales Authorities represented by the Area
Planning Board for Substance Misuse and with the Betsi Cadwaladr
University Health Board…’ So at the very heart of the ‘procurement
process’ was the Area Planning Board For Substance Misuse – who are
presumably the people who have already commissioned CAIS to provide
‘substance misuse services’ and know them well. Rachel’s slide mentions
the need to ensure ‘best value’ and that a marketised commissioning
process is the best way of achieving this – ah, so that’s how 1.5
million found its way into the pockets of Dafydd Alun Jones, Lucille
Hughes et al…
The dirty deed has now been done, the dosh has gone to CAIS/Hafal and
now Dafydd, Lucille and their mates are dictating what ‘service user
involvement’ in north Wales looks like. One of the slides sent to me
gives some ‘facts and figures’ regarding the region covered by the
Betsi. It mentions that there are 1,600 staff employed in the Mental
Health Division. So ‘service users’ who dare to complain are faced with
1,600 people sticking together like glue. (It’s tempting to suggest that
there are probably more staff employed in the Mental Health Division
than patients successfully obtaining a service.) And now they’ve got
CAIS to represent their interests against the 1,600 people.
Whilst reading through the information supplied to me in response to
my FoI request, any, many questions sprung to mind. But the biggest
question of all surely has to be that if CAIS have been given 1.5
million for five years worth of ‘service user involvement’ how much are
they raking in for providing all their other ‘services’? As Private Eye
would say, I think we should be told…
http://www.drsallybaker.com/uncategorized/the-story-behind-1-5-million/
