CLANS - Can they work??
The May edition of Legal Action magazine features an article by Adam Griffith, ASA policy officer, that reviews the proposals for CLANs that have been put forward in Cornwall, South Wales (Cardiff, Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend), Gloucestershire, East Riding and West Sussex.
The specifications vary considerably in terms of
- The amounts being provided by the local authorities and the LSC
- The total funding per head of population
- The services required
- The service delivery mechanisms required
- The targets proposed.
The proposed local authority funding varies considerably between the areas concerned, representing £1.91 per head of population per year in Gloucestershire, £1.26 in West Sussex, £1.20 in Cardiff, and £0.50 in East Riding.
It is hard to see how the funding relates to the services required in many respects.
All the specifications require services to be available at a number of permanent locations (varying between three and seven) during normal office hours five days a week, plus one evening and/or Saturday morning, together with outreach and other services. Three of the specifications also require the CLAN to provide a full time telephone advice service.
The targets for general advice suggest that this can be provided at an average cost that varies between £7 and £35.
All the CLANs are required to provide internal and/or external training, to respond to local emergencies or newly emerging areas of need, and to train and use volunteers.
In three areas the CLAN is required to be a "centre of excellence", and recruit volunteers from all sections of the community, with targets set for the number of new volunteers to be recruited and trained.
Not possible?
Requiring the CLANs to provide specialist services at all their permanent locations all of the time, as seems to be required in some of the specifications, is quite impracticable. The funding available, almost entirely from the LSC, is just not sufficient for this.
The article concludes that the CLAN specifications are asking for too much, given the funding available. Given the basic overheads of running a permanent location, it is hard to see how anyone could deliver to the specifications as currently drafted.
The idea of a network of complementary services seems to have been largely replaced by the idea of a collection of mini CLACs to satisfy the requirements of each local authority concerned.
Read the full article
