26 March, 2010
The new Communities and Local Government Handyperson Financial Benefits Toolkit was launched at the inaugural National Handyperson Conference on 24 March.
The toolkit, developed by consultants Cassiopeia, is designed to evidence the benefits handyperson services offer and assist providers and commissioners to secure future funding. This article, written by James Stock, North West Handyperson Co-ordinator, gives you a flavour of what the tool does and how service providers can use it.
Put briefly, the toolkit demonstrates two things.
1. Firstly, the toolkit evidences the financial benefits produced by handyperson services - such as reductions in costs to the health service due to handyperson interventions reducing the number of falls.
2. Secondly, the toolkit highlights the uncosted benefits of handyperson services (such as improved wellbeing and peace of mind for service users) that form an essential part of what handyperson services offer to local communities.
Users are required to enter some basic information about their existing handyperson service (or the service that they wish to develop), such as number of households visited, the range of interventions the service offers (for example, small repairs, home security) and costs of delivering the service.
Using this information, the toolkit calculates the amount of financial benefit a current or speculative handyperson service generates. The benefits are broken down across social care, health services, the fire service, police service and to the client. The toolkit also provides a summary that indicates the financial benefits produced by the handyperson service against the cost of setting up and running the service. It also lists the other benefits generated by the service that have not been costed, such as increased confidence.
The toolkit calculates the financial benefits based on evidence from a number of different sources. This is the same approach used for the Supporting People benefits model and is in line with the HM Treasury guidance on cost benefit analysis in ‘The Green Book' (on which all public sector economic assessment is based). A conservative approach has been taken, and only evidence assessed as being robust enough has been included. Of the evidence used, if there is conflicting evidence on the benefit from an intervention, the one that shows the least impact is used. Taking this prudent approach ultimately makes the toolkit more credible.
The benefits toolkit aims to balance flexibility for the user to tailor the model to fit local service design and needs without making it too complex to use. The national data used in the tool can be replaced with local data if robust local data is available, and the accompanying user manual provides guidance on this and other matters.
The Handyperson Financial Benefits Toolkit is designed to be used by providers and commissioners of handyperson services. For providers, the tool can give you key pieces of evidence to back up the business case for maintaining existing handyperson service funding or to secure new funding from alternative sources such as the health service, fire service or police.
As budget pressures grow, and commissioners find themselves having increasingly tough funding decisions to make, the toolkit will provide supporting evidence to demonstrate the worth and value of handyperson services to local communities and vulnerable people.
With the CLG handyperson expansion ‘part A' money due to end in March 2011, providers need to start thinking now about how they will make the case to commissioners to mainstream enhanced handyperson funding. The benefits toolkit can provide an essential part of the business case for handyperson services, providing a cost benefit analysis of your service. The strength of this toolkit is that it can provide a credible headline figure to a range of potential commissioners - demonstrating how much your service is benefiting the local area. The toolkit can also help to make the case for more effective joint commissioning of handyperson services across an area by showing where the financial benefits fall.
As effective a statement as the toolkit makes, it will not be enough on its own to convince commissioners to invest. A comprehensive business case needs to be made for handyperson services that also includes:
setting the national and local strategic context
identifying and evidencing the need for the service locally
demonstrating that the service is value for money and valued by service users, and
showing how the service is (or will be) managed to meet the outcomes required by commissioners.
As part of their work to help sustain handyperson services, the regional handyperson co-ordinators will work with Foundations to produce guidance on developing the business case for handyperson services, and that will include material to help providers of handyperson services understand how services are commissioned and how they can maximise the commissioning cycle.
The toolkit and accompanying guidance document is now available online on the CLG, Foundations and Cassiopeia websites.
Foundations, Cassiopeia and the handyperson co-ordinators will host a number of workshops in early summer around the country for providers and commissioners. These will focus on supporting providers to build a robust case for handyperson services, part of which will include the financial benefits toolkit and how this can be used most effectively.
Foundations and the regional handyperson co-ordinators will provide ongoing user support with the toolkit, helping with queries and troubleshooting.
If you have any queries or would like guidance on using the toolkit, please contact Foundations or your regional handyperson co-ordinator.
