This blog was produced in collaboration with social enterprise bodies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA.

Wages are a highly discussed topic across most sectors and industries. Around the world there is ongoing publicity that highlights concerns around modern slavery, exploitation of workforces and disparities in income.

When it comes to social enterprises there can be the expectation that they go above and beyond on wages, by virtue of their model – doing business for good. Wages are a complex area in general and, for social enterprises, there are unique circumstances that further affect approaches and perceptions.

We know that as social enterprises we must value staff, ensuring that they are being paid fairly, especially for those that are marginalised or prone to exploitation – for example, people with a disability. We also know that social enterprises need to attract talent and skills to the team.

As a group of international social enterprise certifiers and standard setters, we all recognise that we want to be more effective in creating transparency and understanding around these points. Giving the issue more prominence can assist and empower those that work in social enterprises, as well as create confidence in the ‘social enterprise brand’ for customers. Across social enterprise certifications/accreditations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA – there are standard principles that we each apply around wages.

The focus for all certifiers is on the broader remit and raison d’etre of a social enterprise – i.e. evidencing social, cultural and environmental purpose being at the heart of the business. However, all certifiers include some form of ‘sense check’ on wages, for example through self or public declarations, and understanding pay policies and challenging ‘out of the ordinary’ pay levels where they are visible. However, wage audits and verification, which are not checks mastered in the regular domain, are not a pass-fail criterion of social enterprise certifications.

Amongst the certifiers there are several consistent issues and questions that arise around wages:

Concerns of underpayment

For some certifiers, stakeholder underpayment has now become a key issue, particularly for the most vulnerable employees and where there is no minimum wage legislation as a safety net, as is the case in the USA, where minimum wage varies by state.

Other concerns of underpayment have arisen in Australia, where many social enterprises pay employees with a disability an acceptable productivity-based rate. Although lower than minimum wage, these rates are consistent with legal requirements and enable these individuals to have employment where they otherwise might not attain it. While this is an ongoing subject of debate in Australia, solutions have and continue to be developed to equalise outlier wages.

Disparity in salaries

A further consideration is very high salary payments, with a focus on the pay differentials between highest and lowest paid staff.  Across all certifiers this is not an easy assessment and there are a variety of considerations at play including the sector of the organisation.

For example, in the UK there is a need to set salaries to attract locum GPs in the NHS, while other industries face similar shortages of skills which can affect wages. In the UK, the Social Enterprise Gold Mark standard considers pay differentials between highest and lowest paid staff but doesn’t have a pass/fail approach, rather a collective scoring on a number of ethical issues.

Paying yourself is not at odds with social mission

All certifications also report the issue of founder underpayment, which has largely fallen under the radar. At times each of the certifiers has encountered social enterprises founders, particularly amongst younger generations, who are uncertain as to whether they can draw a wage and how this would be viewed in the certification assessment.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what social enterprise is about. Social enterprise has to become a sustainable business, nobody can afford to work for free ongoing and indeed this may mask underlying viability issues. On the other hand, we expect social enterprises not to be duplicating the ‘fat cat bonus’ and huge pay differentials that have dogged other sectors.

Some social enterprises, where their business model allows for it, go over and above legal obligations, while others resource wages within their means and in line with minimum or legal requirements. Aside from a sense-check there are no hard and fast rules around payment of wages in social enterprise certification. The variations in legal context, industry and workforce means there are different and valid approaches. Ultimately, we should be looking at what social enterprises can achieve within their own industry and national context.

For seekers and stakeholders of certification, the issues around wages may affirm or challenge assumptions and experiences. The local certification bodies are a resource to tap into as questions and issues arise.

Contributors to this blog: Social Traders (Australia), Social Enterprise Mark CIC (UK), Akina Foundation (New Zealand), Buy Social Canada, Buy Social USA, Society Profits (USA), and Social Enterprise UK.

By Mark Cockerton, Advisor on urgent healthcare & GP out-of hours services

We will soon be having a(nother) reorganisation of the NHS.

I’m assuming that readers will have read the White Paper so I haven’t covered the detail of those proposals. As a very broad summary: A major feature of the 2012 reorganisation was to introduce automatic tendering of NHS healthcare services and bring the commissioning of NHS healthcare services under the jurisdiction of the Competition and Markets Authority.

Both of those are going to be reversed next year. It says it all that the previous ‘reforms’ are being dismantled by the governing Party that introduced them.

9 years too late in my view…

Competitive tendering

Regular tendering of urgent care services has become commonplace. There is precious little evidence of any VFM or service quality benefits arising from tendering; neither are there any shining examples of that process improving collaborative working in urgent care. Some of you will disagree with that, however my assertion is that it isn’t the competitive tendering process that drives service quality.

Many of us remember the world before competition when our organisations were fully-compliant against all 13 NQRs and there was an immediate action plan drawn up to deal with any non-compliance. The assumption that including a requirement to collaborate in a contract specification would mean that collaboration would follow is a pretty damn naïve one. It often had the opposite effect with services much less inclined to collaborate after being in competition with each other during a tender process.

Had NHS competitive tendering been a success when judged against the huge cost of the organisations (including CCGs and Commissioning Support Units) set up to service the system, we’d have been given examples showing us how well it was all working. I have never seen any VFM comparisons taking into account the cost of commissioning, contracting and tendering.

Given the failure to achieve notable service improvements from competitive tendering there is strong public and NHS staff support for scrapping section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and for removing the commissioning of NHS healthcare services from the jurisdiction of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. That’s something that I also support as the current commissioning arrangements are not fit for purpose.

Collaboration and integration

I believe that different parts of the NHS and other healthcare Providers will work together more easily once they are freed from feeling they need to erect barriers with organisations that could potentially compete with them, whenever the next tender is issued. Fear of future competition from ‘partner’ organisations is something I frequently observe and its a serious barrier to co-operation in the urgent care sector currently.

That’s because the local Acute Trust, Community Trust, Ambulance Service, GP Federation, Primary Care Network and commercial provider can (and do) compete with the Social Enterprise provider to deliver urgent care services; either alone, or in partnership with another organisation. I can’t think of another part of the healthcare system that has such a range of organisations competing to deliver it, or where tendering opportunities have been more plentiful. The replacement of the requirement to regularly tender urgent care contracts and replace that with the expectation that local Providers will collaboratively work together in an Integrated Care System, to provide the best service possible with the available resources, has my support… in principle.

However, there are huge challenges coming for organisations that have followed a policy of remaining ‘independent’ and made little progress towards integration. There are many references in the White  Paper to ‘placebased’ services and those organisations operating in areas where they have little geographical relevance as they won their contracts in areas where they had no history of service delivery are particularly threatened.

Threats

Where are the threats to Social Enterprise organisations, including UHUK members, providing urgent healthcare and unscheduled primary care?

• Having worked for one of the Pathfinder Integrated Care Organisations I learned first hand how easy it is to push an ‘external’ Provider outside the integrated care system. How would an organisation without longstanding links to a local geographic area and enjoying little emotional ownership from local primary care and patients, be able to ‘win’ against an alliance of Acute Trust/ Ambulance Service/ core local Primary Care organisation and Local Authority?
• Without enjoying strong local emotional ownership, or being fully embedded within local primary care and/or having local ‘political’ support, social enterprise and commercial organisations risk losing their contracts when the term ends. In my view.
• The alternative outcome is that organisations external to the Integrated Care System may be offered a ‘take it or leave it’ financial envelope that will be very unattractive. The expectation is of course that the Integrated Care System delivers value-for-money. Those core organisations inside the System will seek to maintain their income so far as possible by forcing those organisations outside the System to take the brunt of efficiency savings.
• Any commercial and social enterprise organisations that have depended on a strategy of continually securing new ‘out of area’ contracts to replace other ‘out of area’ contracts lost in competitive tendering processes in order to maintain their financial security, are particularly threatened. That’s because their prospect of securing future contracts in areas where they don’t currently have a very well-established presence is going to be minimal.
• Future integrated urgent care contracts are very likely to be secured by collaborative arrangements between local Acute Trusts, Local Authorities, a core local Primary Care Organisation and Ambulance Trusts. Any provider outside the local area and the Integrated Care System is, by definition, going to be unable to define how they will be able to offer integrated care.
• Organisations that have built an integrated management structure and physical infrastructure paid for by a contract portfolio that includes ‘out-of-area’ contracts are likely to have their future financial viability adversely affected. The economy of scale issues that drove their organisational development become financial barriers when the organisation needs to downsize if it loses one or more contracts that it is unable to replace.
• Politically, Acute Trusts/ Ambulance services/Community Trusts/ Mental Health Trusts/ Primary Care Collaboratives and Local Authorities have a size and influence that no Social Enterprise could ever hope to match.
• High-level discussions will already be taking place between NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and Ambulance services to position their organisations in the Integrated Care Systems. Agreement about who from those organisations is going to become the Chief Executive Officer may already have been reached.
• In some areas Primary Care will have been included in those preliminary political discussions. However, only those social enterprise providers that are extremely well-established locally and have some local political clout will be a party to those discussions. That is also something I saw in the Pathfinder Integrated Care Organisation I worked for. By the time Primary Care joined the discussions it was clear that alliances had already been formed between the Acute Trust and Ambulance service and it was catch-up from that point. Securing appropriate influence for the Primary Care organisation against the combined might of the Acute Trust and Ambulance Service, when the CEO of the Acute Trust was the CEO of the Integrated Care Organisation following a deal with the Ambulance Trust ‘was a challenge!’.
• Bear in mind that the Boards of Integrated Care Systems need only to include NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and Primary Care. There is certainly no expectation or requirement that Social Enterprise providers have a seat on the Board and very few will do.’

Plan for action

• There is still nearly a year until the new Integrated Care Systems are expected to be up and running in April 2022. So there is still time to build a ‘political alliance’. The obvious alliance for social enterprise urgent care organisations is with local Primary Care Organisations but building relationships with local Acute Trusts/Ambulance services/ Local Authorities is essential too.
• Social Enterprise urgent care providers tend to have unrivalled access to local GPs and that gives an opportunity to improve relationships and ensure that the organisation is ‘emotionally embedded’ within local primary care.
• Much of the high-level strategy on the establishment of the Integrated Care Systems will be undertaken by senior clinicians. Clinical Directors of the organisation should be outward-looking and seeking to establish effective working relationships and networks with all other local healthcare Providers, including Acute Trusts and Ambulance Trusts. It is not the time for organisations to be inwardly-focussed.
• All other Senior Managers should be given an objective to build effective working relationships with local healthcare providers. The Chief Executive has a vital role in building the most effective working relationships with CCG leadership.
• Dust off the organisations constitution and ensure that it is being followed, particularly with regard to the involvement of patients, staff and GPs in the organisation. At times of change, buy-in and support from local people is often valuable.
• Dust off too the latest tender submission you made and remind yourself about the promises made with regard to integration, seamless care, joint working, patient involvement etc.
• There will almost certainly be a due diligence process before a Social Enterprise provider is included in an Integrated Care System so make sure you are keeping to your Constitution and can demonstrate how you are different to a commercial provider.
• If there is any opportunity to work with the Acute Trust/ Ambulance Trust/ Primary Care – take it.
• Any organisation that is dependent on ‘out-of-area’ contracts to maintain financial viability should be reviewing its exit strategy for those contracts and making plans to limit its financial exposure if those contracts are lost and replacement contracts are not secured. That includes reviewing its management structure so that staff and managers are identified to particular contracts and can be TUPE’d should individual contracts be lost.

Summary

The proposed reorganisation is, in my view, the biggest threat to the viability of Social Enterprise providers since the introduction of NHS 111. Leadership of those organisations need to step up and help to secure their future. Those organisations that are still around in 3 years time will be those that have been able to form political alliances and relationships with far larger organisations.

Mark Cockerton has 40 years experience in the NHS and not-for-profit urgent care sector. He is currently Managing Director of Urgent Healthcare Solutions, which provides leadership and support services including tendering, organisational development, interim management, IT and telecoms advice, HR support, mentoring services, patient involvement and financial advice exclusively to the Social Enterprise urgent health sector.

By Fiona Walsh and Junior Graham

Student Hubs is a national charity that works with five UK university partners to deliver extracurricular and in-curricular social action programmes. Each year, we work with over 1,800+ university students to support the communities in our five Hub cities of Bristol, Cambridge, Kingston, Southampton and Winchester.

One of the biggest community groups we work with are young people, particularly young community participants facing disadvantage. It is these young people who are disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, with 16-25 year olds seeing record unemployment, mental health issues at an all time high, and the issue of digital exclusion making schooling and education even more challenging. There is no doubt that the long-term impact of Covid-19 will continue to be felt by these young people for years to come.

Our vision and mission is about mainstreaming student social action, engaging university students with social and environmental challenges faced by our communities and creating active citizens for life – something we desperately need in the midst of the current crisis. So how can youth social action and social enterprise support these groups to thrive beyond the pandemic?

Students and young people need confidence and support

Young people are currently isolated, away from their peer and support networks, and potentially dealing with factors such as grief, unemployment, lost learning and lack of opportunities. Before we start with new opportunities, we need to support the crisis of confidence that lots of young people will be currently facing. This requires 1:1 support, role models and interventions which listen to young people and provide meaningful frameworks to get them to a place where they can see themselves making a difference again.

Through Student Hubs’ youth social action programme, LinkYouth, taking place at Kingston Hub in London, a key part of the offer is about providing mentorship, group work and 1:1 discussions for young people. This allows young people to be seen and heard, to have their opinions valued, and to have the confidence to recognize what they bring to the table, as well as for students to see themselves as leaders and role models in this space.

Students and young people need skills and experience

Once students and young people have found their motivation and confidence, that’s when the focus on skills, experience and learning can come back. Through social action, volunteering and social enterprise, students and young people become advocates for themselves, raising money and awareness for causes, and growing their skills in leadership, teamwork and communication in a supportive environment.

Young people need to make the change they want to see

Finally, it’s important that young people see themselves as the solution to a better future. But this requires other people to advocate and believe in them, and space for young people to reflect on this for themselves. These are the tools we will need to rebuild post-Covid, and social action and entrepreneurship allows young people’s ideas to blossom, and for them to provide the solutions their community needs.

We see this in our Service Learning programme at Kingston Hub, where we build social action into the university curriculum, with students becoming consultants and researchers for local community groups facing individual challenges. The programme allows students to have the opportunities to use their academic knowledge, support their community, and give back in a way that they may have struggled to access outside of their degree course.

At Kingston Hub, we’re currently working in partnership with the Rio Ferdinand Foundation through our Service Learning delivery, engaging Graphic Design students to create content for their 10 year anniversary launch, designing activities dedicated to engaging young people into activity. They are also working with students from the Children and Youth Development course at Kingston University to create content for their social media campaign encouraging young people into activities online.

We call all be active citizens

Becoming an active citizen for us at Student Hubs means being an active member of the community, volunteering, being a conscious citizen, and supporting others to thrive. By investing in this future, we can support the students and young people who have been so negatively affected by the pandemic, and build something better for the future we hope to see.

If you want to find out more about Student Hubs and our work, you can go to www.studenthubs.org or email Fiona Walsh at fiona.walsh@studenthubs.org to find out more about our partnerships, training and Hub model.

Fiona Walsh is the Sales Director at Student Hubs. Junior Graham is the Kingston Hub Programme Manager

By Calum Rosie, writer and correspondent for Immigrationnews.co.uk

In a time when the world’s richest people have increased their wealth by $600bn, almost 100,000 people in the UK are facing homelessness thanks to the economic turbulence caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, adding to the staggering number of people currently living unhoused across the country.

Homelessness in the UK has always been a shameful issue, but due to recent circumstances surrounding the pandemic, the UK Government’s failure to address it is tantamount to a national disgrace. And since the government refuses to take positive action, what then can the country’s charities and social enterprises do to tackle homelessness? Unfortunately, there probably isn’t one simple solution, but rather a multitude of techniques will be required.

To that end, many charities and social enterprises are turning to social housing as a temporary salve to the homelessness issue. Social housing will provide safe, affordable, and high-quality homes to those most in need. It acts as an alternative to other temporary accommodation and aims to give people who would otherwise be homeless the support to escape from that life.

Social housing will allow residents to live and socialise together, and is a superior alternative to the likes of homeless hostels and even council housing, because trained staff will be on site to provide meaningful, 24-hour support to residents.

Well-known homelessness support charity Shelter recently commissioned a report on their vision of how to tackle homelessness in the future, where they recommended constructing 3 million more social homes, introducing new rent reforms to increase the standard of living across the board, and advocated for social renters to have a more vocal presence in the community.

Other notable charities and social enterprises that support this notion include Edinburgh’s Social Bite and Cyrenians. They have worked together to build a Social Village in the city, staffed by skilled social support workers who can provide one to one support to help residents achieve their goals.

Similarly, Community Campus ’87 is working hard to combat youth homelessness in Teeside by providing vulnerable young people with a place to live, as well as a personal support worker to help them break the cycle of homelessness, while Brighter Futures is providing employment skills and training to unhoused individuals in the Staffordshire community.

So it’s clear that some of the UK’s top charities and social enterprises support the idea of social housing, and for very good reason. This kind of housing is incredibly important, as it addresses two major problems that the UK is facing. Firstly, the trained staff present in social housing help to tackle a huge issue that exists in tandem to homelessness: mental illness. Around 80% of unhoused people have some kind of untreated mental illness which may act as a barrier to their successful reintroduction into society. With a dedicated staff, this barrier may be overcome, and it may well help the residents escape homelessness for good; it is certainly vastly superior to providing accommodation with no such support offered.

This support will come in a variety of ways: during their time living in social housing, residents can engage in social activities, including shared exercise and cooking lessons, which can reduce isolation and improve mental health. They will also be taught new life skills that will benefit them when they move on, and staff will help all residents find permanent housing, and after their stay will provide ongoing support in order to ensure that they will be successful in their new home.

Secondly, social housing promises to provide quality housing for low-income families and individuals. In the wake of the Grenfell tragedy, we are in desperate need of safe and secure housing for all, not just those who can afford it. Social housing can provide this, because the charities and social enterprises who are dedicated to its implication won’t cut corners in the interest of profits.

This will be a much-needed change to the current private rental sector, which is experiencing sky high rent prices for low quality, even dangerous accommodations. Shelter predicts that this sector is currently reaching a breaking point, and that in the coming years, we will need more than ever a way to support low income individuals to escape not only homelessness, but also being trapped in extortionate and unsafe rental properties.

So, while social housing may not fight the causes of homelessness in the way we inevitably must, it provides a much-needed balm to the wounds homelessness causes. A country cannot be deemed successful or worthy if it fails to provide the most basic of human needs, housing, to every single citizen, and if the UK government refuses to shoulder this responsibility, then we must all do everything we can to support the charities and social enterprises that will.

Calum Rosie is a writer and correspondent for Immigrationnews.co.uk, a website dedicated to shedding light on immigration injustices and social issues.

By Pete Goff, Head of Web Development at Cosmic

At a time when face-to-face interactions are limited to 2-metre distances and people are staying at home, the online presence of your Social Enterprise takes on new importance. Therefore, now may be a good time to improve your website and enhance the user experience.

Whether your enterprise is involved in hospitality, leisure, retail or any number of industries, Covid-19 likely means that your shopfront and customer engagement has moved online.

There are many steps you can to take to maximise the value of your website, keeping customers, beneficiaries, funders and partners happy.

Here are some ideas:

1. Adjusting your current website, to enable you to sell and take payments online, or deliver services remotely and virtually. Pivoting your business model and processes can be the key to thriving (or surviving) during times of difficulty.
2. Reviewing the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) performance of your website. This reflects how highly search engines, such as Google, rank your website when people search for it. It is important that your site is visible to the right people – helping your to promote your service/product/cause to your target audience.
3. Enhancing the visitor experience of your website, ensuring that the speed of loading, the ease of navigation and the enjoyment of the content are all as good as they can be. Does your site respond to different screen sizes, such as smartphones? (You can check here). Is it accessible for people with reduced sight? These are considerations you might need to take into account.
4. Securing your website, to avoid risk of malicious attack, and to give confidence to your customers and visitors. Do you have an SSL certificate? This provides the “s” in “https”. Without one, Google can penalise your performance in searches, and many popular browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will warn customers that your website may be unsafe to browse.
5. Aspiring to reach new audiences, attract new customers, win business, promote new causes – this is what the correct online presence can help you with. There’s more to it than just having a website. You need to ensure that your site up to scratch (as above), but you also need to take advantage of other areas of Digital Marketing: use of social media, advertisements, mailing-lists, newsletters, blogging and content creation.

If you feel that you would like advice or support on any of the above issues, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at Cosmic. We can provide you with training, technical IT support, digital consultancy, and website development. Helping our clients as much as we can in these troubling times is top of our agenda.

Cosmic is a Social Enterprise which specialises in digital skills training, digital consultancy, IT technical support and website development. It provides an innovative range of services and support to help people identify their Digital need and to progress with their ambitions.