Approach 3: Unlocking potential

June 2025 teaching template, slide 46

Approach 3 Unlocking potential

A place where everyone can thrive

June 2025 teaching template, slide 47

Approach 3: Unlocking potential

Introduction: Aims to build long-term capacity, confidence, and capability in communities to prevent need.

How to move toward: Map formal/informal support, use social value tools, and engage local assets.

What to do: Support micro-providers, community initiatives, and co-production at local level.

What not to do: Don’t expect short-term savings or shift burden onto communities without investment.

Risks and issues: Depends on leadership consistency and maturity of the local voluntary/community sector.

Commissioning skills and structure: Requires strengths in market engagement, community development, and economic analysis.

June 2023 adult social care pre-reading, approach 3

Strategic Commissioning Approach 3. Unlocking potential

A place where everyone can thrive.

Introduction to this approach

This approach is paired with the ‘capacity, capability, and confidence’ commissioning aspect and is about having the resources, capacity, and capability available – from various sources (business, charity, mutual aid, self-efficacy) – to meet need at the point of demand or to enable people to live their lives without falling into need. It begins from a view that the best way to deliver outcomes for the community is for the community to do this for itself, and to ensure that all spend and provision is targeted to creating capacity, capability and confidence (pushing ‘upstream’ as much as possible, to try to prevent needs rather than deal with demand). This approach is likely to be relatively disinterested in the delivery model but focused on the direct and indirect impacts of health and care.

The council's role is to assist in the supporting of capability-building activity by deploying its assets (spend, buildings, legal advice, leadership, connections, media) to support the creation and sustaining of community groups (with varying levels of formality) and VCSE organisations, alongside other providers, to co-produce social outcomes. Commissioning is focused around understanding and influencing all the assets available to the community, and helping the community to become stronger and more capable of supporting its members; ‘care by the community not merely care in the community.’.

Such an approach works well where:

• There are strong, connected communities
• Political leadership is brave, confident, and community-focused
• Levels of deprivation and need are significant but not overwhelming
• There are established public partnership bonds of trust

It requires an ability to engage with providers as partners, to consider co-commissioning approaches, and manage an effective balance of collaboration and competition, while staying within procurement and other guidelines.

How to move towards this approach

This approach requires a view of funding and support that considers the long-term and wide-ranging impacts. Therefore, strong market insight, market making, and market management capabilities are needed – a good starting point is sound knowledge of current provision, both formal and informal, and analysis of the secondary impacts of the council’s actions.

There is now a strong evidence base for this kind of approach, but active engagement with all parties who can support people is critical, so developing a combination of systems analysis and engagement skills is critical. Good first steps are to explore social value – through the provisions of the Social Value Act and mainstream contractual requirements – and to prototype one or more approaches, like alliance provision (awarding to an alliance of often voluntary sector providers).

Commissioners will need to work proactively with all parts of the system to deliver change and to be able to bring in economic analysis to underline the secondary benefits as well as savings. Work to understand costs of care and market sustainability may provide an opportunity to make changes in this area.

What to do, and what not to do, when you are pursuing this approach

The main focus here is a community and place which support positive outcomes, with active and dynamic capability from an effective mixed market, all of which support self-efficacy. It is important to invest and measure returns in all parts of this, while still delivering responsive services and ensuring that they are effective and not increasing dependency. Councils need to ensure they connect to wider wellbeing agendas, including, for example, employment and physical activity.

It is important to see ‘unlocking potential’ as a long-term benefit, not a short-term way to save, and to be creative and collaborative in how capacity, capability, and confidence are built, including making social value core, and integrating this thinking into your Market Sustainability work. It is also important not to pay lip service to ‘enablement’, but to follow validated approaches like Good Help.

Specific risks and issues

This is an approach which hugely benefits from top-down support and sponsorship and place-based agreed activity. Its success also depends on the latent capacity of your markets, community and voluntary sector etc, and the history of working with them. It is likely to require long-term consistency of purpose.

A short-term savings focus in this area can lead you to unsustainably loading community, carers etc, and undermine long-term capability. You also need to ensure you are well set up to appropriately use a mix of funding mechanisms.

Considerations for commissioning skills and structure

Market engagement, community development, and a strong focus on self-efficacy are all needed – and the ability to balance a focus on unlocking potential with meeting needs in the here and now. Ideally, commissioning would be structured around pathways from need and dependency to self-efficacy, mirroring services, and be place-based or council-wide, or at least linking to an overall place-based plan.

Examples of this approach in practice

• Commissioning Home Care to rural communities: A local authority in a large rural county had experienced difficulties in securing reliable providers to deliver home care services across the county. The area covers large sparsely populated areas, comprising small towns and villages as well as isolated hamlets and farming communities. 

The existing providers were finding recruitment and retention increasingly difficult as other employment pays more, and travel costs had become a growing disincentive to home care staff. Many providers said that they could no longer cover rural areas and could only respond to requests to take on new work in the larger urban parts of the county. Hospital discharge delays were increasing partly due to the availability of home care services. 

The council engaged with community groups, district and parish councils, voluntary organisations, carers groups, and NHS partners. They heard that in some parts of the county, there was the potential for greater community and neighbour support, particularly for vulnerable older people with care and support needs. However, this was unevenly spread and could not be relied upon to support newly identified needs including hospital discharge. Commissioners decided to earmark a proportion of the home care commissioning budget for a new approach. This involved establishing district home care support budgets which could be accessed by local teams – including GP surgeries – to directly ‘commission’ neighbours, friends and community groups to deliver care and support to vulnerable older people. At the same time the commissioning team promoted the development of micro-providers, working with the local Voluntary Service Council to offer organisational and financial support to get started. 

• Enabling community development and unlocking latent potential in staff: In dealing with a fast-growing crisis and setting up the Wigan Deal, the council supported capability development in two ways that are sometimes overlooked. By the end of 2018, they had put £10m into Community Investment (at the same time as delivering over £130m of net savings). Along with reducing demand on public services and capacity building, this fund leveraged £3.9m of external funding, £5.6m of social and economic benefit, and £1.26m of recurrent savings. The asset-based approach applied to staff, too, with a focus on their strengths, their ability to focus on the strengths and capabilities of citizens and put control with citizens, a clear and inspiring development plan, and permission to spend up to £50 to resolve a citizen issue without authorisation.
• Community-led support: Somerset faced a crisis in care, with the number of people over 75 years old projected to double by 2039, and sought to move from ‘assessment for service’ to ‘being part of joined-up community-based ‘system of support’, aimed at helping people to ‘get on with their lives’. Co-produced, joint working with the council played an enabler role. They began to work hyper-locally in West Somerset using a “test and learn”, open approach that became Community Connect, supported by Community Catalysts. The work created 575 active micro-providers and sixteen trusted trader networks, providing over 9,000 hours a week of flexible, local person-centred support to over 1,500 people, supporting community resilience, and delivering £500,000 annual savings to adult social care, and £2m total savings to the health and care system. Expanding the principles more widely across the council created a whole range of positive outcomes, reflected in customer contact metrics and better care outcomes. A contact centre aims to find community-based solutions and where possible avoid referral for a formal social work assessment. Community Connectors act as local or village-based agents with knowledge of local community assets and support a range of activities from community cafes to supporting hospital discharge, connecting people to community assets and informal services, whenever possible. A focus on personal budgets or direct payments, and services offered to self-funders, allow the council to indirectly fund non-regulated micro-businesses.

This work required expertise and experience, a culture of innovation, permission, and strong leadership from both political leadership and senior officers and, at multiple levels, significant work with front line teams, relationship-building to generate trust, and strong relationships across strategic commissioners, those leading programme development, and the VCE infrastructure organisations.

One thing to read

How-To Guides for creating an asset-based area. TLAP. 2018 https://www.thinklocalactpersonal.org.uk/Browse/Building-Community-Capacity/how-to-guides-for-creating-an-asset-based-area/