Blue Stone Consortium

Blue Stone Consortium (BSC) consists of third sector organisations in Newcastle and Gateshead that are already, or aspire to be, established embedded providers contributing to the health and wellbeing of the local population and their communities. We have begun to demonstrate our ability to collaborate since 2015, coalescing around shared objectives to support those people who often struggle to access the services and the care they need. We want to support the sector to work in ways that makes us more than ‘the sum of our parts’ BSC shares a common concern that current commissioning models across a range of issues including health, social care, housing and employment support, are not yielding the best value to commissioners or the best services for the people and communities we serve. Whilst some progress has been made on integrated commissioning approaches, there is still too much commissioning in silos, with a resulting piecemeal, uncoordinated effort, often aimed at the same individuals and communities. This can at times encourage competition not collaboration, duplication of resources, and areas of unmet need. Commissioners and providers alike can feel restricted in what we would both want to achieve because of inappropriate and overly prescribed forms of performance measurement and apportionment of financial risk. Such mechanisms can be counterproductive, creating perverse incentives on how ‘improvement’ is demonstrated. BSC sense a shared concern and frustration amongst experienced commissioners and want to help address the situation. With this in mind BSC would like to be more than just a group of providers vying for contracts. We are interested in exploring new ways of working with local commissioners and stakeholders to help shape and improve how we plan, commission and deliver for our communities, providing an ‘in house’ third sector brokerage service that enables local organisations to come together and provide commissioners with a route for collective planning, delivery and when required, procurement. To this end BSC can offer: • VCS commissioning support and coordination for our public sector commissioners • Excellent knowledge of local people, communities and services • Soft and hard data • A wide range of engagement, involvement and communication opportunities • Access to our partner agencies and supporters • Opportunities to look at how charitable funding and social investment can be better aligned to (and complement) statutory funding streams • A willingness and ability to pilot new ways of delivering services or co-ordinating existing services to achieve either radically reshaped delivery and/or valuable incremental improvements in performance and efficiency