Argyll and Bute Alcohol and Drugs Partnership [ADP] decided, in the Autumn of 2014 – following a procurement process raising multiple questions of propriety – to award a contract to provide community addiction support services for all of Argyll and the Isles to a company, Addaction, new to Argyll.
Alongside this decision, the Chair of ADP wrote to the all-important users of the existing services to assure them that it was a requirement of the contract awarded that all employees of the existing local 3rd Sector service providers were to be transferred to Addaction or given employment opportunities and any necessary training.
Whether this commitment was indeed a contractual obligation will be known to Audit Scotland who have been investigating what can fairly be described as a chaotic and professionally inconsistent procurement process, attended by a series of eyebrow-raising – let’s call them ‘eccentricities’.
If this contractual obligation exists, it has not been honoured.
The assured expectation of 3rd Sector service providers’ staff being ‘TUPEd’ over to Addaction seems to have focused almost exclusively on staff from the Dunoon and Cowal local service provider, Kaleidoscope, to the exclusion of others.
The Manager of Kaleidoscope – who is also the Chair of the ADP Delivery Group and was in charge of the delivery of the technical specification for the tender, revealed in a letter welcoming the contract award to Addaction [a letter we published in late 2014], that Addaction had actually been working on a nine month familiarisation exercise with Kaleidoscope during the tender period and well before the announcement of the contract award on 4th November 2015.
Awareness of this collaboration had been kept from Kaleidoscope’s 3rd Sector peers; and at a later 3rd Sector meeting, a member of Kaleidoscope’s staff said that she and her colleagues had ‘known for months’ that they were to TUPE to Addaction. ‘Months’ comfortably took this knowledge to a period well before the formal decision on the award of the contract had been take – one of the eyebrow-raisers in question. Addaction has also been given Kaleidoscope’s premises in Dunoon as their HQ.
Very few staff from the totality of the other 3rd Sector service providers across Argyll & Bute have been TUPE’d to Addaction. ADP has remained uninterested and unconcerned about the abandonment of existing staff which, in the light of the ADP Chair’s communication, would be a breach of contract.
The confusion, hurt, distress and anger of those whose futures are uncertain has been aggravated by Addaction’s very recent advertising in Argyll’s local press for new staff to help to deliver the contracted services across Argyll and Bute.
Addaction’s saying now that they need more staff, having disposed of a number of perfectly capable and experienced workers, may also be a very public admission that they underestimated the staffing levels required to deliver the contract.
Their plan to have full time equivalent staffing of no more than eight people – for the whole of Argyll and the Isles was, from the outset, woefully uninformed. They were told repeatedly by the workers on the ground who had been delivering the services, that eight people was a wholly inadequate establishment- which the current advertising programme appears to support.
This advertising campaign raises key issues.
- Where was the informed competence of e council officers who accepted Addaction’s bid plans as realistic?
- Is there money in the contract to pay for a staffing requirement which appears to be beyond the number in the winning bid?
- If a variation to the contract price has been made retrospectively, to cover extra staff, that surely must render the competition void – since other companies which might have bid to supply the services had the tendered price been more capable, were effectively excluded.
Were some existing staff planned for exclusion?
Amongst papers we obtained under Freedom of Information, there was an email from the Addaction administrator to the ADP Coordinator and to a council employee, dated 20th November 2014, a couple of weeks after the contract award.
Amongst other remarks which reflect a specific and known exclusion plan, this email says:
‘So far my concerns are that Kintyre wont [sic] co-operate and may turn up on 5th January – this delays any recruitment that we can do in this area.’
The indication here is that had representatives from the Kintyre group been present at a meeting where recruitment discussions were intended to take place, recruitment would have to be postponed until they were not present.
Ironically, with the fervent hope expressed here that ‘Kintyre’ would not turn up, staff from that group were threatened with disciplinary procedures for not being there. This seems rather a victimising ‘Catch 22′ situation.
Coincidentally [?] staff from the Kintyre group have not been transferred to Addaction – yet that group has been markedly innovative. Their service users formed an independent service user group which helped plan and organise a conference in Campbeltown on opioid replacement therapy that was attended by Government Minister Fergus Ewing and some of his staff. This event was addressed, impressively, by the service users whose participation in ADP has so far not been enabled, although this is a recommended practice.
The Kintyre Group is one of those which has been consistently critical of unprofessional practice and procedures at ADP and, having interrogated their concerns, it has to be said that there is objective substance to virtually every one of them.
The failure to include, as promised, existing service provision staff in the Addaction team, cannot but smack of a victimisation that is another sign of what has all the appearances of a diseased culture at ADP.
But here we are looking at the deliberate and vindictive removal of the livelihoods of experienced and resourceful who may be members of the awkward squad – with apparent reason – and who had already been demonised to a series of consultants employed to report on the dysfunctionality of the ADP.
This is the corruption of power where, when dysfunctionality clearly exists and is functionally disabling, any attempt at investigation or redress is always moderated through the very authority that may itself be the fundamental source of the problem.
It has to be noted in this particular case that the most qualified expert in addiction employed by the ADP, Professor Neal McKegeney – commissioned to produce a Needs Analysis – independently identified concerns very similar to those regulaarly raised by ‘the awkward squad’ amongst the 3rd Sector service providers.
It is also worth noting that Professor McKegeney’s work was routinely subverted by uncooperative ADP staff, under clear licence from senior management to act in this way; and that his report was then subject to a concerted attempt to rubbish it by the Council’s Executive Director concerned with the ADP – although this executive officer is no expert in this field.
And at the end of the day, some responsible 3rd Sector service providers who tried to have serious issues addressed, look as if their own livelihoods are on the scrap heap.
One group, Encompass, has already had to close., with the loss of experienced senior staff. Others look as if they will have no alternative but to do the same.
It is worth noting that a form of Glasgow-based No win No-fee solicitors recommended to displaced staff, has examined the handling of the TUPE issue, judged it to have been seriously flawed and has offered to take on any of the cases concerned. They have also agreed to take on the whole issue around the first issue of a ‘variation of contract’ [the post-award dropping of the contractual obligation to to provide housing support services] and sue for damages and losses as well.
Audit Scotland have not investigated the operation of ADP, only a clearly off-piste procurement process.
It remains to be seen whether the outcome of the Audit Scotland investigation will actually right any wrongs in what is a wilfully unapologetic mess – and there is more to come.
Note: the Argyll and Bute Alcohol & Drugs Partnership is operated by Argyll and Bute Council and NHS Scotland.
