Later this week, people across the North East will have the opportunity to vote for their preferred mayoral candidate for the newly formed North East Combined Authority (NECA), combining seven local authorities including County Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle, Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland.
To understand how the mayoral candidates intend to engage with our VCSE sector, should they be elected, we hosted a VCSE Hustings and invited the six main party candidates to attend, four of whom attended the afternoon. Questions were sent in from attendees representing the VCSE sector, on a number of issues including financial and organisational support, poverty, youth work and social prescribing.
The hustings gave candidates a platform to discuss how they can genuinely make positive changes by agreeing a consistent, cross-sectoral approach, including the VCSE sector, to tackle cross-cutting policy areas like economic inequality, poverty, health inequality and climate change across the North East geography.
If you’d like to watch the Hustings, you can find it on YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K_x6mT22xE
If you don’t have time the below you’ll find a summary of the candidates responses to our question themes, and the pledges they made.
NECA candidates in attendance were:
- Aidan King – Liberal Democrats
- Andrew Gray – Green Party
- Jamie Driscoll – Independent candidate
- Kim McGuiness – Labour Party
All of the lead party candidates were invited to attend.
Questions and responses (written in order of responses provided)
Support for the sector - how do you intend to strengthen investment in the sector recognising our key role in building stronger communities and tackling inequalities in the region and how would you use your position to turn this around and enable us to focus on the more positive and preventative aspects of our work?
Jamie Driscoll – Wants to create long term funding so that charities can plan and ensure spaces are available for charities to operate from. Wants to offer back office support to take the load off charities where they don’t have the organisational capacity or skills. Will stand up to central government around policies that aren’t working. Wants to make better use of the money that goes into employability projects, building on poverty prevention and meaningful 1-2-1 support and coaching for individuals to get into work. Wants to increase support in schools including welfare rights, child poverty prevention and other schemes with advice from and inclusion of the VCSE sector. Will build an evidence base to show that supporting people from the outset reduces the need for long-term support and use this evidence to put more money into the sector for support.
Kim McGuiness – Supporting the voluntary sector will be key in helping people get out of poverty, which is a key economic success indicator. Wants to develop a programme of support which clearly shows how VCSE sector is helping people in communities and how local governments can support the sector. Will treat different organisations in different ways, depending on their needs. Wants to make grants really accessible – easier to apply for with lesser criteria, reduce the need for professional grant writers. Commission rather than procure services to work directly with the VCSE sector. Will be a voice for the sector and stand by you, recognising your role in the economy and ability to support those most vulnerable, offering long term, secure funding to support you for longer. Wants a formal seat at the new cabinet table and to integrate the VCSE sector into business forums. Make sure the whole sector is represented at all levels. Wants to work with the voluntary sector to build resilience within care settings and communities to support those in need with things like mental health prevention work, early years settings to get benefits and childcare plans to help people back into employment. Work with the sector to identify key areas of needs and the best way to respond. Create radical preventative ideas to reduce the need for service in the long term, and create additional funding to enable this work. Recognise when the VCSE sector is the best solution to deliver outcomes and enable this to happen.
Aidan King – Help the care sector as care costs are going up and local councils can’t help by finding more investment for the care sector, work regionally to reduce costs as much as possible. Greater investment to VCSE engaging with marginalised communities. Grow the economic and political power of NECA by growing our economy and driving proceeds into the VCSE sector. Voluntary Sector is often the first step in getting people within disadvantaged communities back into society and it’s important to support this through sufficient funding.
Andrew Gray – Recognised that charities often have to move away from doing the work they’d like to do, to provide core services that aren’t available through the public sector. The solutions to alleviate this will come from communities. Mayor will make sure those solutions are shared, will amplify the voice of the sector with council leaders working across all sector across the region.
Supporting small charities - How will you support and recognise smaller charities providing direct grass-root support to people in our area?
Aidan – wants to revive parish councils so that people have easy access to resources within their community. Wants to drive power and capital to those parish councils.
Andrew – Ultra local are the services he’s most concerned about, and how we can commission services from them. Biggest challenge is large social care contracts which tend to go to large organisations, and small locally based services miss out. Approach would be to improve procurement at a local level and manage contracts in house to ensure smaller charities don’t miss out.
Jamie – Will expand small grants programme already operating across North of Tyne Combined Authority (NOTCA) to make it much easier to provide funding to small charities.
Kim – Recognises that small charities often provide the most vital local work and greater level of local intelligence. Would make sure grant giving is easier for small charities, will work with Local Support Organisations to make sure the right level of business support is being offered to small charities to help their resilience.
Volunteering - How would you recognise the value of volunteering in your role as North East Mayor?
Kim - Already works significantly with volunteers within Northumbria Police & Crime Commissioner (PCC). Thinks we should support raising awareness of opportunities to volunteer, creating a network of awareness, reward and recognition, highlighting and showing the work of volunteers. Recognise the challenges that stop people from volunteering in the first place and address them – free childcare to support people back into work, support caring careers and allow people to live lives where they have more time and space to volunteer.
Andrew – Award ceremonies, events and opportunities to acknowledge and reward work being done and advertise opportunities. Make sure existing Digital portals for volunteering are well advertised and promoted to encourage people into volunteering and the wide range of opportunities there are. Speak to communities to understand what the barriers to volunteering are and how to reduce them.
Jamie – Helped to develop Sector Connector within NOTCA, will roll this out across the region. Will also roll out a volunteer travel pass – to make a practical difference to people’s ability to get to volunteering roles.
Aidan – Volunteers give up their time for free, wants to make it easier for people to find the person they can go to with their issues around the community.
Strategy – What are your three key priorities for the VCSE sector?
Andrew – Better scrutiny of decisions made by local authorities, so that users of services who have been let down can challenge decision making and make sure organisations procured are meeting demand. Keen to directly invest into communities with a specific commitment to fund most deprived areas in wards with an ask of organisations from other wards to share their ideas and successes.
Jamie – Make sure there is space available for VCSE organisations (near public transport) for them to operate and engage with communities effectively. Create long term funding – ideally 5 – 10 years. Roll out volunteers pass across the North East.
Aidan – Investment, devolution down to communities and social prescribing resources in every community.
Kim – Business support for small organisations to thrive. Bring together the sector quickly to identify community issues to develop a radical intervention programme. A proper seat at the table that allows VCSE to feed in at every level on how to improve communities and reduce poverty so that your expertise can be shared and used as intelligence to inform meaningful strategies.
Young People - How do young people fit into your vision as a NE Mayor and how would you support the voluntary community sector?
Kim - £6m has already gone from Northumberland PCC into supporting Youth Work. Wants to create greater access for young people to culture, sport and future opportunities. Wants a youth combined authority to give young people a voice and a direct line to the mayor. Will measure success by the number of children lifted out of poverty. Will identify the fabric that improves young people’s lives and will work with the North East Child Poverty Commission to do that, including introducing free travel passes for under 18’s and retrofitting of homes for better quality of life.
Jamie – Get the transport system back under public control with free transport for under 18’s and those in higher education. Wants to amplify the child poverty prevention programme in schools and oracy training to help young people express themselves. Put at least £10m into a youth voice programme across the north east – a network working with existing youth groups and funding for new groups to give young people a creative voice and presence in the region.
Andrew – Devolution is about future generations, they should be at the core of what we do. Amplify voices, commitment to campaign to change voting systems for local elections so that 16 & 17 year olds can vote. Skills agenda – have a commitment to home insulation and retrofit to housing to work with training providers and colleges to diversity and expand the industry and bring young people into that work.
Aidan – Give people better access to youth facilities. Will build economic power of the mayoral authority to reinvest in youth provision where services have been lost.
Economy/Poverty - What will the candidates do to address the increasing levels of in-work poverty the VCSE sector is seeing across communities?
Kim –Identify how we can create good quality work with higher wages. Employers who want to work with local authorities will need to answer how they will help to tackle poverty. Raise the standard of expectations around work and make sure VCSE are engaged and supportive in sharing the voice of communities.
Aidan – Key is growing the North East Economy, has a plan to radically change regulation in our region to unlock economic growth.
Andrew – Skilled jobs, green jobs agenda – make sure jobs are secure, long-term and future driven. Focussed on people and not capital, job rich investments. Tackle child poverty with public health care approach to understand what feeds into child poverty, join up services and find where solutions are.
Jamie –Make sure more good jobs are available so that employers have to pay higher wages. Anyone who gets investment from NOTCA has to commit to being a real living wage employer. Will roll that out and do more to offer free transport to get people able to travel to work more easily. Will roll out the Union work project – helps upskill people to higher levels of work to earn more money. Issue of wealth and equality in the region, driven by national politics – we need to campaign for fairer levels of tax across levels of income.
Healthcare - How will you ensure you are prioritising health inequalities, and how will you involve the VCSE sector within this work?
Kim – We need to specifically convene around poverty and breakdown of public services which contribute to stark health inequalities. Work to ensure we have the right levels of support in the most deprived areas. ICP partnership to identify the 5 key areas we will tackle including child poverty, access to health care and focus on mental health, then agree how we will tackle them together.
Andrew – Use wellbeing frameworks to measure progress, rather than economic growth to see if approaches are successful and focus on health inequalities. Expand art and culture programmes that hugely contribute to mental health and wellness – this would be key to improving deprived areas. Focus on housing to improve healthcare – make significant progress on creating secure and safe housing.
Jamie – Need to build security, roll out the wellbeing framework, which is already implemented in NOTCA. Adopt a homes first policy to make sure everyone has somewhere to live – make this a basis of an approach to tackle poverty.
Aidan – Economic growth is critical to improving healthcare and higher wellbeing in communities. Will build economic growth by unlocking green fuel sites.
Environment - What opportunities do you envisage for cross sector collaboration across the region to enable community-based sustainability and climate action?
Jamie – Creating a public transport system that works for everyone and gives everyone the option of not owning a car. Through work at NOTCA, Net Zero North East England (NZNEE) has already been set up, funded through the NOTCA, ran a citizens assembly on climate change and gives options directly to local groups to tackle climate challenges through crowdfunding to improve community based sustainability.
Andrew – Build resilient communities to enable the changes to behaviour needed to tackle climate change on a community based level. Cross sector collaboration should be a mix of formal groups and informal campaigns because everyone has something they can teach each other.
Aidan – Will green the electricity grid in our region, and will build highest quality, energy efficient homes. Wants to work with housing charities and associations to unlock land and building opportunities to create county leading modern methods of construction.
Kim – Lean into green jobs make the North East the home of Great British energy. Provide greener transport network, and decarbonised housing. Get better at convening cross sector conversations so that organisations can learn from each other in a much more constructive and supportive way. Create a social decarbonisation fund allowing organisations to invest in local communities and have the ability to green on a local level.
Closing Statements
All of the candidates pledged to work with organisations to make the North East a Living Wage region.
All of the candidates agreed to our asks from NECA to commit to:
- Ensure that a VCSE Leadership Board and VCSE Assembly is recognised as the appropriate forum to nominate the Cabinet member and VCSE champions and to support their nominations.
- Ensure that a Senior NEMCA Officer is appointed to support VCSE liaison with NEMCA and support the Cabinet member for the VCSE.
- Secure resources to enable meaningful VCSE sector engagement and involvement in NECA.
- To work with the VCSE sector in the spirit of collaboration and cooperation, transparency and equity.
- To discuss how we can genuinely make things happen by agreeing a consistent approach across the North East geography.
