Hampshire Supporting People Audit

Overall result: The summary of the report states that Hampshire Supporting People delivers an excellent programme with 3 stars with excellent prospects for improvement.

Hampshire Supporting people were audited from 29th November to 8th December 2006 by the Audit Commission. The Audit commission is an independent body responsible for ensuring that public money is spent, economically, effectively and delivers high quality local services for the public.

Hampshire County Council has become the first county council in England to be given the highest possible score by the Audit Commission for its work with partners in supporting a wide range of vulnerable people with housing related services.

Over 17 thousand people in Hampshire have been helped by the Supporting People programme which offers support to older people in sheltered housing, the single homeless, young vulnerable people, ex offenders, women escaping domestic violence and people with mental health problems, physical or learning disabilities.

The team was very pleased that the report recognised the many strengths of the local programme including the strong partnerships with colleagues in district councils, probation and health, the positive relations with providers, our long established commitment to involving service users, the strong and ambitious leadership of the programme, the high level of support and ownership of the programme among both elected members and senior managers and the positive track record in delivering improvements despite a reducing budget.

The report made three recommendations relating to further work that should be undertaken to improve the involvement of health and the voluntary sector, the performance management of the Supporting People programme through additional reporting to governance bodies, and ensuring consistent access to services and information across Hampshire.

In order to achieve these recommendations an action plan was drawn up in February 2007.

We used the recommendations to produce a set of actions that would ensure Hampshire Supporting People continued to build upon the successful partnerships already in place and continued to improve the range and quality of services available to vulnerable people in Hampshire.  The vast majority of the actions were achieve before the end of 2007, whilst a small number proved more difficult and are being looked at on a longer term basis.

To view documents related to the audit please contact Jackie Morrison on 01962 832177 jackie.morrison@hants.gov.uk