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The consultation on the Capacitybuilders National Support Services has closed. While we recognise the good intentions behind the consultation, DSC has always had a consistent and well-defined take on the ChangeUp project, especially the national Hub structure. Here are the main points of DSC’s responses and recommendations to the NSS consultation:
- The changes proposed do not address the underlying issues of an expensive, un-transparent and unwieldy Hub structure. They don't represent significant enough changes to the existing project to offer a convincing and credible alternative
- The main proposal to reduce the number of Hubs form six to four, and give them less money, will significantly reduce the number of organisations able to deliver
- Some critical questions remain unanswered, for example, why fund all of the sector's infrastructure at once? A more staged approach could allow for far greater impact
- This is an opportunity to make ChangeUp and Capacitybuilders a key part of the sector - get rid of the Hubs completely, invest in Capacitybuilders, and use experts (especially existing infrastructure funders) to shape the project.
Ben Wittenberg, DSC Director of Policy and Research, said: ‘It will be a big job to make enough changes to this proposal and enable ChangeUp, and Capacitybuilders, to be key agents for change post-2008. Capacitybuilders needs to take control and enable key infrastructure organisations to do what they do best - support the sector, not further entrench them in a needless layer of murky bureaucracy.’