In April 2011, A4e’s proposal to find innovative and collaborative solutions for dealing with substance misusing prolific offenders in Hammersmith and Fulham was selected as one of ten Cabinet Office ‘Labs’. Over an eight month period, A4e worked with a wide range of partners and stakeholders including: the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Innovation Unit, London Probation Trust, User Voice, RAPt, the West London Magistrates Court, the Metropolitan Police, and critically, current and ex-service users and families of those affected by substance misuse.
Although it was awarded ‘Lab’ status, the project received no funding. However, by adopting a co-design process, it brought together a diverse group of people (from service users to sentencers, and policy makers to the local police) who gave up their time because they represented a stakeholder group that each wanted to find a better way of dealing with a deeply entrenched problem.
The Lab team focused on a relatively small number of Hammersmith and Fulham residents who were dealing with a current or recent Class A drug problem, either in recovery – on a maintenance programme – or in relapse, and with a history of persistent and prolific offending. These individuals were well known to the local police and the local Magistrates Court, mostly living in hostels, and familiar with the key service providers in the area. Despite each of those agencies and services spending a considerable amount of money supporting those individuals each year, the individuals concerned remained locked in a cycle of addiction, reoffending and social exclusion.
The Lab partnership was tasked with identifying all the financial, structural and systemic barriers that inhibited better join up of services and support for substance misusers at local level. More importantly, the partnership took a completely new approach to re-thinking how services and support structures could be better designed, using a ‘co-production’ methodology. From start to finish, the Lab partnership set about designing a solution in conjunction with the very people that would use it – ‘service users’. That included spending eight days shadowing people suffering from severe addiction, to see the world through their eyes, as well as including service users at every stage of the design process.
By December 2011, the Lab partnership had co-designed a blueprint for a new model of tacking Class A substance misuse through recovery and abstinence rather than maintenance, and for reducing reoffending amongst persistent and prolific offenders. The blueprint proposes a fundamental re-structure of services for substance misusing offenders, resulting in co-located services, multiple agency collaboration and a pooling of budgets, and was designed to deliver radical efficiencies in a time of public sector funding cuts.
If you are interested in hearing more, or think that this blueprint might be suitable for implementation in your local area, please contact us for more information.
“Too often we’ve seen government policies that really want to help people in disadvantage but don’t understand the day to day realities facing people that are suffering from addiction and so they end up missing the mark.
“The point of this project is to create a service that we know will successfully motivate and help users off drugs – and the reason we know that it will work is because we’re designing it not only with them in mind, but actually with them.”
