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Annual Report July 2007 – June 2008

Registered address c/o Horsey, Lightly, Fynn, Solicitors. 3, Poole Road, Bournemouth. BH2 5QL
 
Other Addresses Allington House, 46, Dean Park Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH1 1QA. Primary & Secondary Care Unit
  Cornerways, 20 Braidley Road, Bournemouth, Dorset. BH2 6JX Primary & Secondary Care Unit
  Francis House, 2, Hulse Road, Southampton, Hampshire. SO15 2WG Primary & Secondary Care Unit
  Bryant House, 15, Walpole Road, Boscombe, Dorset. BH1 4HB Supported Accomodation
  122 Wolverton Road, Boscombe, Dorset,. BH7 6HX Supported Accomodation
  StreetScene, PO Box 6037, Westbourne, Dorset. BH4 0AG Administration
  19 Market Close, Poole, Dorset, BH15 1NQ Development Office
     
Directors/ Rev. Canon Godfrey Taylor Chairman
Trustees: Mrs Hazel Corner  
  Mrs Daphne Taylor  
  Mrs Helen Owers  
  Mr Guy Robinson  

Any member of the above body of trustees is able to nominate further trustees to the board. If the person is willing to be considered, after various checks have been undertaken (including CRB checks), the board can vote a new member onto the board by means of a majority vote. At the end of this year, two new trustees are being proposed.

Auditors Mike Gerard, Stone Osmond Chartered Accountants. 75 Bournemouth Road, Chandlers Ford. Eastleigh
 
Solicitors Mr S. C. Nightingale, Horsey, Lightly, Fynn. 3, Poole Road, Bournemouth. BH2 5QL
 
Principal Bankers: HSBC. 165-176 High Street, Poole, Dorset. BH15 1AV
 
Senior Staff: Patrick Gormely responsible for rehabilitation & human resources.
  Tim Howson-Green responsible for finance.
  Tessa Corner responsible for development issues and trustees matters.
  Sharon Baker senior manager responsible for ensuring adherence to legislation, policy and procedure by all units.

Governance

StreetScene Addiction Recovery is a charitable company governed by Memorandum and Articles of Association incorporated on the 8th June 2006. It represents the incorporation of the earlier charitable trust, StreetScene, originally declared in 1989, registered number 802521. It has two objectives:

Structure

The company has a structure based on five tiers. The top tier is the board of Director/Trustees, who have overall control of the charity and meet each quarter to discuss the performance to date and future plans, with a rotation of trustees visiting every unit each month to observe the work first hand and speak to clients and staff about their experiences with StreetScene Addiction Recovery.

The operational responsibility is delegated to the four chiefs, who make up a team of people who work together with particular areas of responsibility, which are:

The third tier is made up of the managers of each unit, the treatment units being Allington House, Cornerways, Francis House and the Re-settlement unit, based at Bryant House. The managers and chiefs comprise the Steering committee, which meets roughly monthly to work on immediate issues such as amending policies and procedures, training events, staff recruitment, refurbishment needs.

The fourth tier is made up of the staff with external responsibilities, including the finance team, DSS Liaison, the in-house purchaser and the counsellors, who have external responsibilities to our service purchasers.

The fifth tier of staff are those who work within the units but whose external responsibilities are generally through the unit manager, this includes project staff, night staff, maintenance staff and volunteers.

Each staff member has their own role within the charity, covered by job descriptions, generally the roles are:

These staff members also have a voice in weekly meetings held in each unit, monthly supervision and regular training events.

Assets

During this year all the fixed assets of the Trust have been transferred to the charitable company. These have all been utilised for the work of the charitable company and are held in trust by the board. All deeds are retained by the Solicitors; Horsey, Lightly, Fynn. The Trust retains the reserves from the operations of the trust up to the transfer of operations and the sale of Anderson House. Some of these reserves were used to install double glazing into Allington House and Francis House before transfer into the limited company. Current reserves are held by the trust for use according to its charitable deed including grants made to the limited company as and when required.

Activities & Achievements

At the end of the previous financial year, two items remained uncompleted of the six targets stated for the year 2006 - 2007.

One item was the transfer of assets and liabilities from the trust to the charitable company. All the properties are now transferred. Some of our reserves are still held in the old trust, this will be clarified after the auditors have completed their work. We are still expecting to leave the money for Boscombe Celtic Football Club, the Terry O’Dwyer Fishing Club and the Minibus Fund in the trust accounts as these amounts are so small as to be easily lost in the larger company accounts.

The other item on our list was to complete the transfer of staff to the new charitable company. The new contracts have been issued and signed and all staff have now been successfully transferred from one organisation to the other.

Plans for 2007 - 2008

Our plans for this year were:

  1. Increase staff benefits to attract and keep high quality staff.

    2. During the year the finance team have been looking at various extra benefits we can offer to staff. Various options were discussed and put to the staff, including:

    • Bonus sharing with long service bonuses: this is only possible now we are a limited charitable company. What it involves is a fixed percentage of the annual surplus being shared out between staff based on days worked and number of years with the charity. It may not be a large amount when you consider we make a very small surplus each year and there are a lot of staff, but it would come in the November pay-packet, just in time for Christmas.
    • Sick Benefit: To commence after 2 months of continuous sick leave, giving 2/3 of monthly salary for a period of time, say 4 to 6 months.
    • Long Service bonus to pension: StreetScene to pay an extra £10 per month for each year of employment starting at 3 years continuous employment and to a maximum of £50 per month
    • Extra Time Off: Baring in mind we currently have 30 days leave and 8 days bank holidays, which totals nearly 8 weeks a year, what we are proposing is as follows: An extra day off each year after 2 years of service to 7 years of service, meaning that people who have been with us 7 years or more get 35 days a year plus 8 days bank holiday – making a total of 8 ½ weeks a year.
    • Death in Service: meaning if you die whilst in our employment, your next of kin or chosen beneficiary gets 2 or 3 times your annual salary as a life insurance payment.

    The staff voted on these options and voted for the first benefit to be extra time off. A further incentive will be introduced this year according to the staff vote. The final choice in order of preference was: Extra time off, Bonus sharing, Sick Benefit, Pension bonus and Death in service.

    The annual holiday year was altered so it runs from 1 July to 30 June each year being the same as the charities financial year. The benefit of this being:

    • Staff not having to ‘cram’ unused allowance into December. This being normally a time of staff shortages.
    • The bonus payments (if due) are paid at a time of the year which is financially more sensible for both the charity and staff.

  2. Streamline finance systems.

    3. With the change to the charitable company it has been possible to re-organise the accounting system to one which enables more detailed analysis of income and expenditure. This was introduced from December 2007 and means that next year we will have a complete set off accounts on the new system. It has also enabled greater ease for comparing budget versus actual figures, improving our budgeting abilities.

  3. Investigate computer based client data system

    4. During the year we have investigated various packages available for our type of service. We have budgeted for our preferred system to be purchased and implemented during the coming financial year.

  4. Expand the newly established tail end detox

    5. We have continued to offer the tail end detox, which is now an accepted part of our treatment package.

  5. Expand day care to meet the needs of clients as they approach the end of residential and want to leave treatment.

    6. We have increased the availability of day care throughout our units however this may be superseded by plans to enable clients leaving treatment to access further education and employment in line with the new drug strategy.

  6. Increase our voice at a political level becoming more involved in Government policy with regard to the treatment of addiction.

    7. We have increased our attendance of conferences where policy is debated. We have ensured that we respond to every request for feedback such as last year’s consultation. We are trying to increase our contacts through networking events. It is too early to assess the impact of this work, although it is fair to say that we feel as though progress is being made.

Other Achievements for 2007 – 2008

Above and beyond our plans for the year, opportunities to expand our work have presented themselves and have been taken:

  1. Working with Treatment Centres outside the UK.

    2. During the year we have met people, either in person or via our website, who work in the treatment field in places such as Nepal, Ukraine and Egypt. This has resulted so far in one visit to our units in Bournemouth by Binod Aryal from Nepal to share and exchange information on practice. We are hoping that at some point it will be possible for a couple of staff member from StreetScene to go to Nepal. We are now awaiting a visit from staff members from a treatment centre in the Ukraine.

    This global sharing of policy, procedure and practice has come about by accident rather than design, but has offered us, and hopefully our international colleagues, new insights into the nature of addiction and treatment on a wider scale than the UK or the USA. It has reaffirmed our understanding of the problem of addiction to drugs and alcohol as a global issue, affecting people, families and communities worldwide.

  2. Working with Organisations in the UK

    3. We have been working with the Aldridge Foundation to support the ‘User Voice’, a group set up to try influence policy within the Criminal Justice System. We have been involved with facilitating workshops nationally to elicit as much as we could from service users and last week had the opportunity to visit the cabinet office to meet with Gus O Donnell Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service along with his team, to present our findings. It proved to a very positive experience for all and the group of service users did a great job of representing their group.

  3. Health Commission Survey

    4. During the year the Health Commission carried out a review of all tier 4 services. We were pleased to see that all of our units were scored at 10, giving us a rating of good. Of the 103 centres scored the mean result was 8.3 and the median result was 8. To put this in context, below is a table of all results for all treatment centres:

    Health Commission Survey Graph

    Figure 1: Health Commission Results of Tier 4 Services
    Y axis: number of treatment centres attaining a score
    X axis: score achieved

    The two areas of potential improvement were waiting times and resources to be identified in the training and development plan to support the delivery of training. With waiting times there is something of a problem, some clients are assessed for admission at a later date, for example after a court case or post detox, both of which increase the waiting time. With regard to our training and development, we do have a training budget, in house training is provided for all staff on statutory issues on a rolling annual basis, all staff are supported to attain NVQ 3 as a minimum, staff are encouraged and supported to undertake specialist relevant qualifications and each year a minimum of 4 training days are provided on other relevant subjects, including MI, time management and so on, however the resources required are not identified in the training and development plan.

  4. Training in House

    5. We have had a big push on training and developing staff as well as the volunteers to support our strategy to get people back to work.

    We use a variety of trainers and professionals from outside agencies as well as designing and providing our own training this formula has proven to be both popular with staff and successful in its goal to motivate and empower the staff teams.

Challenges facing us in 2008 – 2009

One of the biggest challenges facing us this year is around the issue of clients needing supported accommodation. Many of our clients, on completion of treatment, have no home to go to. Even the NTA survey of tier 4 service users report 46.1% having no permanent home in the 4 weeks before treatment, 19.7% in temporary accommodation, 15.2% NFA etc. For many of our clients the way ahead is supported accommodation, to get them into living successfully in the community and most would rather stay where they know people in recovery than return to where all the people they know are using.

The problem with this is the funding. Bournemouth has a reducing budget and doesn’t want to fund people from out of area, which is understandable with their budget cuts. Other areas don’t appear to fund the support element of supported accommodation for ‘out of area’ projects as they too have fixed budgets, but to not provide these clients with what they need is high risk strategy. This is a service which doesn’t fit into the ‘Local Services for Local People’ genre, but is none the less vital for those in need.

This situation is going to reach critical mass in the next few months as the 5% budget cuts come into force and we would like to find a solution for our clients before this. We have approached the NTA who are aware of the problem but are unable to offer any advice or support in this matter.

Plans for the year 2008 to 2009

  1. Upgrade software with regard to computer based client data system.
  2. Upgrade software with regard to HR.
  3. Investigate the expansion of re-settlement to include retraining / employment for clients.
  4. Investigate new methods of funding out of area clients for supported accommodation where appropriate.
  5. Continue to try and increase our voice at a political level with regard to the treatment of addiction.
  6. Investigate ways of making our units, staff and clients more environmentally friendly by reducing our carbon footprint.
  7. Investigate other sources of income such as expanded programs and detox programs.
  8. Move towards achieving pension payments to staff to comply with the expected minimum pension rules to be instigated by 2012. This being 3% of basic salary. Employees will be due to pay 4% of basic salary. The minimum of 7% must be paid to avoid the employees being placed in the Government "personal accounts".

Policies on reserves and investments

This year our reserves held by the trust have been used on occasion to assist short term cash shortfalls. It is however being rebuilt and is aimed to achieve £400,000 by 2010. The limited company holds all prepaid contract amounts in a high interest account from which money is only released once it has been earned. It was not possible to use our reserves to reduce the mortgages due to the very high penalties which would have become due. All reserves are held as cash with HSBC although investigation into higher rates of return without increased risk are to be investigated.

Reserves Policy

StreetScene’s policy is to establish a reserve fund as defined by SORP 2000 and the Charity Commission advice CC19.

The reserve fund is to:

  1. Provide short-term funding to ensure the company can meet its financial and legal obligations in the event of restricted or fluctuating cash flow. (FINANCIAL)
  2. To meet the costs of any future legislation; such as the requirements of extra training, equipment or professional advice or to finance any exceptional unforeseen costs or repairs. (CONTINGENCIES AND RISKS)
  3. To take advantage of market opportunities to expand or improve the service provided within the remit of the charities governing documents, including the funding of new projects, central development of management, the funding of furniture and equipment, the training and development needs of its staff and volunteers and the acquisition of suitable premises. (OPPORTUNITIES)

While no figure can be put on the level of the reserve needed as they are beyond the charities control the Trustees have agreed it would be prudent that a policy that aims to achieve a level of reserves equivalent to three months' unrestricted expenditure as an ideal target, and one month as a minimum.

Investment

It is felt that excess cash in hand for reserves be invested in low risk investments as Bank or Building Society accounts with immediate access but with a good return or Government gilts or bonds from companies with AA rating or above. No more than £100,000 being held with any non-FTSE 100 institution. Constantly monitor financial institutions strength.

Risk Management

At present the following potential risks have been identified, along with the steps to minimise the impact:

Government policy change Increase our voice via NTA, FDAP, NCVO and other routes, remain flexible to change via Chiefs meetings and Steering meetings, ensure continual environmental scanning.
Legislative requirements Conflicts between governing bodies, continual liaison needed.
Skills availability Training packages to be continually reviewed as skill requirements change.
Computer system failure Good back-up and maintenance procedures are in place, all machines have been replaced recently. Software improvements are being considered.
Inability to expand Monitor funding, contracts and occupancy rates. Build reserves for short term management and have contingency for “mothballing” units or changing their usage.
Funding reduced during a recession Monitor funding, contracts and occupancy rates. Build reserves for short term management and have contingency for “mothballing” units or changing their usage.
Interest rate rises Causing higher than budgeted monthly interest. No large rises in rates are anticipated however should this risk rise then further investigation into financial protection products would be instigated.
StreetScene Addiction Recovery Charity Details