Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): We welcome Oliver Wilkinson, the chair of the Victims and Survivors Service, and Margaret Bateson, the interim chief executive officer (CEO). First of all, congratulations, Oliver. I think that, last time, you were waiting for a board or you were interim chair.

Mr Oliver Wilkinson (Victims and Survivors Service): I was the interim chair.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Congratulations on your elevation to chair. I will pass over to you to make your opening remarks.

Mr Wilkinson: Thank you, Chair and Committee. Good afternoon and thank you for the invitation to come before you. It has been around six months since we were last here. We appreciate the opportunity to update you on the work we have been doing and hear any issues or concerns that may be around that would help us to take forward the service we are providing.

The paper you have in your pack outlines our work over the past six months in detail. I will just touch on a few issues that are dealt with in much more detail in the paper. Since April, we have delivered support to more than 4,600 victims and survivors under our individual needs programme. This is approximately 500 people more than we were able to support last year. We have continued to support the groups that are providing services in the community by extending the letters of contract they had last year through into this year.

Just for your information; we receive a large number of telephone calls and callers to the office on a daily basis. Since we opened our individual needs programme, 275 people have dropped in, on site, for assistance each week. Our staff were dealing with more than 1,100 telephone calls. While that continues to place demands on our staff, we are still meeting the targets that have previously been set, which are to contact people on the telephone within 24 hours and email them within two days.

We also closely monitor any complaint that comes to the service. We have a very inclusive view of what a complaint is. Anybody who is unhappy; we take as a complaint. The answer to the question might be a very simple answer, and then the complaint is gone. We are right on the ball: we take a very inclusive approach to what a complaint to our organisation is. We have had 10. We compare that with 43 in the same period last year. This is very much down to our staff and the systems we have developed — which we have mentioned in detail in our report to you — which have cut down on a lot of the issues that had previously been of concern.

Another area I want to touch on is Co-Design, a programme that is being led by the Department, the commission and us. Its purpose is to develop models of service delivery for victims and survivors that are fresh for today and better for tomorrow, so that we are not just continuing to do the same old thing year on year. We have made big improvements in our management information system (MIS). This has taken quite a bit of time and a lot of effort from our staff, and it has meant that we are reducing any errors that we had in communication. This had, obviously, led to complaints in the past. We are speeding up the processing of payments that we are getting out to people. In addition, we have a pilot project up and running at the moment, in partnership with the commission and the Department, on personalised budgets and a caseworker approach. Margaret will cover that in much more detail for you if you wish to know more about it.

Another big area is monitoring and evaluation. What is it that our groups are doing? Is it what is required to help people to move on from the position they are currently in? We are really pleased to see that our groups are working with us to develop good monitoring and evaluation tools and are now using them. We hope that the next time that we are here we will be able to say much more about the actual quality of work that is being done out there.

To conclude, we, as a board, are very pleased with the work our staff have been doing. We are very positive about the partnerships we have with the groups that work with us. We are delighted that a new commissioner has been appointed, and that, without the relationship we have with the commission and the Department, we could not do what we are expected to do for, and on behalf of, victims and survivors. We have a good foundation, as I said on the last occasion. We have moved on from that. Obviously, we have a great deal of work still ahead, but I think we are in the right position.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Oliver, thank you very much indeed. Can we start with your position? Last time you were with us, you were the interim chair and practically on your own on the board. The independent reviews touched on the matter that OFMDFM should have made sure that there was a properly sized and resourced board at your disposal. Are you up to speed now with membership and skill sets?

Mr Wilkinson: Yes, I am pleased to say that we have seven board members now, and that is fine. We have a good spread of people. The additional individuals came on board around April, so they have really been learning the ropes over the past number of months. In the summer you lose a bit of time but, later this month, we will be sitting down, as a board, to review our existing corporate plan and begin to develop a new one. We have a good board, and we know what we need to do. We feel that we have enough people to set about the task of doing that.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) recommended having a qualified accountant on the board. Have you managed that?

Mr Wilkinson: No. Perhaps, Margaret, you can cover that.

Ms Margaret Bateson (Victims and Survivors Service): CIPFA recommended having a qualified accountant as the board member sitting on the audit and risk committee. At the minute, we have an independent chair of the audit and risk committee who is not a member of the board, with financial experience but who is not a qualified accountant. That is the one matter that is still outstanding from the recommendations.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You have a kind of temporary fix in place.

Mr Wilkinson: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Margaret, what difference does it make to your ability to do your job to have a fully functional board now in place?

Ms Bateson: We now have a fully functioning board. We still, obviously, have an interim senior management team (SMT). I am currently the interim CEO, and as the Committee is aware, there has not been an SMT in place for the last 12 months. In the last few weeks, I have brought in some SMT support. It is on a six-month basis, and it is really to provide support for the new board and outline the longer-term strategy of the organisation in looking again at our corporate and business plan and at our service delivery models going forward.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): How long have you been interim chief executive?

Ms Bateson: Since August 2014, so just over a year.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Oliver, are there any plans to address that?

Mr Wilkinson: We are in the middle of that process at the moment. The specifics of the post have, obviously, changed. As a board, we have begun to look at what we require for the future; so, we are negotiating that with the Department at the moment. I expect to have all the questions that we have posed answered within the next few weeks, and I would like to think that we will advertise that post within the next four weeks.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You have given us a positive assessment of your relationship with the Commission for Victims and Survivors. What about your relationship with the Department?

Mr Wilkinson: It is a very good relationship. We have come from a difficult position. We have had to knuckle down and work together. Coming from where we have all been, we know that we cannot possibly allow things to slip in the direction that they once were. So, we are committed, and we get a real sense that the Department is committed, to improving services to victims and survivors, which is what we all want. The new commissioner is only just in post, but we have had constructive meetings with the commissioner and look forward to continuing with that.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Does she have new ideas?

Mr Wilkinson: At the moment, the work we are doing with the Department and with, in particular, McClure Watters, who have, in a sense, set out a path indicating the direction in which we should be going, does not conflict with what she has been seeing. I think we are on the same page, but it has been difficult without a commissioner . We are looking forward to seeing things improve significantly.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Let us turn to the all-important funding. I know that the last financial year was extremely challenging for you because of the shifting financial sands. Margaret, you seem to be very pleased that there was a solid opening baseline. How has that gone for you since March?

Ms Bateson: This is the first year that the service has had an opening position at the start of the financial year. So, it will be a very interesting year for us. It is the first year that we will see when the peaks and troughs of service are. It will help us with resources going forward, because, in theory, this should be a blueprint year for how things should work.

With regard to allocating the budget, we have maintained the victim support programme at £6·3 million. This meant that we extended the funding for one further year for all the groups that we were contracted with in the last financial year. If you remember, there were a small number of voluntary and community groups where there was no funding available last year, and we have also given them a letter of offer for this year. So, we are supporting five further organisations from that list.

More importantly, the individual needs programme has meant that we can increase the funding allocated to it to £4·8 million this year. Already, we have supported just under 500 new individuals compared to last year, with a small number still undergoing assessment at this point in time. So, we are pretty hopeful that we will be able to offer support to any new people coming forward this year, based on the existing eligibility criteria. If the volume starts to increase, our support will be determined on our securing additional funding from October monitoring as well. We have made a bid for just over £100,000 to make sure that, if people continue to come through at the same speed as they have to date, we can keep that programme open.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I will let Andy Allen come in here because I think he has an interest in monitoring.

Mr Allen: Margaret, I am aware that you made a bid for additional funds in June. Obviously, that has not been successful, because we have not had a June monitoring round. How many people are affected by that?

Ms Bateson: There are just under 200 individuals currently undergoing assessment. This does not mean that there are 200 individuals awaiting support; we have eligibility criteria that we need to work through. We made a bid for funding of just over £200,000 in June, which was unsuccessful. Since then, we have moved offices and have saved money in doing so. We were also able to reallocate funding from some other corporate headings into the individual needs programme. At this point in time, the shortfall is estimated to be about £100,000 for the remainder of the year.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): So, you have allocated £11·1 million.

Ms Bateson: We have allocated £6·3 million to the victim support programme; £4·8 million to the individual needs programme; £1·8 million for corporate costs, which compares to £2·1 million last year; and just under £300,000, which is a one-off budget allocation this year for the pilots and the Co-Design work to improve our management information systems (MIS) and monitoring and evaluation of soft upfront costs.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): So, that is the full £13·245 million accounted for.

Ms Bateson: That is the full £13·2 million allocated, with the exception of a small number of individuals.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): There is a significant saving in the move to Alfred Street.

Ms Bateson: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): How much?

Ms Bateson: Over £100,000 per annum.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): What about accessibility? Are there any issues with it?

Ms Bateson: No. We moved in on 12 June. It is a communal building so, at the start, we had a communal entrance area. By August, we had the fully functioning disability access doors. There were a few issues with the front entrance in the first few weeks, but now it is fully accessible with much greater on-street parking than we had in Millennium House. To date, the feedback from victims and survivors and from the organisations we work with has been only positive.

Mr Wilkinson: We spoke to the forum before our move and we asked what it needed by way of access to the services we were providing. The forum was not particularly comfortable with our last property, but we think that most of the issues have been addressed to the forum's satisfaction. It was not that we just went out and picked somewhere; we asked and went on the advice that it gave us.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Understood. The other question is about staff. You mentioned the lack of an SMT, but, previously, there had been issues with temporary staff/agency staff. Has that washed through? Have you now got a solid team?

Ms Bateson: It has. We have 25 permanent staff and five agency staff, but five agency staff that make sense. We have SMT support in for six months until we see what the longer-term service delivery model is going to be. We have an MIS officer in for a further six months doing a piece of project work on our MIS systems, and we have three admin officers who support different areas at peak times. The point is that I think that we will always use temporary staff at different parts of the year, but we have 25 solid permanent staff.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): As you said earlier, this year, with the solid finances, you will see where the real peaks and troughs are, and that will help you plan.

Mr Hazzard: Thank you very much for the presentation. I think that Co-Design is a great initiative. What areas are yet to be worked out? What are the areas of concern or debate when you discuss this, and when can we expect firm proposals?

Ms Bateson: The commission carried out an extensive assessment of the service back in 2013 and made a number of recommendations, and they were resolved and implemented with the exception of a number relating to the assessment of need — the assessment of individuals — and the other area was monitoring and evaluation. Those two areas, along with research that the Commission for Victims and Survivors did, were then rolled into the Co-Design process. So, there is an action plan and an area of work. In terms of when things will be finished, some already are, and others, by their nature, are longer-term. We are looking at the victim support programme, the individual needs programme and the Peace IV programme that is coming down the road.

We are looking at seven key areas of work, and I will maybe name them, although I am not about to go into detail on each area. One is monitoring and evaluation. We have been working in conjunction with the talking therapy hubs in Belfast and wider across the region in terms of the monitoring and evaluation of health and well-being areas and looking at the evidence-based approach to what we are doing.

We have been working with the groups that we fund in doing that to make sure that we are not giving them more bureaucracy and paperwork. We are using existing systems that are out there. We expect to start seeing some information and reporting from that, starting from this month onwards. The last six months have been very much about talking to people and agreeing the frameworks. Hands-on training on how the systems work will start in November. A training programme will be in place from November to March.

We probably went into detail on our management information systems in the update report. That is the second area. The third area is evidence-based practice. In combination with the monitoring and evaluation systems, we have also developed a workforce training and development plan for the sector. Again, that is being rolled out from March 2015 until March 2016. Another key area is partnership and collaboration. That is really an overarching theme in everything that we are doing. The other three are longer term: how the Co-Design process over the next six months really needs to get into the strategic allocation of funding, rather than a grant-led process; long-term sustainability; and eligibility criteria. Those are three quite complex and difficult areas in the longer term.

Mr Hazzard: With regard to the eligibility criteria, will this look at a particular bugbear of mine, which is the eligibility of siblings to be able to access support services? Currently, siblings are not eligible. I think that that is awful. I think that if most people in the public knew that the siblings of those who were killed as a result of the conflict are not eligible for support, they would be shocked. Is this the way that it will continue? Is this a policy that is up for debate and change?

Ms Bateson: The Victims and Survivors Service is the service-delivery body. In 2012, the Commission for Victims and Survivors carried out a comprehensive needs assessment. Following that process, it was determined that siblings were not eligible for direct support through the individual needs programme. Just to be clear for full clarification: siblings can access support, through any of our funded organisations, for social support and health and well-being activities.

Mr Hazzard: Siblings are, of course, as far as I am aware, redefining themselves as "psychologically injured". This is inflating statistics, I presume. A lot of those who are coming forward as psychologically injured are indeed siblings. Is that something that you have found? Is it something that we need to deal with?

Ms Bateson: It is. The last Co-Design meeting with the Department and the commission was specifically on eligibility, where we outlined what the current eligibility for each of the schemes is and what the issues and challenges were, that being one of them.

Mr Hazzard: OK. No problem. Finally — I think that it is actually linked to the sibling thing — is the need for a gender lens when we approach all these services. As well as anything else, one of the big things is that, when you consider that most of those who were killed were young men, very often, siblings tend to be sisters. To what extent is all of the process or any of the services going through a gender lens? Do we have that perspective in the VSS?

Ms Bateson: At the minute, none of the services is going through a gender lens in any sort of systemic manner, but I have been having discussions, just very recently over the last two to four weeks, with other organisations that are doing it. A paper will be presented to our board at its next meeting on 20 or 21 October outlining a proposal on how we can improve that and some practical things that we could do in the short term to address that.

Mr Hazzard: That is very welcome indeed.

Mr Moutray: I congratulate you folk on coming here today and how you have turned this organisation around. It is so refreshing to have you here and discuss the issues, as opposed to the many meetings that we have had over the past two or three years with the VSS.

Is there anything, any indications, coming through from the pilot project as to how it is going? Is it something that could be rolled out further?

Ms Bateson: It will probably be December when we have really good, robust outcome information. As regards how it is rolling out, it started in July. There are two caseworkers within the Victims and Survivors Service and 14 caseworkers out there in the organisations. The organisations were asked to nominate existing members of staff with specific skills and competencies to carry out that role. Just over 200 individuals have come forward as wanting to participate in the pilot. The pilot does not provide any additional funding to the individual this year, but, rather than being prescriptive about what you can spend the money on, it aims to have a much fuller discussion with the caseworker on what outcomes could be improved; for example, increased mobility or decreased social isolation. The focus is on the improvement in that person's life rather than on what the money is being spent on. The caseworkers are really just at the start of that. The Commission for Victims and Survivors will evaluate it independently to us. That evaluation is starting this month, with the expectation of an interim report within the next four weeks and then a fuller report around Christmas time.

Mr Moutray: I look forward to that.

Mr Wilkinson: This is a very exciting development. Rather than us, as a group, or others standing on the outside and saying to people, "This is what we think is good for you", we are asking individuals, "What would make a difference? What outcome are you looking for that we could assist you with?". That is really exciting, and we could get some very creative ideas out of that; but, equally, there are risks. I am raising it simply because someone can come up with a very interesting proposal to us that makes perfect sense but, in the public eye, might cause a few questions to be asked. I am mentioning it to you so that you are aware, but we think that we are at a stage where we need to take risks with people to help them to move from where they are to a better place in their lives rather than maintaining them where they have been for a number of years. It will help people to move on. We are encouraging risk but not being foolish about it, because we know that we have to be careful with public money.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I was previously a commissioner, and I really get it, Oliver, and support it. For example, I remember meeting a family who basically used an allotment as their way of de-stressing. You probably cannot run a scheme for something like that because you would be ridiculed publicly and might even find yourself trying to justify it in front of the Public Accounts Committee. But actually, what the family was doing was the equivalent of therapy, and it came in at a very reasonable rate to the public purse. I think that the idea of asking and discovering what works for an individual or a single family is absolutely the way to go.

Mr Maskey: Thank you both. I echo Stephen's earlier remarks about the great work that is being done, and I wish you well in the continuation of that work. It is very good to hear. Could you elaborate a wee bit on the Peace IV programme? You are nominated as the lead partner. Could you share a little bit of information about the preparation of that? Are any of the difficulties at the moment holding up the preparation for that work and the consultation?

Ms Bateson: As you are probably aware, Peace IV is quite recent for us as well. It has come in the last number of weeks, and we have been named as the lead partner. There is €17 million of funding assigned to us under the victims element of the Peace IV programme, with the overarching theme that it will improve the health and well-being of victims and survivors. We are at the start of the process, and there are some very broad indicative areas on health and well-being caseworkers, health and well-being advocacy support, research into those areas, training and development of the workforce and a number of programmes to increase the resilience of victims and survivors. It has not gone any further than those broad headings. We are just about to start consultation with our stakeholders. Our understanding is that it has gone to the European Commission this week, and, given that we have been named as the lead partner, we will need to apply to SEUPB for the funding. It will probably take another six to 12 months until we are in a place where we are implementing and getting the money out on the ground. That is good, because it means that we can plan in conjunction with what we are already doing in the Co-Design programme. We can make sure that the Peace IV programme and the victim support programme make sense going forward and that they complement each other. We are basically at step one at this stage.

Mr Maskey: If the programme is linked to the community and voluntary sector and, obviously, you are going through the SEUPB, that by its very nature indicates to me that you will potentially have a new range of stakeholder organisations that you will want to engage with. How do you dovetail the current stakeholder engagement that you have with the potential new ones?

Mr Wilkinson: It is possible. As I have said before, we have an excellent network of organisations out there doing very good work. The true value of that will become more evident as the monitoring and evaluation kicks in. While additional groups may appear, we obviously have an interest in adding support and resource to our current groups to enable them to do many of the things that we are asking them to do. We will be expecting more of that for the future. So, I think that it is a real opportunity for our groups to really establish themselves as high-class service providers in their local community, maybe even by extending their geographical boundary or the range of services that they provide. That is my primary interest, but, of course, we have to be open to the possibility that there may be some additional groups that will appear.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): On what you are talking about there, Oliver, how many groups do you assess are still solidly single identity and are afraid, perhaps, of reaching out? Let me preface that by saying that I acknowledge that the 10-year strategy acknowledges the right of groups to be single identity. I am not criticising them but just wondering how many are thinking to the future in embracing the community and who is not.

Mr Wilkinson: I do not have the number of those that are single identity. Like you, we respect that. We know that sometimes it is difficult for a group to extend; but, by the same token, we have to keep supporting and training and then expecting more. Hopefully, we will be a critical friend in encouraging groups to look beyond what might have been the boundary that they established a few years back. This might be an opportunity for them to do that; but, in the end, you know the community as I do, and we have got to work with that.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I fear that, perhaps at the end of the 10-year strategy, the next strategy will not give the same protections and acknowledgement to single identity because the direction of travel is "other".

Mr Wilkinson: Possibly, but I hope that we would be strong enough to make the case for those groups that should continue in that way, because it just is a reality that, I think, we will have to live with for a long time to come.

Mr Lyttle: Thank you for your presentation. I noted that you advised that you have been named as a lead partner in the proposed programme for victims and survivors under Peace IV and that it is to be €17 million and will look at a number of issues, including advocacy support. You are probably aware that Haass papers and Stormont House Agreement papers propose what is akin to independent victims advocates. How do you see that fitting into that particular bid in terms of independence from VSS? Would it be similar to the caseworker approach that is currently being taken?

Ms Bateson: I think that there is a direct link between Peace IV and the role of the advocacy support. It is not envisaged that those staff would be employed by and sit within the VSS. There are a lot of people who are doing that work very well already out there in the community. We have been talking to them to try to better understand exactly what that role is, because it is important that we define it and that the people who undertake those roles have the skills necessary to do so. Part of the programme is an accredited, formalised-type training programme for advocacy support workers in addition to the recruitment of those workers. The pilot that is being undertaken at the moment with the caseworkers will also help to feed into exactly what that means. The term has such a broad meaning. At the minute, we are trying to work with the Department and the commission to determine exactly what that means.

Mr Lyttle: I think that it can be narrowed down. It would be a useful addition to create that more formal role to support victims and survivors, as they need it to navigate the various pathways and processes that they have to navigate, especially if we do manage to create additional pathways for victims and survivors to access justice, truth, information and services. I think that the caseworker approach is a useful addition as well. I wish you every success with those.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): There are just a couple more questions. There was a recommendation from the commission that you collate and make available a reference guide to practitioners with details of services to groups. Is that in progress or done?

Ms Bateson: It is. Our website will undergo a revamp in the next few months. After an invitation to tender, we have just appointed someone to take that work forward. In conjunction with that, there will be an online portal as part of our website. We are aware that, if we start doing books, they become outdated very quickly, so the idea is that there will be an online portal for anyone in the public, not just the caseworkers, to be able to go in, put in their postcode and see what types of services and activities are happening around them. It will be more of an interactive, online guide that each of the caseworkers can —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Have you any idea how many victims and survivors use the Internet amongst your registered — ?

Ms Bateson: There are around 1,500 visits to our website each month. We have made quite a lot of improvements over the last 12 months, but most of our users access it though mobile technology, and it is not great for that. We will make it more user-friendly on mobile devices.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Have you any idea what percentage of victims and survivors who are registered with you are users of the Internet? Are email addresses registered?

Ms Bateson: No, and I would not want even to hazard a guess.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): The commission, in a quarterly report on you, mentioned a judicial review on the financial assistance programme. What can you tell us about that?

Ms Bateson: The applicant has since withdrawn.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Finally, there are just a couple of things back on the Department. When you last briefed us, you said that the work plan for 2015-16 was with the Department for consideration: have they agreed it?

Ms Bateson: The Department has agreed it, and the head of the Civil Service (HOCS) board has agreed it. It is just awaiting ministerial approval.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Ah. In October.

Ms Bateson: For us, it is business as usual; we operate as if it is approved.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I am not sure if you heard, but I mentioned right at the beginning that we had asked officials for sight of your management statement and financial memorandum (MSFM), and they were to get back to us. Just by chance, looking at your website, we since discovered that it has been up for 11 months. Did you know that we were looking for it?

Mr Wilkinson: No.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Let me echo what others have said: it is a fantastic turnaround in the Victims and Survivors Service. Great credit to you both for the work you have done. Thank you very much for coming along today. We look forward to meeting you again in the future and wish you all the very best. Oliver and Margaret, thank you both very much indeed.