Scie’s chief executive looks to the future

Andrea Sutcliffe, of the Social Care Institute for Excellence, on funding cuts, maintaining a diverse talent pool and its new website for people looking for social care

Integration of health and social care, that long-sought nirvana, can now be brokered across a north London breakfast table. On one side of the muesli sits David Stout, deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation, the membership body for health service organisations; on the other sits his wife, Andrea Sutcliffe, new chief executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (Scie). If this couple can’t bring the sectors together over tea and toast, surely no one can.

It was Stout who spotted Scie’s job advertisement and suggested Sutcliffe apply. She was winding down the Appointments Commission, one of the quangos culled by the coalition government. Although not a social worker – her professional training was in NHS finance – she has been at the interface of health and social care for much of her career.

“I can clearly see that social care has an absolutely unique contribution to make and a voice that needs to be heard, and that Scie is in an excellent position to articulate that in an authoritative way,” says Sutcliffe. “And nobody can accuse me of professional self-interest around that.”

Scie was set up a decade ago to promote high-quality social care for children and adults. Unusually among a plethora of quangos established at the time, it was given charitable status. This is doubtless one of two reasons why it survives: the other, most observers agree, is that after a shaky start it has won growing respect and found an important niche, thanks in no small part to the understated but highly effective leadership of Sutcliffe’s predecessor, Julie Jones, who has retired. It has pioneered digital training for anyone working in the social care field and its social care TV has videos on a wealth of subjects from safeguarding adults to commissioning for personalisation. Ministers regularly sing its praises.

Commercial approach

That is not to say the government continues to pour in resources, however. Total funding from the Department of Health has fallen from more than £20m in 2009-10, including £14m for specific projects, to just £4.4m this year, of which £1m is for earmarked projects. The grant “will continue to diminish”, says Sutcliffe. “One of the issues for Scie, though I don’t think we are in any way a special case in this, is looking at diversifying our income sources and making ourselves a bit more commercial and business-minded in what we do, how we do it and how it gets funded.”

Much depends on Scie being paid to work with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) on development of the quality standards for social care proposed in the new Health and Social Care Act. It had been widely assumed that Scie was guaranteed this work, especially having undertaken two pilots, but the Nice board has decided recently that “in the interests of fairness and transparency”, according to a spokeswoman, it must go through a formal tendering process. Universities and consultancies may now bid.

Sutcliffe says: “I’ve been spending my life running a fair, transparent and rigorous [appointments] process, so I can’t really argue. I think we have a very good pitch to make and I would hope we would have the support of many other parts of the sector in doing that.”

Another key to Scie’s financial health will be the success of Find Me Good Care, a website it plans to launch later this year to help people make decisions about care and support. The idea is to upload or link to all essential information about care homes, home care agencies and other providers that is in the public domain, as a matter of course, with providers having the option to supplement this material for a charge. Smaller operators will be offered practical advice and assistance in how to set out their stall to best effect.

The website will be entering an increasingly busy market for such comparative information, catering both for people paying their own way and others with state-funded personal budgets, but Scie hopes its authoritative voice will set it apart. Find Me Good Care will carry comments on care services by people who have used them, in the style of the websites such as TripAdvisor. However, entries will be subject to moderation. “There will be an appropriate mechanism for ensuring the providers have the opportunity to respond,” Sutcliffe stresses. “We are about improving services, and enabling people to improve services, and input from users and carers is absolutely critical to that. But you also need to make sure that people can do something about it.”

Sutcliffe, whose parents live in retirement in a village in North Yorkshire, is in no doubt about the need for help in navigating the complex and diverse care sector.

“If something happened to my dad and I had to do something for my mum, what would I do?” she asks. “What on earth do I know about what’s available and appropriate 250 miles away? I’ve got no idea – and I am somebody who knows their way around the system. If I’d be sat there in a bit of a panic, clearly a lot of other people would too.”

Irrespective of the success or otherwise of the website and work with Nice, Sutcliffe says she will need to take “a long, hard look” at everything Scie does and how it is done. Staff numbers have already been trimmed, to about 70, under a reorganisation carried out by Jones, but the new chief executive warns that “there may be things we have to stop doing if we are not getting funding for them”.

Her management style, she says, is to be open as possible with staff about such matters. At the Leeds-based Appointments Commission, which oversaw the recruitment of chairs and non-executive directors primarily for NHS trusts, she had more than two years’ notice of closure and was able to help many staff find other jobs, making fewer redundancies than first anticipated. The commission will not finally close its doors until October, so Sutcliffe left without a redundancy payment.

She welcomes steps being taken on the recommendation of Sir David Normington, commissioner for public appointments, to overhaul the recruitment process: a much-simplified appointments code for public bodies to use; and the proposed “centre of excellence” to support bodies undertaking recruitment and to disseminate good practice. However, she remains anxious that in the absence of an Appointments Commission, which compiled a database of 10,000 potential candidates, the system should not slip back to a default position of recruiting overwhelmingly middle-class, white, able-bodied males.

Diverse talent

“The thing I would worry about now is development of the pipeline of talent and ensuring that we have people from diverse backgrounds coming into these roles,” she says. Sutcliffe accepts that Scie might well have been culled had it not been for its charitable status. Moreover, she thinks that status gives it the ability to be “more fleet-of-foot and nimble” than a conventional arms-length government body as it plots its survival course.

And she is no doubt that Scie is sorely needed by the social care sector, which, she points out, employs more people than the NHS. “It’s inconceivable that we should not have a body such as Scie, helping the entire sector to improve,” she says. “Regardless of who is paying for what, and how much money they have got, we have to make sure that it is being done as effectively as it can be.”

Curriculum vitae

Age 48.

Lives Crouch End, north London.

Status Married.

Education Longfield comprehensive school, Darlington; Queen Elizabeth sixth-form college, Darlington; London School of Economics, BA history.

Career 2012-present: chief executive, Social Care Institute for Excellence; 2007-12: chief executive, Appointments Commission; 2000-07: director of planning, then deputy chief executive, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence; 1999-2000: assistant director of social services, London Borough of Camden; 1995-99: general manager for children, women and neurosciences, St George’s Healthcare NHS trust, south London; 1992-95: manager, services for older people, Camden and Islington community health services NHS trust; 1989-92: finance policy officer, Bloomsbury and Islington health authority; 1986-89: trainee management accountant, Tower Hamlets health authority.

Interests Hiking, cooking, supporting Sunderland FC.