Where to start with this?:

A website manager employed by Portsmouth City Council left after just six months on the job because he was frustrated at a lack of funding. The council spent around £25,000 recruiting and paying the unnamed employee to transform their website, but when he discovered he had no budget to spend on the service he quit.

(via Carl Haggerty)

I enjoyed attending the launch of the Right to Control Trailblazer yesterday. I attended as a representative of a user-led organisation in Essex - one of eight successful Trailblazer areas.

The Right to Control represents an innovative project that seeks to bring together a whole range of funding streams so that disabled people have more choice and control over how they use the funding they're eligible for. It's actually really easy to get into the details of the Right to Control and what it will mean in practice, but much harder to capture the overall shift it represents. The way I characterise it is that, instead of disabled people changing their behaviour and accommodating the way services and funding is provided, the whole thing is shifted around: let's start (as we so obviously should) with enabling an individual as much possible and configure the services to make sure that happens.

As an approach it clearly has value in and of itself; but it's one that I think will deliver lessons for a whole range of public services, particularly within the tough budget settlement the public sector will find itself with in 2011/12 onwards.

Alongside many positives, there are many challenges to implementing the Right to Control. For example, getting agencies across the public sector working together - including social care, housing, Job Centres Plus, the Independent Living Fund and user-led organisations - will be tough. There are the system and process changes required to underpin the Right to Control, not least of which is a single or common assessment, as well as the huge complexities of putting all money in one pot whilst still being able to identity outcomes by each agency involved. Ensuring all information, advice and peer support is available is more straightforward, though the delivery of this will require both cultural change within public agencies and appropriate capacity within the voluntary sector. And then, as with everything, there's the question of political will and senior leadership buy-in.

If these challenges can be overcome - which is precisely what the Right to Control Trailblazers are created to find out (and I think they will work) - then the Right to Control could be a significant success we'll see replicated across the public sector.

(More information on the Right to Control is available from the Office for Disability Issues and here. Tweets from yesterday's event are available here.)

Today's activity from Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabularies (HMIC) and its huge error around their planned launched of "My Police" is another example of the poor exercise of statutory agency power (on the back of the recent BBC example).

To recap: HMIC is planning to launch an initiative called "My Police". The only problem being that the excellent @MyPolice already exists and works very effectively.

When I first heard the news I honestly assumed that HMIC didn't know @MyPolice existed. It wouldn't be the first time a statutory body was unaware of innovative practice beyond their usual sphere of engagement. But in this situation it became clear the case against HMIC is the worst possible: not only were they aware of @MyPolice, but they actively didn't care about the clear overlap once they became aware of it.

For me, the primary issue here is one of power. HMIC clearly doesn't believe in or value the idea of @MyPolice because (a) they're treading all over the @MyPolice brand, and (b) they didn't engage to understand how both could work together.

There's also the secondary issue of HMIC not understanding the value of such bottom-up initiatives as @MyPolice and how they can contribute to the police as a whole, fulfilling, for example, the (occasionally derided) policing pledge.

I hope the situation has a positive outcome, though I hold little hope. Sooner or later, public bodies are going to have to realise they can't continue to fail to engage with what is represented by @MyPolice; because if they do, this will represent their failure to engage with the people they are there to serve.