“It’s a great pleasure to be invited to open this conference today and to see so many people dedicated to the work that’s been going on with E-CINS and, more importantly, committed to the concept of partnership working.
It’s about engaging partners and maximising participation but from a strategic perspective, it’s also about managing risk and dealing with the pressures of the current financial situation we find ourselves in. There are increasing pressures upon organisations, with the reduction in funding, to start reverting to what’s called core business.
We know that in any major public enquiry where there have been issues around child exploitation or IOM failings the public perception about how we respond as a group of public services is very much based on “are you linked up?” “are you sharing information?” the consistent message around any review or any perceived failing is frequently that somebody, somewhere knew something and didn’t share it. Or that the association with one piece of information in one context wasn’t clear and a failing occurred.
The whole E-CINS process is about engaging partners and making sure that we don’t lose those opportunities. It’s also about maximising participation and managing our professional reputations as well.
I come from a long history and background of working with local authority partners and I can see huge benefits from E-CINS.
Cambridgeshire’s Journey
We started in December 2011 and were one of the very earliest forces to use E-CINS, We worked very closely with housing associations in the Fenland area of the county, our local authority partners and with police and fire service.
We found very quickly the benefits but the problem, however, was that there was no real critical mass of examples being used to demonstrate this. For the new people coming on, there is now far more experience, more learning, and far more case studies which reinforce the value of making sure we maintain those partnership links and that we maintain the ability to share and communicate with each other.
We took our time over it but the journey for Cambridgeshire is that it has got faster and faster and it has accelerated.
Looking at how we tie in with licensing premises, how we start widening the issues to deal with IOM far more aggressively and potentially sharing information around child sexual exploitation. There are no real limits to this in terms of the benefits we can have going forward, the efficiencies we can drive out and the overall good in terms of a positive outcome for our com-munities.
Data Sharing
If we were to ask the question “What is your understanding of how information is shared around professional bodies to manage public good? I think the public perception would be “well, of course you do that already, don’t you?
Historically we haven’t, but the public expectation is “well, why wouldn’t you?” and that’a a really challenging question.
Cambridgeshire’s position is that we will have all of our district councils up and running by the end of this calendar year. Everyone has signed up to the principles of information sharing. At first we did have some misunderstandings from some of our agencies who were unsure if they could share information in this way. They felt we could all be vulnerable if we’re challenged about some of the information that we’re giving out. Actually when we ask the question “what do you think the public would expect you to do?” virtually everyone says “that’s the right thing to do”.
Trying to work through this legacy of data protection and the risks associated with sharing data, I think we’re beginning to see an enlightened approach of “this is obvious, why wouldn’t you do this?”
There are numerous positive examples of what could be fatalities, of major incidents occurring as a consequence of not sharing information, where partners have gone to a situation and said “you need to look at this because individual components of this do not work – you combine this together and you get this toxic cocktail”.
At that point scales fall from somebody’s eyes and they say “you’ve protected our organisation, you’ve protected our reputation and you’ve saved us a huge amount of money by not having that occur.”
It’s avoidable and we can avoid it.
The whole E-CINS ethos is hugely positive. We actively encouraged agencies to share what we thought was appropriate to get them on board and some agencies at first did have the view that it was an inappropriate free-for-all sharing of data. It isn’t. It’s about making sure that you share what is appropriate but also being open to the challenge of broadening that construct and making sure that it is appropriate to what we are seeking to achieve as partners.
Going forward there are ample opportunities to broaden the amount of information we share. I am not convinced this journey is complete yet, we have a broad range of partners in Cambridgeshire who are very positive and actively sharing the process. What we’re beginning to see is that the impact of that information sharing is now becoming so slick that we are not needing to meet as frequently as we had to previously.
When I sat down with a practitioner last week I was frankly quite shocked. I’ll just run you through some of the stuff that we’re currently looking at. ASB, Domestic Violence, Families work in terms of difficult to reach families, hate crime, IOM, restorative justice, vulnerable persons, youth issues, stalking, CSE and potentially gangs as well. All high risk areas. Consequences and actions in those areas, the impact on partners and our communities are high risk. The only way we can manage that risk going forward is to make sure that we are as comprehensive as possible in ensuring that professionally we discharge our professional relationships to protect people.
All of us have responsibilities for safeguarding, for criminal justice contributions and, on occasions, ASB work. This tool has clearly demonstrated an ability to manage that in a way that utilises the technology, saves money and potentially saves reputations at the end of it as well as giving us the positive outcomes in making sure that people are safer.
I am buoyed up by the enthusiasm that I see around people working together as a partnership and in relation to the complexities we will be facing in the next few years. This gives me a great sense of professional optimism that we are going the right way of working together appropriately.”
Read the summaries of the speakers’ presentations here