Collaborate CiC and Involve are currently working in partnership as the External Scrutiny Team, as part of the development of the 2024 to 2028 Grenfell Support Programme. We have been appointed as part of the Global Settlement Agreement, which requires a new fund of money to be spent to benefit the bereaved and survivors of Grenfell and the local community.
There are three themes towards which the programme funds must be allocated:-
- Support for bereaved and survivors
- Support for the local community
- Education and training (for both bereaved and survivors and the local community).
The agreement doesn’t go into details on exactly what this support should be, or how spending the money should be decided. It gives the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council the responsibility of consulting, then designing a funded programme that works - and appoints the External Scrutiny Team to provide an independent voice to ensure this happens.
From October 2023, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea will be leading a consultation, the results of which will shape the new programme. We will be working with bereaved, survivors and the immediate local community to make sure that this consultation is fair, effective and transparent.
We will not be carrying out the consultation itself. We’ll be providing independent scrutiny of the consultation process, so that the Council can be held publicly accountable for hearing and taking into account the voices of bereaved, survivors and the immediate local community in programme development.
From October, we will also be working with bereaved, survivors and the immediate local community to set up a system for people to scrutinise the delivery of the programme and hold the Council to account.
Though the Expert Scrutiny Partner team are not experts in the experiences of people impacted by Grenfell, they bring significant experience across public engagement, collective decision making, monitoring, learning & evaluation, trauma-informed practice, mediation, community work and youth work. The team will use this experience to listen, learn from and advocate for the experience, views and needs of the people impacted by Grenfell.
Our involvement
Our role is to work with bereaved, survivors and the immediate local community to scrutinise the consultation design and implementation. We see our role as helping bereaved, survivors and the local community hold the Council to account.
The objectives of the External Scrutiny Team, in scrutinising the consultation, are to:
- Establish a best practice framework for effective consultation and ongoing scrutiny and monitoring of the consultation.
- Test and scrutinise the Council’s consultation design against this framework.
- Audit the Council’s consultation against the agreed framework at each stage of design, delivery, analysis and recommendation forming.
The framework is currently in development. It is built on expert literature on public consultation and engagement, as well as related areas, including public engagement, asset-based community engagement, co-design and power analysis. It is also guided by trauma informed practice and Restorative Justice principles.
Most importantly, the framework has been tailored to the lived experience expertise of bereaved, survivors, and local community impacted by the Grenfell tragedy. Some of this experience has been shared in meetings with the External Scrutiny Team, and some has been shared with the council and in the public domain over the years since the tragedy. No framework can fully account for the depth of this lived experience, however this work seeks to place the experience of the people of Grenfell at the centre.
What's next
We have a plan of activities for scrutinising the consultation and reporting on what we have found. At each stage we’ll report publicly and also send a summary to communities of our views.
August - September
Scrutiny of consultation design - review how the Council has designed the consultation. We will be inclusive, transparent and fair in how we judge the work they have done.
October - November
Scrutiny of consultation delivery - we will look at how well the Council is doing in reaching everyone, including unheard and quieter voices, and involving them in the consultation.
November onwards
Scrutiny of analysis and recommendations - we will check how the Council is assessing what they have heard, and scrutinise how well they are turning this into recommendations that are based on people’s feedback and meeting peoples’ needs.
Monitoring and scrutiny
The second phase of the work is then to design and set up ongoing scrutiny and monitoring arrangements for the programme, to ensure the voices of those affected are centred in the programme design, delivery and evaluation. This phase will be led by Collaborate, with Involve supporting.
More information about the Global Settlement Agreement, Grenfell Support Programme and our role is available here.
You can contact the team for more information at [email protected]
Image attribution: ChiralJon, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons