By Helen Evans
ON Monday afternoon, the Jersey Recovery College announced on its website and on social media its permanent closure with immediate effect. This was widely greeted with expressions of both surprise and regret.
The sudden closure of any organisation inevitably has undesirable consequences. Often, the organisation’s own staff are among those hardest hit, and there is an impact too on a wider group of those who were involved with the organisation in various ways, or planning to be in the future.
There can be no doubt that the sudden closure of the Jersey Recovery College will have hit some people very hard.
Amidst the plethora of social-media postings in response to the announcement of the demise of the Jersey Recovery College, many of them expressing shock and sadness, there has been widespread admiration for the organisation and its work.
There is no doubt that the college had succeeded in establishing a high public profile and attracting much support in the seven years since it was established.
It is important now that the widespread positive public sentiment surrounding the organisation mustn’t stand in the way of the need, in due course, to take a dispassionate look at what went wrong.
The Jersey Recovery College was born out of the Mental Health Strategy for Jersey 2016–2020. It was registered as a company in October 2016 and started operating in 2017. It was later registered as a charity in Jersey.
In the strategy was a commitment (Key Priority 1) to setting up a recovery college which could be “service-user led with support from mental-health organisations and professionals”. This was in line with the wider recovery movement, emphasising co-production.
From the start, it was clear that there was a sense in which the Jersey Recovery College was a child of the government.
Certainly, it has received considerable government funding, amounting to more than £750,000 over its lifetime.
Its 2022 annual report shows that, in 2021 and 2022, governmental income accounted for approximately half of its total funding, with approximately a third coming from grants and around one-sixth from revenue generated from courses. Only a very small proportion (3–5%) came from donations and fundraising.
The government funding provided to the Jersey Recovery College was for the contracting of services it delivered on behalf of the government. Health Minister Tom Binet, speaking on Tuesday, said: “We are now considering how the services offered by the Recovery College on behalf of HCS can be provided in an alternative way as soon as possible.”
Decisions as to what services the government provides directly itself and what services it contracts out to other organisations – be they private companies or charitable organisations – are complex and highly contested. Some see advantages in bracing elements of free market competition in contracting in some domains, while others – myself included – may generally be more sceptical of the benefits of contracting with other organisations to provide public services that are required on an ongoing basis.
One potential downside of parcelling out public services to be contracted for delivery by organisations external to the government is that it can risk introducing additional overhead costs. This may well be a particular risk in a small jurisdiction, such as Jersey, where an organisation delivering a highly specific set of services cannot benefit from the economies of scale that might be possible if it were covering a larger population.
For the three years 2021–2023, the annual income and expenditure of the Jersey Recovery College had both been within the range of £250,000 to £300,000. According to its 2022 annual report, it ran 75 courses and had 648 students.
The Jersey Recovery College undertook other activities as well as direct provision of training and education.
During 2022 and 2023, commissioned by the Mental Health Strategic System Partnership Board, it ran a pilot designed to embed co-production across mental-health services.
The Co-production Framework for Jersey Mental Health Services is identified as an example of good practice in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s recent report on the commissioning of government services.
For now, at least in the short term, the government is intending to deliver the services previously provided by the Jersey Recovery College itself. This is a change of approach from that envisaged in the 2016–2020 Mental Health Strategy.
It is unfortunate that the transition from one model of provision to another has involved the abrupt closure of an organisation.
This raises questions about the oversight – both of government contracting and of charities in the Island – and all the more so as it involves the demise of an organisation that was set up at the government’s behest, registered as a charity and, apparently, highly reliant on government funding.
It is possible that the verdict, in time, may be that the Jersey Recovery College was an ill-conceived project that was never going to be an efficient or cost-effective way of delivering the services contracted to it. It is to be hoped that, whatever emerges in retrospect towards the understanding of what has gone wrong here, care is taken to avoid such organisational failures and abrupt transitions in the future.
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Helen Evans is a qualified accountant and a lecturer in higher education, teaching mainly statistics and mathematics. She is chair of Reform Jersey.
