In this piece, Charlie talks about the importance of focusing on the positives and the need to highlight and learn from schemes and projects that are working across the country, instead of making the same mistakes and repeating projects that haven’t worked in the past.
Audio Transcription
Hello, I’m just going to go through a things of what, what we do and what we report on. I mean, we were always picking up on stuff that’s going wrong in our areas and around the country, always saying about the stuff that needs changing. And it does need changing. And, yes, people need to speak a bit. But I do think we’re missing a trick. There was a lot, a lot of good stuff going on in the country.
There’s some fantastic projects and schemes going on that people should look at. Some going on in Exeter, there’s some going on in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle that are really, really working, but they are specific to those areas. Why the research and the documentation can’t come up and highlight all these projects that are working on doing good and make them national and putting them all over. Okay, you are going to have to tweak them a little bit to put them into different areas. Because, different areas have slightly different needs, but there are so many fantastic projects out there that should be highlighted and should be made national projects instead of local areas.
I mean, there’s a great one, there’s a Housing First project in Maidstone in Kent, I believe it’s called Porchlight, you need to check that out, and it is a great and it’s the only proper pure Housing First project I’ve seen being done properly in this country. All the rest have taken on variations, like when you have a support worker. What, how many clients a support worker has on, has to work with. On the Housing First, they have a specific number of clients to support workers so that they can get their full attention, not being run from post to post. So I think people need to look at this project. I think there’s so many other projects on it.
As I say, there’s, there’s a project in Birmingham where you get mental health practitioners, mental health nurses going out with outreach and finding them. And they use things when they can’t find the people, people out there on the streets, they, they improvise. They go to pharmacists and ask them when do they come in and collect their prescriptions? Once they know when they pick their scripts up, they can be there so they can check to make sure these people are OK and being looked after, little things like that. And they should be national guidelines. They should be put in place. So there’s so much stuff.
What I’m trying to say is there’s so much good stuff being done all over the country by some fantastic people and I think these need to be highlighted and brought in to a national project because these these areas is working. There are lots of places where it’s working so it needs to to be brought up onto a national project. And I think it’d be great, absolutely brilliant to change stuff, to bring in stuff that works instead of regurgitating stuff that hasn’t worked in the past, making a few tinks, tinkering with it, and then putting it back out there, knowing it didn’t work before and ain’t going to bloody work again and ain’t going to work this time either.
Look at these places where it is working and then bring it in to your areas, make it national. I wholly believe that some company, agency, government, whoever should actually go around and see all these projects are working all around the country and make a feasibility project of making it national and bringing these fantastic projects into a country-wide. Whether it’s far in the sky, I don’t know. But I do hope that then, I hope that the hard work of some fantastic people doesn’t just go for three years, then run out of money or it doesn’t get its new funding and falls by the wayside when it’s something that’s actually worked.
But people have to recognise that in some other new scheme or new project that the government thought up, take some money away from that. I think they need to go out there and check out all these projects that are working and then bringing them into a national structure. Anyway, I’ve had my little rant and my little go on it. Whether that will happen or not, I don’t know but thanks for listening.
