MENTAL health charity Swindon SUNS is fighting for survival as council and health officials seek to re-shape voluntary and community sector provision in the borough.

Swindon Council and the Swindon Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) plan to decommission and re-tender community-based support for people with mental health, disability, learning disability and ill-health issues.

To reduce the number of contracts that the council and the CCG hold, officials recommend that bids from consortia of organisations are invited in two areas: support for people with learning disabilities, and support for people with mental health diagnosis.

The proposals, to be discussed by the Joint Commissioning Board (Adults and Childrens) on June 4, recommend replacing a number of contracts with one tender for each of these areas, plus another for a welfare benefit advice and information hub, to ensure new services are in place by April 2014.

The move, which aims partly to reduce duplication of provision in areas such as service user engagement, would save the council £100,000 per year from a total council budget of £1.641m. The CCG would also see savings, however some interested parties in a consultation that included current providers and service users, said it would put smaller providers at risk and reduce choice.

SUNS (Service User Network Swindon), a mental health charity in Victoria Road, has agreements to run service user engagement by providing opportunities for people to comment on care they receive, and also to provide the Swindon Listening Line, where people can talk in confidence to skilled staff about things troubling them.

The members say they could not make a joint bid with other providers because they are a distinct service-user-run organisation. They say officials have suggested that national charities, Mind and The Samaritans, could take on the new contracts.

However, they claim they offer a different service to the Samaritans through their links to emergency services, and point out that a choice of providers, working in different ways, is important for service users. The charity deals with up to 250 calls a night.

June Stewart, the vice chairman, said: “Bigger organisations regardless of quantity can do things cheaper. But what they are doing is taking away all the satellite services around mental health. It’s more about saving money, what choices are they actually giving?

“It’s saying there’s just one place you can go, and that’s not a choice.”

Vivienne Marsh, the support worker and networker, said: “The Listening Line has saved so many lives, without the Listening Line where are they going to go. The Samaritans is totally different, they don’t work with other services, and we do, we call an ambulance, we save their lives.”

She said the charity, which employs six staff and has been around for about 15 years, had enough money to continue for about 12 months from when its contracts end on September 30, and in the meantime would seek funding from other sources, including supermarket sponsorship.

To help out SUNS, call 01793 836871 or donate money at www.swindonsuns.org

‘We’re trying to improve service,’ says department chief

SWINDON Council’s health chief has defended the proposals.

Coun Brian Mattock, cabinet member for health and adult social care, said: “I’m absolutely confident that those vulnerable people who need our services will get at least as good as, if not better, a service from this model.

“What we’re trying to do is improve the service, recognising the financial constraints we’re under, and we’ve got to manage those, but we also recognise that the commissioning contracting for the third sector hasn’t been done for a number of years, which is why we’ve taken our time to do a very thorough consultation.”

He said smaller organisations could work together to share administrative costs and enable them to jointly bid for a contract, adding: “We recognise there’s a place for all sizes of organisation.”

Robert Buckland, Swindon South MP, said he praised moves to bring services together in a more coherent manner, but feared the workload for the emergency services would increase if SUNS lost funding.

He said: “I think there’s a little bit of a misunderstanding about precisely what SUNS do. What they tend to do is work very closely with service users who for whatever reason cannot access other parts of the service and rely very much on other service users to get through the day.

“The listening line in particular, run by service users, does a lot of work with people with mental health problems that would otherwise be accessing crisis services.”