Hi Douglas, thanks for the opportunity to ask questions, your workshop last year was really superb. I only wish that you would work on the West coast. I find it hard to pose a general question, cause general answers can be found anywhere, there is so much info out there.
Question is, we're looking to the future of our Healthy Living Initiative and thinking of becoming partly self sustaining. At the moment we are brokered by the NHS. Where would you propose that we start, because there are so many implications for staffing, funding etc. Do you think that professional help would be necessary and if so, would you know of any good consultants who have experience with this kind of project of splitting up a project from a statutory organisation.

Being foster parented by a large public body can have huge advantages in terms of tapping into resources and protection of staff including robust terms and conditions and other policies and procedures. The downside of course is lack of independence and flexibility. A clever option is to try to have your cake and eat it. This model is used increasingly by local authorities setting up arms length trusts. This allows a lead body to be an independent trust (often with charitable status) which can then access external support and grant funding. It can then have wholly owned trading subsidiaries which can operate for profit, gift aiding it to the charity. Within that model though, all staff continue to be employees of the local authority (or in your case the NHS) with all the protection that brings and policies and procedures can be adopted.

This of course will require the agreement of the NHS as it often involves technically losing assets.

The only other option is to launch off as an independent organisation. I would imagine your running costs will be enormous so would only recommend this as a last resort as full grant funding will be difficult to access and trading will take some time to put in place.

As you might expect, it is difficult to recommend a specific consultant, though there are some out there. Better to think this through yourself and then buy in specialist legal help.

Thanks Douglas for this. What do you mean by the lead org loosing its assets. In our case, the assets are owned by the HLI Partnership, would the current assets go to the Trust if you were to set one up? is that what you mean?

Would you think that a trust is better than a Social Economy company, or can local authorities only set up trusts?