Manchester Area Partnership Market Position Statement

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The guidance for the Care Act advocates the development and use of Market Position Statements, building on the learning from the Developing Care Markets for Quality and Choice programme.

The aim of Market Position Statements is to bring together information and analysis about the local market for the benefit of the local market so that current and prospective providers understand the local context, what is likely to change and where the opportunities might in the future. Many areas now have a Market Position Statement, but relatively few councils have developed these through genuine co-production with people and providers or across local authority boundaries. One example of where this has happened is the Manchester Area Partnership Market Position Statement which was developed as part of the Right to Control programme.

Whose idea was it to do this?

The Manchester Area Partnership Market Position Statement was co-produced from the start. The decision to develop the Market Position Statement was made by the Right to Control Board whose members included people who use services. It was then endorsed by the senior management teams of each contributing local authority.

What was the issue?

The decision to develop a co-produced Market Position Statement for the Manchester Area Partnership was taken for three main reasons:

1. The Right to Control pilot meant that people were going to be pooling budgets from different places and thinking about what care and support they would need to live full lives. While working with people with budgets, it became clear that there were not many different or interesting types of support or service available that could support people in this holistic way. For example, at the start of the Right to Control programme, people were asking 'if we've got all this choice and control but there are not enough interesting or flexible services or types of support available - what do we do?' And so people decided to write a Market Position Statement as a first step towards making sure that there were more interesting and flexible services and types of support available out there.

2. The different councils that make up the Manchester Area Partnership buy services from some of the same providers. So they needed to work together and develop a Market Position Statement together so that they could make sure that there was a good range of care and support services across the whole area.

3. Although there had been lots of work done on Market Position Statements in the past, people felt that these did not have enough input from people using services. Often, the development of Market Position Statements has been a very technical process, focusing on the money. People thought that Market Position Statements should also be about working with people using services identifying what they want from their lives. People also felt that it was important to work with local people to think about how they would like to see their lives improve and how care and support services can help people to achieve these things.

How were people who use services involved?

The development of the Market Position Statement involved user-led organisations working alongside the three councils involved (Manchester, Trafford and Stockport). Each council used the Working Together for Change framework to make sure that their work was really co-produced. This involved combining information from people's person-centred reviews about what was working, not working and important for the future and using this in a number of inclusive and engaging workshops to identify priorities for doing things differently that were fed into the MPS. People with disabilities were also involved throughout the process in the governance of the project and in the working groups that reviewed drafts as they were in development.

What good things happened?

Co-producing the Market Position Statement helped to identify and create new areas of support. For example, people found that there were not enough services that helped people get back into employment in the area, and so the partnership worked with a number of micro-providers to make sure that more of this kind of support became available.

People involved felt that their views about co-production changed as a result of the process. People began to see the benefits of co-production and collaboration.