Stephen Rimmer, home office director-general for crime and policing, recently took up his new role at the Metropolitan Police – as strategic adviser to the commissioner after spending two years in the West Midlands as regional lead in preventing violence against vulnerable people.

Mr Rimmer is a keen advocate of multi-agency working practices and is eager to see it embedded within the different agencies, from health and policing, to social work and probationary services.

He wants to see more investment in Early Interventions and more integration around infrastructure, IT and an overall shared mission. Above all, he believes the era of partnerships is over. It’s now about integration.

For Mr Rimmer, multiagency safeguarding hubs (MASH) should be in the collective DNA, a fundamental system, an organic set of ways agencies look at and manage risk and public protection. He spoke to us shortly before his recent appointment to the Met.

How long were you working in the West Midlands?

I started working in the West Mids in 2013. I was brought into work with all the statutary agencies to bring a stronger sense of operational direction. This was particularly triggered around child sexual exploitation (CSE). All these risks and threats tie in with each other regarding the weak and the vulnerable.  It’s about how agencies need to deal with things on a multi-layered basis.

I realised quickly the central challenge for the West Midlands was tracking vulnerability across the piece. I agreed a problem analysis with key leaders and then took responsibility in implementing a programme to address it.

This was predicated on “what are you going to do to get this approach embedded across all these different agencies”? The role was always time limited to how to make this a core business across the agencies.

Do you think you succeeded?

I’m pleased to say that we have a proper structure across the piece that drives all this now. In governance terms we have an overarching high level board responsible for the programme, which is co chaired by the lead chief police officers accountable for public protection and the lead local authority chief execs – a whole range of partners are on that board.

They’ve got a particular scrutiny around CSE because it is such a charged issue with the public. And then we have a series of sub groups that are tasked with delivering specific actions. One  is around FGM, another is around rape and sexual assault and another is around domestic violence and communities. All the key drivers; it’s part of their core responsibilities.

Aside from the clarity around governance and work within that framework, 2 other important things happened:

1. At a strategic level are the issues around combined authority. That is important because the West Mids is starting to develop a more general sense of collective identity leading to potentially significant devolved powers. You have to have confident communities with the skills to do all that. So a strong sense of collective identity is really important. The notion of a combined authority historically had been almost viewed as a joke. So the last couple of years have been important and genuinely transformational.
2. The commitment that by April-May 2016,  MASH (multiagency safeguarding hub) will be a core component across all seven metropolitan areas, connected effectively to their Early Help structure – this is really important. So many individual issues can then flow through – it involves the clarity of how things get referred in and how they get assessed.

So is MASH important to the vision you had?

Very important.

MASH is multidimensional chess. My final West Midlands report to the minister emphasised that I don’t understand why government has not commissioned a proper national evaluation of MASH yet. I appreciate there are limited funds for research, but there are lots of other evaluations commissioned by central government of much smaller importance and risk than this.

I liken it to Gromit laying the track as he’s chasing along because we’re making it up as we’re going along. It’s maybe too harsh to say that, but there are assumptions about efficiencies, thresholds and key components of the model, about what determines success. So still in that sense it feels rudimentary.

What is good is that the seven chief execs are clearly committed to action. We had a strategic meeting recently and without any hesitation it was clear that a recent report on the Coventry MASH by Nigel Boulton – who devised MASH as a concept – should be shared with the others as part of their building blocks.

A year ago there would have been more resistance. Sandwell, which I think have been unfairly criticised by Ofsted for some of their safeguarding arrangements, have been particularly open about the reviews they’ve done in regard to thresholds.

That ability to be open is important. You have to constantly re-evaluate everything. What matters is that you are regularly reassessing what you’re doing, what impact that is having on children and others. That means you have to be flexible, tweak and tinker and reassess.

We’re not doing enough to prevent CSE. That means we’re not doing enough to challenge the attitude in areas that fuel the latest generation of perpetrators.

As you know the whole safeguarding industry is a wrap around for victims, which when it works well works well, but there wouldn’t be victims if you didn’t have perpetrators and we’re not doing enough. Particularly around teenage boys, as there are some cultures that will fuel the thoughts that they can do what they like to girls or anyone not as strong as them. We are really interested in how we can develop some products that will enable those challenging discussions about at risk adolescent perpetrators to be had.

And how important is Early Help in this?

Early intervention is massively important and Nigel Boulton are I are of one view on this. With Birmingham Council chief executive Peter Hay’s leadership, there was a conscious decision to get some momentum behind a fundamental problem with Birmingham, which it has had for many years; that it hasn’t even surfaced all the need for children at risk in the city.

In an ideal world you’d get your infrastructure right first before you generate a MASH because, as everyone knows, first and foremost, a MASH can escalate. Last autumn the numbers went very very big.

What about the under reporting of cases in the city?

It was a good thing that we addressed the critical crisis point for Birmingham, which was getting below the surface of the level of the amount of under reporting of instances of child abuse. That is not sustainable over time because if you accumulate more and more cases and there is no confidence in anything other than in effect formal section 47-type investigations as a sensible way of dealing with risk then:

1. you completely overload police and social care and
2. Early Help never gets off the ground.

So the Sandwell and Birmingham experience has been important for the region as a whole because it shows how quickly you develop – both went large before Early Help was mature. So it’s a dynamic with your Early Help offer as these numbers start to accelerate.

In both cases we’ve just about got to a point of equilibrium where the numbers are increasingly going into the MASH – there are the services to deal with them and run with them, so you don’t get endless re-referrals back to the MASH.

It’s still early days.

Is there the will to fund something like Early Help?

One of the fundamental problems with Early Help as a public service model is the benefits you’re going to get when you stop things happening – in financial terms it may not be realisable over shorter period.

In the West Mids, there has been a degree of political courage in being prepared to invest in Early Help, recognising that the pay offs will take longer than some of the other areas.

I don’t know how much nerve people can hold around that. Nationally, the Treasury said in their spending review document in the summer that Early Help is a way of squaring the circle, how to do better for less.

But it’s difficult and the evidence base for some Early Help we have so far is limited.

There isn’t any fundamental challenge to the notion that in an ideal scenario around public services getting much of the operating model upstream is the thing to do. But it is really challenging to turn the reactive/risk escalating “supertanker” around

How does MASH work nationally?

It’s not just the Home Office. In policy terms the Home Office and DFE need to be joined up. We’ve had a very active relationship with DFE here and various senior officials have visited various MASH’s and have had correspondence on what learning we’re developing. So joint owners of the concept.

But what connects their policy world view on how and where it sits is very different. For DFE it’s about the wider safeguarding landscape and they are clearly sceptical about LSCBs and other elements of that, and they can’t get their heads round where do MASH’s add value to that.

From the Home Office point of view it’s about how much of a priority is it for the police to invest in that model, relative to other activities. These issues don’t seamlessly meet in policy in Whitehall.

And nor should they. The real drivers should come from the learning of the implementation of the models going already.

I’m not saying there should be a national template, but there should be some evidence-based learning regularly updated that provides a degree of clarity of what seems to work and what doesn’t.

So should there be more partnerships nationally – and how would that work?

I think the era of partnerships  is still fundamentally a model based around marginal costs and benefit rather than core business; that is over. It’s now about integration. Partnerships in the traditional sense have always been an addition to public services, so it’s been around “here’s an extra pot of cash and let’s convene a partnership”.

With MASH this is core business – it’s a powerful model. The integration that is required is around infrastructure, IT and the cultural bit around shared mission. That reflects the capabilities of specific agencies – you get both. That’s a big deal.

The biggest challenge can be with some of the leaders. On an operational level a lot of frontline people see how these issues of threat and harm play out in the real world. They see how all these issues are connected. It’s in their daily DNA.

When you get into leadership roles, it’s more about how my organisation is represented and perceived. You can easily get into real tensions because some leaders have a frame or reference that starts with “what I can control and what I can deliver”.

This world runs counter to that. That’s very challenging. Not what leadership is traditionally all about. Systems leadership is about an ability of being able to think how your people and resource gel with others. The ability to trust other agencies to make big calls. All of this is high stakes. It only takes one catastrophe.

It’s easy for me to spout clichés like multi-agency, system integration, but it’s hard. The people who have really impressed me here are the people who don’t’ just sail through it all like a duck in water, but are themselves open about how very difficult it is. How they’ve had to change. There are still some really challenging issues about balancing intelligent in information sharing across agencies with proper safeguards around privacy.

The public sector has to collectively get its head round this less corporate, less compartmentalised view of the world. Business, economic sector, voluntary and community  sector.

Birmingham council has been viewed as having had a monopolistic view of the world for many years. Birmingham could get far more done for people by enabling others to take the lead – this is a big step which it is beginning to take.

Austerity provides the non negotiable bit of that. LAs, police and health and all of them have come from the mentality that they are a big beast and most of what they want to achieve is down to them. Austerity has changed that.

Those worried about integration now understand that they need that connectivity or their own mission wont’ be fulfilled.

Austerity is a driver of this. It’s the learning platform.

So with your vision of the MASH, where do you go now?

My new role is working for the Met Police as it gears up for delivering major efficiencies and transforming its core services to Londoners during the next few years. Working with partners in London is an integral part of that transformation. We’ve just agreed with key partners that our shared mission is ensuring London is the safest global city. It’s about prevention and about targeting vulnerability.

MASH is central to the agenda because:

1. it’s happening and it’s real
2. it’s not a bit of low risk public service
3. it’s about supporting vulnerable communities.

If we can crack this as a fundamental model delivery service mechanism and link it systematically to early help then it has really significant application right across the country in delivering the right proactive services to the right people and the right communities more efficiently and effectively that we have ever managed before.