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High-risk and high-harm domestic abuse perpetrators pose the greatest risk of serious harm to (ex-)partners and family members. Robust evidence of perpetrator intervention is lacking for this group. The Drive perpetrator intervention in the United Kingdom focuses specifically on high-harm perpetrators to reduce abuse and increase safety of victims, using individual case management via support and disruption, co-ordinated multi-agency response and targeted support to victims. This paper reports on evaluation of the Drive pilot. A high quality quasi-experimental approach with individually randomised intervention and controls was applied in three areas in England and Wales. High-risk perpetrators (N = 2627) were allocated randomly to either Drive or usual care (support to victim). Change in safety and risk for Drive-associated victims was compared with the usual care victim group. Longer-term outcomes were assessed before, during and 12 months following the intervention for Drive and control group perpetrators at one site. The Drive intervention reduced abusive perpetrator behaviours and increased safety for victims compared to the control. The reduction in perpetration by both serial and repeat perpetrators sustained for a year after the end of the intervention and was statistically significant (p < 0.001) for Drive perpetrators compared to the control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Partnership working in the welfare state has moved from the margins to the mainstream in terms of achieving policy objectives. Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical developments in the field, this article presents a framework for analyzing welfare partnerships that give precedence to the issues of trust and interdependence. This article presents findings from a study of local authority museum services in Scotland, England and Wales to test this framework. A series of case studies revealed that partnerships have been driven by a number of factors including policy, power, funding and people. Partnerships could gain services credibility, but trust and interdependence were compromised by conflictual and unequal relationships. Partnerships were often short term, lacked ongoing maintenance plans and limited by their type of funding. The article proposes that further analysis of the level of individual agency at ground level be considered when thinking about partnerships in the cultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses cybersecurity policies relating to critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the U.S. and Great Britain. Topics include the relation of cybersecurity to civil society in liberal democracies, the role of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in cybersecurity, and the importance of international cooperation in cybersecurity efforts. Also addressed are the security of industrial control systems (ICSs), private sector relations to U.S. and British cybersecurity efforts, and interagency cooperation in cybersecurity efforts by both nations.

The article analyses organizational structures and coordination mechanisms for crisis management in six European countries, focusing on the prevalence of hierarchical and network arrangements, administrative culture and perceptions of coordination quality. Our main research question concerns the importance of collaboration and cooperation in the management of crises. We apply a structural-instrumental and a cultural perspective, and examine data on formal organizational structures as well as survey data from administrative executives. The mapping reveals hybrid coordination arrangements with different national 'flavours'. The survey data show that the executives accorded significant weight to coordination, but the use of different coordination mechanisms was only loosely linked to their assessments of coordination quality. Our findings support a view of public administration as a largely composite system combining contradictory organizational principles that have evolved through institutional layering. National context and the specific challenges from different types of crises therefore influence crisis management capacity profoundly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A continuing criticism of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms is that they fragment the process of probation supervision and, as a consequence, are likely to damage the network of relationships (between workers from different agencies as well as between supervisor and supervisee) that encourages compliance with orders and desistance from offending (PA/PCA, 2013; Ugwudike, 2013; McNeill and Robinson G, 2013; Robinson A, 2014). This short article reports on a research study that explored probation practice in an increasingly fragmented environment. The article outlines the implications of some of the study’s findings for the developing practice of community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) and highlights points of particular concern if good practice is to be maintained and practitioner expertise sustained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the issue of child trafficking in the United Kingdom and of multi-agency responses in tackling it. The United Kingdom, as a signatory to the recent trafficking protocols, is required to implement measures to identify and support potential victims of trafficking--via the National Referral Mechanism. Effective support for child victims is reliant on cooperation between agencies. Our regional case study contends that fragmented agency understandings of protocols and disjointed partnership approaches in service delivery means the trafficking of vulnerable children continues across the region. This article asserts that child trafficking in the United Kingdom, previously viewed as an isolated localized phenomenon, maybe far more widespread, revealing deficiencies in child protection services for vulnerable children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the Labour government, Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) in England were responsible for the delivery of Local Area Agreements (LAAs) - agreed targets between central and local government. This paper uses statistical techniques and local authority case studies to explore the impact of LAAs on LSPs' efforts to promote social cohesion. The results suggest that LSPs with a LAA for social cohesion experienced a better rate of improvement in community cohesiveness than those without, and that tougher targets resulted in stronger improvement. The impact of changes in LSPs' approaches to promoting social cohesion appears to be responsible for this finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the potential consequences of a privatised probation service in Great Britain. She argues that privatization poses a risk of leakage of sensitive data on victims and offenders. She describes how the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) can promote multi-agency collaboration to prevent data leakage. She also examines the disadvantages of adopting a payment-by-results model to measure desistance to crime.

Following recent reforms of both local government and the National Health Service, there is significant emphasis in both services on improving inter-agency collaboration, user involvement and strategic commissioning. In response, this article reviews historical debates about the relationship between local government and health care, before arguing that these two ‘partners’ need each other now more than ever. If local government is to be a ‘place-shaper’, then it needs significant influence over local health services, while the NHS needs to learn from the best of local government if it is to gain sufficient local legitimacy to take the difficult decisions it needs to take. Against this background, the article reviews different options for future joint working, exploring various options for enacting a new relationship between local government and the NHS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, children's safeguarding policy and practice in the UK have focused on individual and family-level explanations of abuse and neglect, with relatively little attention given to children's overall well-being or the role played by neighbourhood conditions in shaping it. As a result, community-oriented practice, designed to improve the neighbourhood conditions in which many of the families who come to the attention of child welfare agencies live, has largely remained on the margins of mainstream provision for safeguarding children and young people. However, more recent policy developments, including Every Child Matters and the Children's Plan, do highlight the influence of children's wider circumstances on their well-being, providing the foundations for more holistic approaches to service provision. Nevertheless, it is argued that these policy developments are unlikely to be successful unless they are accompanied by fundamental changes within the culture of many agencies and professions. Using a combination of ecological theory and practice examples, some of the main strands of the changes required (developing a culture of listening to children and adults; recognising and supporting the safeguarding activities of local people; and promoting partnership approaches to extending local provision) are critically examined. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commissioning is integral to the Government's change agenda for public services with its crosscutting aims of keeping people well, improving overall health and reducing inequalities. Commissioning for mental health - rather than merely for the treatment of people with mental health problems - should be a defined and clear-cut aspect of health and social care planning and investment. However, it remains a significant challenge for a number of reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines how the meaning of risk, safety, and accidents are constructed in a military context. We compare meanings of these constructs among members working for three organizations (Health and Safety Executive, Ministry of Defence, and Royal Marine Commandos) jointly responsible for planning and executing “safe” military training and maneuvres in a particular unit of the United Kingdom’s Royal Marine Commandos. The discourse among these members embodies the inter-organizational collaboration over military safety, and through an analysis of this discourse we situate and frame shared and contested meanings of risk, safety, and accidents within this particular community of practice. We discuss implications of these findings for theory and practice, rallying for a more contextualized understanding of what risk, safety, and accidents mean in organizational life and thus the relative nature of the standards to which organizations are expected to adhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been growing concern in the UK that local services aimed at risky or vulnerable people are ineffective, because of agencies’ persistent failure to share information about their clients. Despite considerable national policy effort to encourage better information-sharing, previous research indicates that there are many cases where information is still not shared when it should be, or where it is shared when it should not be, with potentially devastating results. This article uses data from the largest empirical study of local information-sharing yet undertaken to examine four policy sectors where multi-agency working has come to the fore. It shows that variations in their information-sharing and confidentiality practices can be explained by neo-Durkheimian institutional theory and uses insights from this theory to argue that current policy tools, which emphasize formal regulation, are unlikely to lead to consistent and acceptable outcomes, not least because of unresolved conflicts in values and aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the importance of community involvement in the siting of hazardous industry in Great Britain. The effect of the European Union Seveso II Directive, which addresses the siting of hazardous industry, on British legislation is described. Problems of inter-agency coordination and the development of effective safety measures is discussed in terms of a 2005 explosion at the Buncefield Oil Depot in Great Britain.

The article focuses on the system of government in the British States Assembly that aimed to have more efficient decision making, improved communication and coordination between government organizations, and more effective and responsive government. The author states that a significant change was the establishment of a Council of Ministers.

This article explores developments in the UK's institutional arrangements for managing 'stabilization' operations. It suggests that 'stabilization' activity takes place within a different framework of priorities from either 'development' or military-led 'hearts and minds' frameworks. It argues for a sharpening of, and to some extent a returning to basics for, Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) while creating capabilities for a more developed form of 'stabilization CIMIC'. It also highlights the need for new and widely understood institutions that enhance the capacity for comprehensive and integrated (rather than sequential or coordinated) interdepartmental operational planning. It stresses the difficulties with stabilization models that imply a generic sequencing of activities, rather than approaches that represent a mixture of simultaneity and 'critical path analyses. The debates framed in this article are rooted in institutional developments witnessed in 2006 and 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tensions between imperatives for sharing of information about clients, patients, and offenders and those for confidentiality and privacy have become a prominent but unresolved issue in British public policy in the context of greater pressures toward interagency collaboration. This article analyses empirical data from a major Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project designed to provide the first systematic evidence about the ways in which local partnerships working in sensitive policy fields in England and Scotland attempt to strike settlements between sharing and confidentiality and discusses the impact of national government's attempts to increase formal regulation of their information-sharing practices. To do this, the project has developed a methodology to operationalize neo-Durkheimian institutional theory and demonstrates that theory in this tradition has the power to identify and explain patterns of information-sharing styles adopted in local collaborative working. The overall conclusion is that the stronger assertion of formal regulation by national government may well be leading to the greater prominence of hierarchical institutional forms but it may also be associated with the counterassertion of other institutional forms, too, and in ways that may reinforce problems that greater regulation is intended to address. In particular, we show that neither does increased formal regulation always lead frontline staff to be more confident about local information-sharing practices nor should it lead observers to be more confident that data-sharing practices will be more transparent or consistent from locality to locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside efforts to improve practitioners' skills to deliver regeneration policy in the UK, the government has been actively encouraging members of ‘target’ communities to participate in such activities. However, less attention has been paid to the impact of skills training for regeneration ‘recipients’. This article explores the degree to which the Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI) Pathfinder programme has offered ‘flexibility’ in respect of promoting and utilizing knowledge and skills acquisition by community members, and their subsequent ability to positively influence programme outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommendations for a more co-ordinated and effective approach to easing the transition from children's to adult services have been recycled by innumerable high-level committees at national and local level for the past 40 years, and have been incorporated in successive codes of practice and even in legislation. Why is it proving so difficult to put them into practice? The aim of this paper is to provoke national and local discussion of the proposition that the needs of school-age children and young people with learning disabilities have not been comprehensively addressed in planning and provision following the publication of Valuing People some five years ago. This is reflected in recent research on the experience of young people during the process of transition from school to post-school provision. Since inter-agency collaboration is currently a high priority for central government, the time seems ripe for a new attempt to develop a more fully integrated service which includes local education authorities, SEN regional partnerships, Learning and Skills Councils, colleges of further education and the Connexions Service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Joined-up government’ policies have been promoted by the government in the since 1997. To date, there have been few empirical studies of the implementati of these policies. This article presents the results of a study of expenditure on intermediate care in England and highlights tensions between multi-organizational co-ordination of services on the ground and hierarchical financing and reporting arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the publication of a white paper on ‘Our Health, Our Care, Our Say’, the government reasserted its belief in the value of partnerships in delivering effective public services. Yet, despite the commitment, perpetual organizational reform will continue to undermine joint working. This article explores how certain types of continuous and externally imposed organizational change cause managers and practitioners to reluctantly turn away from partnership working, and considers what this means for policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article overviews the findings of a domestic violence and disability study undertaken in 2005. The study was sponsored by Middlesbrough Domestic Violence Forum and funded by the Neighbourhood Support Fund, Middlesbrough, as one way of taking forward their equal opportunities commitments to this group of women, in the wake of the domestic homicide of a local disabled woman. Although local, it is one of the very few recent UK studies to address this issue, so its findings have national significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A nation's structure and culture of civil-military relations are important and largely overlooked factors in explaining the performance of armed forces involved in complex expeditionary operations. The US model of ‘Huntingtonian’, divided civil-military structures and poor interagency cooperation, makes the US military less suited for complex expeditionary operations. British civil-military relations involve a Defence Ministry that conscientiously integrates military and civilian personnel, as well as extensive interagency cooperation and coordination. This ‘Janowitzean’, integrated form of civil-military relations makes the British military more likely to provide for the planning and implementation of comprehensive campaigns that employ and coordinate all instruments of power available to the state, as well as troops in the field displaying the flexibility and cultural and political understanding that are necessary in complex expeditionary operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the early stages of the development of integrated services, a study that examined the views of children and their carers on being missing from education is drawn upon to highlight two key issues that connect with the integration agenda: identifying the object of intervention and altering frames of organizational relevance. It is argued that if the proposed national outcome framework for England is to be meaningfully achieved (being healthy, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution, staying safe and achieving economic well being) within new service configurations, children's problems can no longer be fragmented into objects of organizational or professional expertise. Organizational relevance must adjust to enable the service user's (in this case children's, young people's, and their parents'/carers') framing of problems to be communicated, heard, and responded to. Three cases are presented for illustrative purposes, which show (i) the continued fragmentation of the service user's problem into objects of organizational relevance and (ii) the impact of this fragmentation on outcomes for children. Following presentation of the cases, a policy discussion is offered, which highlights a number of factors that undermined agencies' efforts to offer a joined-up and holistic service in this particular local context. The study draws links between this particular local context and issues of national relevance and concludes that, for the families in this study, problems presented to agencies continued to be framed according to organizationally relevant concerns and practical realities. This process occurred in spite of efforts by children, young people, and their parents/carers to steer diverse professionals involved with their lives down a more individually relevant path. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the reform of English children's services, children's trust pathfinders were launched in 2003 by the British government to promote greater inter-agency co-operation between children's services and professionals. This paper reports on early findings from a multi-method, longitudinal national evaluation of the implementation and impact of all 35 children's trust pathfinders. Using data from a 2004 survey of 35 children's trusts managers and in-depth interviews with 107 professionals conducted in 2005, results show strong endorsement of an integrated children's service vision. However, arrangements for co-operation on governance and strategic developments were more advanced than for procedural or frontline professional practice. In this transitional period, professionals were negotiating a balance between targeted and universal service provision and, concurrently, establishing the scope of formal strategic partnership bodies (including local safeguarding children boards) with potentially overlapping remits. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the experience of the first 260 Sure Start Local Programmes of developing interagency partnerships in their areas. It draws on quantitative and qualitative data collected between 2000-2005 by the implementation module of the government-commissioned National Evaluation of Sure Start. Following a résumé of the aims and design of the Sure Start Local Programme initiative, a description of the implementation module methodology and an overview of existing knowledge around inter-agency collaboration, five factors are identified which impacted on the partnership-building task. These comprise: the nature of partnership history; clarity of purpose; the extent of strategic commitment at the highest levels; trust among partners; and the characteristics of the national workforce. The article concludes by highlighting the continuing relevance of these issues to the new collaborations required by the UK government's Every Child Matters agenda, including the work of children's centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of research findings regarding strategic partnerships in localities in relation to services and interventions for children and young people in the United Kingdom. It describes the categories of literature informing the research review and describes findings about what works in partnership working. It discusses the need for such partnerships between local agencies as required by Children Act, 2004.

The article focuses on the implications of the Children Act 1989 to residential care in Great Britain. One of the law's aims is to achieve a better balance between the duty to protect children and the need to allow parents to challenge the state intervention in the upbringing of their children. Interagency cooperation will be required both in providing services to children in need and in their protection. Since the task of residential care is to make positive changes in young people's lives, there are issues which have to be resolved if social care is to meet the challenge of the Act. One issue is the exemplification of dysfunction within the child care system.

The author focuses on the issue of whether leading and managing in inter-agency settings in Great Britain is actually different. She cites that discussions of inter-agency working indicate that the challenges faced in such settings are of greater magnitude compared to those faced within traditional settings. She notes that lack of effective leadership and management is a common reason for seen failure of inter-agency working. She says that leadership and management are considered as essential contributors to facilitating inter-agency relationships.

The article focuses on the City Strategy Pathfinders that was established by the British government to address local problems of unemployment, economic activity and labor market exclusion. According to the author, the Pathfinders imply an acknowledgement by the central government that the solution to problems related to labor and employment requires coordinated local actions across several agencies.

The author reflects on the British government's ten-year strategy dubbed New Horizons aimed at improving the mental health of the nation. He cites several factors which can contribute to the success of the strategy, including interagency collaboration. He mentions the plan of the Department of Health to increase funding for front line National Health Service (NHS) services in line with inflation. The author also describes the challenge of improving public health service in the country.

The author calls on the British Department of Health and the National Health Service (NHS) to adopt a new settlement that respects the unique roles and capabilities of each partner. He describes how the department gains more from such a separation as politicians would be free to focus on wider health-relate issues. He suggests three tests that would apply to any proposed new settlement. The author also anticipates that the department and the ministers will face challenges in distancing themselves from the NHS.