Dear

The decade is already underway, and the Compact Voice office is buzzing with anticipation. We have the imminent Annual Compact Meeting to kick-start the next Compact decade, and we're upping our support for the swelling ranks of Compact champions, including the first national conference in April.

The Compact Advocacy Programme is also celebrating the resolution of a long-standing case to the benefit of all involved, while print copies of the refreshed Compact are starting to make their way out to partners across the country. With all this momentum, we hope you too are ready to take the Compact forward in your organisation this year!

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Dugald McNaughtan
Compact Voice

Compact Advocacy Programme: long-running case resolved
One of the Compact Advocacy Programme's longest running cases has been successfully resolved in early 2010. Read more.

Compact Champions conference
We're excited to announce that the first ever annual Champions Conference will be held in Manchester on Thursday 22 April at the Lowry Hotel. We are currently finalising the programme for this event; to be one of the first to book please register as a Champion and we'll keep you in the loop.

Events roundup

• The early conference season continues with the NCVO Annual conference, being held in London on Tuesday 23 February,
• Also in London, on 11 March, the Public Services 2010: Equipped for Change event looks at how public and voluntary sector partnerships can deliver public services
• Whose Voice Is It Anyway?, a day-long event for local groups, is being held by NAVCA in Birmingham on Thursday 11 March
• Future Communities, Future Engagement is a free, national conference from the IdEA, which will feature workshops and speakers on mainstreaming community empowerment and the role of elected members. Book now online.

Seb Elsworth is Director of Strategy at ACEVO (www.acevo.org.uk), the professional body for Sector leaders, and he leads its work on the Sector’s relationship with government.

Q. What do you think is the Compact’s most important achievement so far?
The most significant achievement is having created a common agenda for discussions between the Sector and government agencies. The fact that issues like full cost recovery, longer term contracts and the need for consultation are all understood by statutory bodies is a real step forward. They can’t be ignored any more. That puts us in a much stronger position than the Sector in many other countries.

Q. Do you think there’s more need for a Compact in its second decade than in its first?
The Compact remains a really important agreement but it must continue to evolve to be relevant to the changing relationship between government and the Sector. The refresh is a great example of that. As markets evolve and new social problems need to be tackled our terms of engagement must change too.

Q. How well do you think Compact is representing the Sector as a whole?
It is hard for any one short concise document to represent the sector as a whole. I know that several groups were disappointed by the refresh process. However I believe that the Compact principles are pretty much universal – they need to be accompanied by guidance and support which make them relevant to all the different sub-sectors who need to be able to use them.

Q. Can you give us the best example of Compact usage in your own organisation?
We won a commendation in the 2006 Compact Awards for our work on the full cost recovery campaign. This campaign is still going strong, http://www.fullcostrecovery.org.uk/main/.

Q. What is the one key point you’ve made about the Compact recently, for example at a national address?
I made a speech a few months ago about Local Compacts and the need to ensure that they are properly resourced. They mustn’t just be a tick-box exercise on the part of the local authority, but a strategic framework for their engagement with their local sector.