NB: all names and contact details have been redacted and replaced with “[name of organisation] OFFICIAL” because these details are incidental to the Freedom of Information request made.

department for children, schools and families

Every Child Matters:Change for Children

IISaM Programme

ContactPoint Project

NRUC data sourcing: release of funds from the ContactPoint budget

I. Document History

II. References

III. Document Reviewers

IV. Document Approvals

Contents

To release ContactPoint budget to enable the supply of data from the National Register of Unaccompanied asylum seeking Children (NRUC).

Provision has been made for NRUC since late 2005 in the ContactPoint financial plan with a budgetary estimate to be a national data source (NDS).

1. SMT is asked to approve the allocation of £173k of the £250k that has been reserved for NRUC.

2. SMT is asked to approve the allocation be managed under the funding and governance arrangements that have already been established for approved CMS Submissions. For NRUC the Lead organisation is Westminster City Council, which provides the processes and infrastructure required for London Councils to operate NRUC on behalf of all Local Authorities in England, Scotland and Wales.

Westminster CC will receive a letter confirming the full indicative amount of funding for the NRUC enablement project during January 2008.

Note that this is important so that the NRUC activities can be planned alongside the other approved CMS enablement projects. This is particularly poignant for NRUC as they plan to operate in association with the LB Havering, which has already been fully funded to ContactPoint enable its CMS. These organisations are customers of the same supplier (Esprit) and have identified significant cost savings from undertaking the two enablement projects as a single combined project. If we delay a stand alone enablement of NRUC until some future date it would cost £408,000. Whereas, by undertaking a combined project enables reduced effort and management efficiencies at a cost of £173,000 that nets ContactPoint a saving for the NRUC data supply of £235,000 (inc VAT).

Grant letters are currently planned to be issued to all lead organisations in January 2008 so that CMS enablement projects can commence.

NRUC submitted a funding proposal for the modification of its Case Management System for integration with ContactPoint on 24 September 2007. The level of funding requested in the submission was £173,000.

The National Register for Unaccompanied asylum seeking Children (NRUC) has been a candidate ContactPoint data source from the early days of the project due to the vulnerability of the children involved.

NRUC is operated by London Councils using the organisational and business process infrastructure of Westminster City Council. NRUC is a national (England, Scotland and Wales) register that is available to all LAs to monitor involvements and child movements across LA boundaries; and through which LAs may make claims for the related costs that are settled by the Home Office.

The NRUC website explains the purposes and benefits of NRUC stating that

since the year 2000 over 15,000 unaccompanied children have entered the UK seeking asylum. On arrival these children have no identification, information, documentation or guardians. NRUC has established and maintained a comprehensive database of information from the Borders & Immigration Agency (BIA) and local government Social Services Departments on Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC).

In October 2005 the case for taking data from NRUC was stated in a draft Data Supply Specification as follows:

Arrangements with OGD national data sources (NDS) have been agreed using a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) supported by a Data Supply Specification, which includes details of the operational arrangements. It was along this path that discussions had been initiated with NRUC.

Arrangements with Local Authorities (LA) are being effected with Grant Letters resulting from a funding application and evaluation process, whereby ContactPoint enablement of a case management system (CMS) for data feed and user query may be funded in whole or in part through the LA acting as the lead organisation (LO) in association with its CMS supplier (unless an in house system).

As NRUC is administered by a local authority it is proposed that the CMS enablement governance and funding processes be applied to NRUC for convenience and consistency within the sector.

Accordingly, the NRUC proposal has been evaluated using the evaluation criteria that were applied to the CMS Submissions. Overall, the LB Havering and Westminster submissions are both of good quality (in comparison against others) and using the CMS evaluation criteria.

Agreement is sought to commit £173,000 of the £250,000 provisioned in the ContactPoint budget head “(National) Data suppliers' System Modifications”.

DCSF OFFICIAL, DCSF OFFICIAL, DCSF OFFICIAL and DCSF OFFICIAL support this recommendation.

Westminster CC would proceed with ContactPoint enablement of the NRUC if they receive confirmation of this funding level. The combined LB Havering & Westminster CC plan targets their systems to be available for accreditation in September and October 2008 respectively, or as otherwise agreed in finalising their Grant Letters, in the early period of the revised ContactPoint launch timetable from Sep/Oct 2008.