Only a charity would ask its chief executive to sleep out on the streets for a night, in his first week on the job. But Sir Tony Hawkhead professed to be “more excited than when I started” when he spoke to Kirsty Weakley at the end of his first week at Action for Children.

After leading Groundwork for 17 years, Sir Tony says: “I felt Groundwork was at a point where I could safely walk on and it would work very well. It had a very clear plan for its future and I also felt that it’s time for me to do something different, which would stimulate me and be a new challenge.”

He adds: “I wanted to come to somewhere where there was great quality but where some of the lessons I had learned in other places could be used to take a great organisation even further.”

On the face of it, going from an environmental organisation to a children’s one is a big move. He tells civilsociety.co.uk that he’s always had a keen interest in young people and at Groundwork he was involved in developing schemes to get young people into work and training.

Action for Children is currently looking at how it can better help the young people it supports into work, which he says is “right in the path of my background, so I’m hoping to bring some of the experience”.

Coping with government spending cuts

Like Groundwork, most of Action for Children’s income comes from contracts with local authorities, which have seen their funding slashed in recent years, with more cuts to come. But for Hawkhead: “The issue isn’t around public expenditure reduction per se; the issue is about the way that decisions are made about those cuts and the way in which commissioning has changed.

“I believe that children should be protected at all costs from the worst impact of spending cuts and I’m not sure that is the case at the moment.”

The big problem is short-term contracts he says. “If a charity is forced into taking on a contract that lasts one or two years the bottom line is that it’s not going to be good value for money for anybody, because you have heavy investment costs up-front and you hardly have any time to develop the service.”

He recommends a minimum contract term of five years, arguing: “Why should a road repair company get a ten-year contract to repair roads in a borough and yet a charity gets two years to do work with children who are the people we should most protect from spending cuts?”

Stressing that there are some good examples of local authorities commissioning in smart ways he says: “One of the things that I really want to do is see how we can work with local authorities better to come up with a model that works for them and for the children we support – and I believe we can do that.”