Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, on what we are discussing today there is a lot of common ground across the Chamber and across all parties. I do not intend to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in her slightly partisan wind-up because there is a great deal of common ground.
We are all volunteers. Volunteering, after all, has a long tradition in Britain. Long before the welfare state grew up there were churches and chapels; philanthropy and charitable activities by the well-off; friendly societies; co-operatives among the working classes; trade unions, of course; and, above all, women. My mother retired from her last voluntary post when she was older than a considerable number of the women in the old people’s home of which she was chair. She was one of that generation who would have had a career had she not married. As we know, one of the problems that we are facing in the voluntary sector is that there is no longer that great pool of capable women who are not able to work because they are married. We therefore have to rely on the fit retired much more than we did.
I suppose that in some ways I am one of the fit retired who is a volunteer, as are half the government Front Bench. I work but I am not paid, although that is partly because I have quite a generous academic pension—not, of course, half as generous as doctors’ pensions—which enables me to provide my contribution. Most of us in this House are actively engaged in one way or another in the third sector. Indeed, I remember some months ago the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and myself being taken by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, to the Bromley by Bow Centre, a remarkable generation of investment, started on the basis of a rather dilapidated congregational church and now involved in the regeneration of a large area in east London. So I welcome the focus on volunteers and recognise, as do the Government, that support for volunteers is very much part of what has to happen in this sector; you often need paid staff to train and support volunteers. At a reception for small charities the other evening, I met the leaders of a small charity in north Yorkshire which has two part-time paid staff who, in turn, support several hundred women in visiting elderly people living on their own in homes. That is a good example of the sort of thing that all of us wish to support and encourage, but which the state does not easily provide.
Several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, have talked about the proper balance between state, society and market. That is what we are all really concerned about here. We need to make sure that, in that balance, there is a strong civil society as part of the mix, both in relationship to the market and in relationship to the state. The Prime Minister has labelled this “the big society”. I, as a Liberal Democrat, would prefer to call it “the responsible society”, or even “the liberal society”: empowered individuals working within strong communities, working with a decentralised state. I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that Ed Miliband said in a speech last year:
“I have been clear that we should recognise the shortcomings of the centralised state”.
Indeed, we need to go back, as far as is possible, to much more local engagement and local accountability. Of course, this is a process. Change takes time. The Localism Act 2011 is another part of this, and so is the provision of diverse funding streams—Big Society Capital—now getting under way and, as the noble Baroness rightly says, building on work of the previous Government with other support schemes providing matching funds—for instance, Community First, the Community Endowment Fund, community foundations and private bodies. They are all very valuable, giving grants to social enterprises when they are set up. I was very happy to visit the Community Foundation for Calderdale, which my noble friend Lord Shutt had a great deal to do with starting. Now there is also the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012.
Then there is the whole question of government contracting, on which we have had a number of contributions and, rightly, some criticisms. The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, raised the particular question of Close Protection UK. I understand that Close Protection UK has taken full responsibility for the very poor treatment that its staff suffered, and has offered an apology to all concerned. The Security Industry Authority has written to CPUK asking for further information to ensure that it is in compliance with the relevant legislation. We in no way wish to see volunteering as a mandatory requirement for individuals to claim benefits, but volunteering is part of the way in which you get people back into the idea of work, and should therefore be offered, as far as is possible, to people as they begin to get out of long-term unemployment and back on to the job market.
There is a changing culture in government contracting, and that also takes time to change. We have a new Crown representative for the civil society sector, who took up post on 18 June, so this is very much a new initiative. He will work closely with the Crown representative for mutuals and the Crown representative for small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve changes in how the Government do their business, and to ensure as far as possible that we catch the small social enterprises and local companies, which we all wish to do. Social impact bonds are another way of trying to help social enterprises cope with payment by results. A number of experiments are under way in that area.
On funding, all businesses, including mutuals and social enterprises, must consider the VAT question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, as part of their business planning. Our evidence from mutuals has not suggested that VAT is a major barrier to mutualisation, but I will be very happy to talk to the noble Lord further about some of the issues he raised.
The financing of social enterprises was raised by a number of people. We are concerned to encourage charitable donations, giving as much as we can. We recognise that the welfare state cannot meet all the demands that will be placed on society over the next 20 or 30 years, particularly in adult social care. As the noble Baroness will recall, the consultation on the Budget proposals on high taxpayers was intended to raise the issue for implementation in the 2012 Budget. Some extremely vigorous consultation has been under way, as we will all have noticed, and we have taken it into account.
The world of for-profit companies has been raised by a number of people, the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, and my noble friend Lord Phillips in particular. This raises wider issues about the future of company law and what companies’ formal obligations are, which are rather beyond the limits of this debate. Corporate social responsibility does not save you from takeover when it comes. I lives in what was a company village, built by Salts of Saltaire with its very strong sense of local social responsibility, not far from where Rowntree’s did the same in York and left substantial endowments for regional social benefit. I am aware of Cadbury’s and others in that wonderful Quaker tradition. As such, I am conscious that we have gone a long way back in our corporate sector. That includes the Quaker bank, which educated me and of which I remain rather ambivalently a customer, which has lost a lot of its corporate sense of social responsibility. However, that is a wider question, which I encourage the noble Lord to put down for another debate.
We are learning and reviewing as we go. This summer, we will have a social economy review, which will look at how social enterprises operate. Also this summer, after five years of the Charities Act, there will be a Charities Act review, which my noble friend Lord Hodgson has well under way. I was very happy to be briefed extensively by him on the sheer complexity and diversity of the charity sector. I hope he will not mind my saying that I emerged from it confused at a far higher level than I was before.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, asked whether we were, none the less, cutting down on the public sector. The evidence that we have shows that we are moving towards mutuals where we can. We are also experimenting with mutuals and there will be a mutuals task force report this summer on the experiments in mutual pathfinders in public sector delivery. Some of the evidence that I have seen, which is still limited, suggests that improving job satisfaction and better workforce morale lead to both higher productivity and greater customer satisfaction, which supports experimenting further with the mutual model. That also raises the question of impact measurement, on which we are working in partnership with the voluntary sector. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, spoke about this, particularly the role of Triangle Consulting.
The government focus is on communities where social capital is low. This is very much part of the thrust. We will all have different labels for what the Prime Minister calls the big society. We have a vibrant civil society in many areas of Britain. Indeed, in my own village of Saltaire, we are almost embarrassed by the number of local bodies, such as the Saltaire Festival, the Saltaire Arts Trail, the Saltaire Village Society, the history society, the allotment society and so on. However, within five miles of Saltaire are large 1950s and 1960s estates, where social capital is very low. The Community Organisers scheme that the Government are running and the national citizen service are very much aimed at encouraging people who have lost the hope that they can control their own lives and manage their own communities to regain hope and faith in that.
Social enterprises play an important part in this because, as noble Lords have said, they employ people locally and reinvest locally. That is exactly what we need. Last year I was in a very large estate in Yorkshire—I had better not say which one—in which the largest single area of local economic activity appeared to be illegal cannabis growing in sub-tenancy council houses. I was going round with the local police support group. We need to get people back employed within their own communities as far as we can, with community associations and organisers and the encouragement of social enterprises, which feed into a revival of self-confidence and a strengthening of local community links.
I would call that building a liberal society. Conservatives would talk about strengthening the little platoons on which a strong society and state should rest. Labour would talk about local co-operation and self-government. I hope that we would all agree on the underlying objectives and admit that we had not got it right but have continued to work on getting it right—and also admit that there is a limit to what central government can do, because much of this has to come from the local level. We have learned that top-down government is not good for civil society. We have also learned that increasing government expenditure on welfare runs up against strong resistance to paying high levels of taxation. Let us hope that the enterprise on which we are embarked in rebuilding a very strong civil society based on voluntary contributions of all sorts in time, money and social enterprise helps to bridge the gap which we may otherwise face in providing support for a changing society, a much larger proportion of elderly people and all the other contributions that we need to make.