Charitable Sector

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 5th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, it is an enormous privilege for me to be able to speak here today and to make my maiden speech in this debate. This House has many Members who have a remarkable history of contributing to the voluntary and community sector. I therefore intervene with some trepidation. The generosity of spirit that exists in this House means that new Members have been received with warmth. Every effort has been made by staff and Members alike to ease our entry. I want to say thank you for that.

I must confess, however, to being bemused by some of the rhetoric around the big society, because the ideas behind it are those with which I have worked throughout my life. I was born into a family which was steeped in the Methodist Church and in the Labour Party. My sponsors, my noble friends Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, who is here today, and Lady Morgan of Huyton, represent both those strands of my life that come together so strongly.

In our household, public service was simply a part of how we lived our daily life. Several people here knew my father, who was a local councillor, a head teacher and then my predecessor as Member of Parliament for North West Durham between 1964 and 1987. In Durham, he was probably as well known for his lay preaching and his support for non-league football as for his politics. He and my mother simply lived their lives in the belief that, in our society, we had responsibilities one to another. Their children were just expected to get involved and we did.

I was lucky enough to be one of the early recruits of the Voluntary Service Overseas. I spent two years between my degree course and my postgraduate year working in Kenya as a schoolteacher. I now have the enormous privilege of being a trustee on the international board of VSO. I have been delighted at the number of Members of this House and of the other place who have done short placements with VSO in countries where they could be useful. I offer that opportunity to anyone else who is interested.

As previous speakers have said, voluntary and community organisations are a very important part of how civil society works. For centuries, they were the main means by which education and healthcare were offered to many people in this country. It is only since the Second World War that a welfare state has been established to offer universal services as a right and not simply as a matter of charity. But this did not sound the death knell of the voluntary sector. The challenge for both the state and the voluntary and community sector is to understand the changes that are taking place in our very complex world and in people’s lives, and to respond appropriately. Recent research shows that, contrary to what many think, an active state provides a framework within which citizens feel free to engage and charities are able to take risks and to innovate. My experience in charities that work almost exclusively with the most excluded—those whom someone described to me last week as the people whom nobody else likes—has shown me the importance of engaging those people in voluntary activity and work, and training them in the skills necessary to raise their self-esteem and enable them fully to participate.

As part of the change that has taken place particularly since the introduction of the welfare state, charities—even those that are contracted to deliver public services—have taken up advocacy and campaigning. This is very important. A commission looking at law and practice relating to charitable trusts in 1952—it was chaired by a former Member of this House, Lord Nathan—reported that an active, questioning charity sector is one of the guarantees of democracy. That is very true. I see the partnership between the state and the charitable sector as one that has edge, that has challenge, and I want that to continue.

Today, there are more civil society organisations than at any time in our nation's history. Likewise, volunteering and membership of charitable causes are at historic levels. The independent, campaigning role of civil society has had a profound effect on government policy—it certainly did in my time. I think of Make Poverty History, the anti-smoking campaigners in public health and of gay rights campaigners. All of those enabled legislators to keep pushing social policy forward, and they are all indicators of a healthy, vibrant, independent and assertive civil society. I now have the privilege of being involved as a trustee with a whole range of voluntary organisations and social enterprises—I have registered them all, I hope—mainly in the area of the homeless and socially excluded, but also with international development organisations and children's organisations. I find it incredibly exciting and challenging, day by day, to work with such a range of people who have so much to give and to offer to our society.

There can be a temptation for some people who promote the big society to pretend that nothing good or worthwhile happened during the past 13 years. I urge them to resist the temptation to overpoliticise this area. The charitable sector doubled in size during the period of the previous Government, but I know that there are ideologues on the right who argue for a dismantling of state action in welfare provision and a return to voluntary and charity activity instead, and there are those on the left who think that the state should do everything. They are both wrong.

I am much more with Beveridge, who wrote:

“Co-operation between public and voluntary agencies is one of the special features of British public life”.

That means on both sides: politicians have to work effectively to encourage and develop that partnership. There is increasing anxiety in the sector. Many are already dealing with severe cuts, and that affects the service that they are able to provide to the most vulnerable. The spending review will be very important, and the messages given very important. If the big society is seen primarily as a means of cutting support to the most vulnerable, much that is good in our society will be tarnished. Not only will the lives and opportunities of our most vulnerable be diminished, the work of those who give their commitment and skills to work with the most vulnerable will also be devalued. I do not believe that any of us want that.

I look forward to holding the Government to account and to being part of that challenge and that active society which makes sure that we value the contribution of charities and the voluntary and community sector in our society.