Community and Voluntary Sector

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Porter. Noble Lords who, like me, have visited Fulwood, will appreciate that it is one of the best places in Britain to test new models of buses and possibly the worst place to sit your driving test, as you head up those hills out to the Peak District. I wish her all the best.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, for this very timely debate. Every new Government come into power and have a vision for the voluntary sector. It is good that we get to discuss it at this point. I am not sure what a covenant is, but I am going to make some suggestions about what I think it might be. As others have said, the voluntary sector is important. I declare my interests. I have always worked in the voluntary sector. I have a consultancy, which works primarily with charities. I am on the board of GiveOut, a charity developing philanthropy to support LGBT human rights around the world.

If you want to know about the importance of the voluntary sector—my noble friend Lord Fowler is here; I will call him my noble friend on this occasion—look at the progress made over the last 40 years on HIV. None of that would have happened at the pace that it did without the ability of innovative voluntary organisations to bring together scientists, Governments, health and everybody else, with intensity and purpose. When Governments get that the voluntary sector has a powerful presence and part to play in convening different sectors, things begin to happen at pace.

I hope that a covenant means that the Government are going to properly treat charities as professionals. I hope for one thing they dismiss the suggestions in the last few days that the NI increase should not apply to charities. We are professional bodies; we employ professional people. Yes, we do a lot as well and have a very different role and approach to what we do, but we are at heart professional. That is why government—local government as well—needs to start treating us as professional bodies which add value to what they do. I hope that we will stop treating charities as organisations that subsidise public services but instead as ones that bring value to them. I would like to ask the Minister whether the procurement regulations will be reviewed, and if we will go back to looking at the social value Act, which I think is a key point about how we treat charities properly.

One of the big announcements in the Budget yesterday was £22.6 billion for the NHS. As a user of NHS services, along with everybody else, I have come to wonder whether we have a National Health Service. I really do wonder whether it delivers care pathways, as it often says it does. I suspect quite often it does not; I think it delivers episodes of care, not many of which are joined up to form a pathway. It is often informed voluntary organisations, such as the one chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, which does the work of developing care pathways. Will the Government be bold—they are not, at the moment, appearing to be a very bold Government, but they should be—in making a large part of that £22 billion conditional upon proper involvement of the voluntary sector? They should make sure that some of that £22 billion goes to the voluntary sector, that day in and day out covers many of the deficiencies of a malfunctioning service.

I have a great deal of sympathy for chief executives of local authorities, whose budgets are disappearing. As part of what they have to do, they focus on the statutory responsibilities and are often forced to cut the voluntary sector. I would like the Minister to say whether the Government will be looking at the way local authorities in jeopardy and the voluntary organisations within them can be maintained and helped to endure. They are very much needed in those situations.

Now, people have heard me speak about this subject before, so it will come as no surprise that I want to return to one of my particular hobby-horses—the fact that the majority of central government funding for youth services goes to the National Citizen Service. The National Citizen Service is a good organisation and does good things, but it was set up under the previous Government with an enormous amount of political cover and investment. It was given a royal charter body status, which it did not deserve and does not need. I think it is now time that the National Citizen Service should be reviewed, and there should be a comparative review of what it does alongside other youth services, to see whether or not—and I make no prediction about the outcome—it deserves to continue to have that favoured status. As we all know, around the country, youth services have been badly hit.

I want to follow up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about the development of the social enterprise sector. It is a long-running and very technical issue—charity “anoraks”, put them on now: this is your moment. Enabling individuals who do not mind investing in the social capital of their area to do so by liberalising the rules on social investment bonds is something various Governments have looked at and run away from. Now is the time, under a covenant, if you like, to look again at that issue.

In recent years the Charity Commission has done a very good job of digitising and improving its information systems, but like the EHRC, it has been very politicised under the last Government and has strayed—admittedly not as far as the EHRC—from its purpose. It is time to depoliticise the commission and get it back to doing its job, which is the impartial regulation of charities. There is enough to be doing on the technical regulation of charities and social enterprise without becoming another warrior in the fake world of woke wars.

This covenant could be a good thing if, in particular, it got an agreement from government to work with the sector on costing models for prevention. We know that in pretty well every government department—Home Office, Justice, Environment—the imprint of the voluntary sector does save money. Prevention saves money, but we have never been able, nationally or locally, to come up with a costing model that enables an authority, particularly one with statutory responsibilities to deliver services, to defend the funding of something preventive at the expense of something immediate and urgent. If the Government assembled a task force to do that—it could include all sorts of economists and so on—that would be a very important service.

One group that should be involved, although we have not spoken a lot about it, is the big tech companies. I am old enough to remember when there were towns that were company towns, where everybody worked for a particular company. The people who owned those companies had a strong sense of social responsibility to the places where they were based. Not Google, not Microsoft—I look at the towns up north, which I know very well, and such companies contribute nothing. They might come along and find the brightest and best in schools and take them out to work for them, but they do not contribute at all. They have got away with so much. A bold Government would challenge them, first, on the paucity of what they call their charitable donations, and most of all on what they take from communities and fail to return.

I thank noble Lords for this debate. I hope the Minister is going to go back to her department with some specific arguments for being bold and making an actual difference to the voluntary sector.