The Big Society

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I am pleased to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Wei, that I and many others on this side are passionate believers in civil society. Whatever the big society is, at the very least it must depend upon people giving voluntarily of their own time. We can agree on that much. I believe in civil society because I believe that the ties that bind our country and our people together are not in fact big threads woven by the state but are made up of lots of tiny, overlapping threads. Those are woven out of the individual encounters we have with people around us, especially people unlike us.

I spent a number of years in the voluntary sector, most recently running the British Refugee Council. When I arrived there, we had 400 paid staff but even more volunteers. Yet people do not volunteer by accident. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, pointed out so eloquently, the support required to get volunteers in more than pays itself back. I watched people arriving in this country who had been welcomed in, having been traumatised and in many cases tortured by their own states. They were moved almost to tears by the fact that individual British people would give of their time to come in to teach them English, to mentor them, to help them take up a career and to integrate. So moved were they that they would almost always go on to volunteer in turn, passing that down the generations. What we are doing there is not only reaching out to each other but creating and reinforcing a set of values which make our country what it is. We also create the next generation of volunteers.

I am delighted to hear that the Government want to invest in community organisers. Four thousand sounds a wonderfully impressive number. Yet what is the point in investing solely in new ones if we are, in practice, taking funding away from the hundreds of thousands of people out there who are involved in charities and who got there through the support of the Government? I am trying really hard not to make a cheap political point out of this but I have spoken to so many people in charities, as I know other noble Lords have, who are seeing the programmes that they have built up over years falling apart. It took so long to develop those volunteers and pull them together that it would take them years, if not generations, to rebuild them.

I urge the Minister to think carefully and to reassure people on all sides of this House, who I think share those worries in one way or another. How can we make sure that the values of the big society and of civil society are embraced not only by new people coming in? We should show how grateful we are, and how much we care and are thankful, to all those who have been doing this for generations.