Voluntary Sector Funding

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords, this is a very vital topic. I echo a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said and offer the Minister a perspective from the grass roots. I have been talking to colleagues I work with in deprived areas in Derbyshire and, especially, in the city of Derby. We all recognise and accept the need for what we call cuts—a reduction in expenditure—but the plight of voluntary groups funded by local authorities is a very powerful litmus test of how these cuts might be made and what the priority should be around public funding of social welfare.

The Government have called us to have this vision of the big society, in which we all co-operate, so that the capacity that we lose through the cuts can be compensated for by an increase in voluntary endeavour and activity. That is a very great challenge, especially to those in churches and the voluntary sectors. But let me offer some perspectives from those trying to rise to that challenge.

First, many of my colleagues say that the voluntary sector is taking a disproportionate cut of the reductions in expenditure that local authorities are making. In Derby this year, community grants by the local authority are to be reduced by one-third, which is a massive cut in the voluntary sector investment. The voluntary sector generates enormous resources. I saw a statistic the other day that the Church of England contributes something like 23 million hours of voluntary work a month to the working of our society.

However, the reality is that, beneath that, much voluntary endeavour is small-scale, fragile and vulnerable. It therefore needs to have a bigger frame and a set of priorities to help the volunteers and those offering the funding make the right decisions, because my colleagues tell me that at the moment energy is going into survival rather than serving the people who the organisation was set up to serve. They say that we are having cuts in public sector spending and in the voluntary sector but that there is almost no evidence of private investment. The result is what one of them calls a feeding frenzy for funds. The experience is that the lottery is becoming the arbiter of social welfare and making big decisions about that. I do not think that it was set up for that. Who should be making decisions about priorities in social welfare?

I welcome, as do my colleagues, the response of the Government in a lot of commendable initiatives on red tape, a national citizen service, community organisers, best value for local authorities and the notion of the compact but, on the ground, it feels as if all those things are calling energies into process and inward-looking negotiation. They are taking energy away from engaging with the need of people on the street, just at the time when the capacity of the voluntary sector needs to increase.

This is having two results. First, people are becoming frustrated. This week in Derby, Action for Blind People demonstrated in the streets and collected petition signatures against the cut in its local authority funding. These were not disaffected youths in Leeds on a Saturday night in the summer. It was Action for Blind People—a main-line charitable enterprise, using local authority funding, whose people are frustrated and angry at the dilemma they are suddenly thrown into, when all their good work looks like receding because of the way that the cuts are being managed. They are saying that volunteers are not being encouraged but being alienated. That is the message which I pick up from people working in deprived areas. The volunteers who we want to encourage to populate the big society are, at the moment, not being encouraged but being alienated—not just by the size of the cuts but by the higgledy-piggledyness of it, really.

The other factor is, of course, that need is increasing rapidly. Some of your Lordships will have seen in the Times this week some articles about human trafficking. Our church is involved with a project called Restore in inner-city Derby, which works with prostitutes. In recent months, besides working with girls who are on the streets, there is an increasing challenge to work with the issue of trafficking, which is coming into our city in a very disturbing way. This requires greater resource and greater engagement—and the kind of policy view, as the Times draws our attention to, which we must look to Government and local government to have. We cannot just leave volunteers to increase their capacity against these odds.

What can we do? There is a primary responsibility on those of us in the voluntary sector to step up and make our contribution, as my right reverend friend the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds said. In our own diocese in Derby, we are sponsoring a movement called “growing community” in the city of Derby. We have taken an initiative to bring together faith communities, voluntary groups and the local authority to see how we can create a new kind of infrastructure to care for people in need in our cities, given the new circumstances. We are looking for a partnership and giving priority to jobs, micro-industries, self-support schemes, food banks, the homeless and the poorly housed. My point, when I ask what the Government can do if we are trying to get organised like that, is to strengthen our arm on priorities.

The Government say that they have a commitment, which I commend, to a fair and equal society. The question is: what does fair and equal mean? Does it mean more than our great concern today with human rights? I suggest, and I ask the Minister to comment on this, that it also means a concern, especially for people in deprived areas, with what we might call “social rights”—rights to access to jobs, housing and an environment that is secure and not threatening.

In the big picture, when we use the word “government”, both nationally and locally, we have to do some hard thinking about priorities and the rights that we desire people to have to flourish in their human lives. That would provide a framework of context within which the groups could make a contribution and get organised. Small and vulnerable though we are, if there were a framework to direct our energies and priorities and to encourage local authorities to have public strategies for social welfare, then we would know what we were trying to achieve and how we could all work together.

Best value, which is important and which the Government rightly invite us to inhabit, is not simply an audit of processes and their effectiveness; it is about the markers of making a difference in the lives of people in our most deprived communities. Surely the markers should not just be decided by agencies like the lottery—there ought to be a richer and more thought-out framework and sense of priorities and values that the Government encourage, and that local authorities negotiate with partners both voluntary and private in their areas. If there were clearer priorities and a sense of direction, we might get more private investment and local authorities might be able to be shown to be more accountable for what they were doing, rather than getting criticism for making cuts but not being seen to offer many positive alternatives.