Social Policy

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

To call attention to the role of partnerships between government and civil society in shaping social policy; and to move for papers.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, it is our custom at the beginning of every sitting of this House to pray for the,

“peace and tranquillity of the Realm, and the uniting and knitting together of the hearts of all persons and estates within the same”.

That is a prayer for a strong partnership between government and civil society, an idea whose time has come as we seek to respond to the threefold crises of our day—the financial crisis and its economic effects, which have sharply reduced the status and confidence of market liberalism; the ecological crisis, of which the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico is but a symptom; and the crisis of political confidence in this country, focusing particularly on the expenses scandal. Taken together, these give us a remarkable moment of opportunity: to set our sights high and ask ourselves how civil society can shape our world and how, in the words of the Carnegie commission’s report, we can make a,

“transition from an age of ‘me’ to an age of ‘we’”,

and realise,

“the idea that we do best when we work with others, and when we understand our interests as shared with others”.

I look forward enormously to the rich variety of experience and understanding which I know this House will bring to this debate and especially to the maiden speech by noble Lord, Lord Wei, with his rich experience at Teach First and the Shaftesbury Partnership, which gives him a key role in this House and in this Government as an adviser on this very subject. This kind of exploration is exactly right for us, because if these are indeed early days for “new politics”, we need every opportunity we can muster to think together what this new politics is about.

When the Prime Minister spoke recently about,

“Galvanising, catalysing, prompting, encouraging … for community engagement and social renewal”,

he prompted us to ask: what kind of Government and what kind of political culture best serves that renewal? What kind of responsibilities can properly be transferred to active citizens? What kind of capacity building does such transfer require? What are the characteristics of an engaged society? How much trust and readiness to divest itself of central control does that require of a new coalition beginning to acquire familiarity with the levers of power? In short, what does the shorthand of the “Big Society” really mean for us? Are those who suspect this agenda of being little more than a veil to cover the rapid reduction of the state’s responsibilities right to be concerned, or is there a new rich model of society waiting to be discovered from which many may benefit?

It is upon these questions among others that I hope and expect our debate to touch. The Carnegie commission makes the telling point that:

“Liberal democracy is a three-legged stool—though, at present, it’s a pretty wobbly stool. One leg is government, providing public capital. Another the market, providing market capital. And the third, civil society, providing social capital. To get things back in balance, the third leg needs strengthening”.

By “civil society” I refer to what we might call associational life, where people come together voluntarily for actions that lie beyond government or for-private-profit business, including voluntary and community associations, trade unions, faith-based organisations and co-operatives. Civil society is grounded in values such as social justice, solidarity, mutuality and sustainability. It operates in the public sphere in which people and organisations discuss the nature of their cities, their neighbourhoods and their communities and find ways of reconciling differences.

I am proud that we find such a rich kaleidoscope of these values and associations in my own city of Leicester. Nearly 500 faith-based voluntary organisations represent the hugely diverse religious traditions of that city. Their work is often among the most hard-to-reach groups: the elderly and isolated Afro-Caribbean or south Asian communities, the young, single parents, victims of violence, discharged prisoners, substance abusers, the homeless, asylum seekers and others. The list is remarkable for its range but also for the fact that, in this humanitarian work, our values coalesce more often than not. This work stands as a witness to the fact that our faith communities are not to be regarded as awkward, angular, divergent and prone to conflict but rather the reverse: as vital to social cohesion and the building of strong communities.

That is why the Faith Leaders Forum in Leicester finds common cause repeatedly and why we have been so pleased to have established the St Philip’s Centre in our city, of which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom I am so pleased to see in his place today, is the patron. This is one of two national centres for training those who work in multi-faith areas and for preparing secular agencies, especially the police, teachers and health professionals, for work in such areas.

This work illuminates some fundamental principles of civil society—that capacity-building is a two-way street, that the public sector needs this voluntary sector expertise for its own effectiveness and that this is true for all the socially and religiously diverse populations of our largest cities. Further, this work does not come on the cheap. As the state contracts, civil society will not automatically expand to take up the slack. It will require the most careful research and sensitive investment from government as the grant crunch follows the credit crunch and vital components of the big society begin to shrink, just when they are more needed than ever.

You would expect those on these Benches to argue for stronger communities and stronger intermediate institutions, since for too many decades the institutions that have stood between the individual and the state have tended to be eroded or neglected. But this is how the Church has always understood itself—as a community bound together by a shared story and expressed most clearly in localities: urban, rural and suburban. That is why Members on this Bench are to be found engaged with local strategic partnerships, community foundations, police authorities, school and university governing bodies, the new deal for communities—the list is almost endless. That is why we believe that, despite an increasingly individualistic culture and the many ways in which our lives are characterised by flux more than permanency, people still find their identity to a large extent in communities, whether brought together by beliefs or location or their shared understanding of what makes for a good life. These communities need the scope to develop ways of life that are consistent with their values. Here is the rub; promoting a community of communities means encouraging the flourishing of communities with which I may disagree or even those that I may not be able to understand. It means granting a degree of autonomy to those with whom we have active differences. That has presented real challenges to contemporary Governments. The point is that the big society stands as a challenge to the centripetal tendencies to which all Governments can fall prey.

Let me be more specific. For example, the voluntary sector has played a crucial role in facilitating adoptions. However, as the Catholic Church has recently discovered, a culture of individual choice has skewed the adoption process towards the rights of the prospective parents in a way that precludes the Catholic Church from running its agencies in a manner that is congruent with its beliefs about the best interests of children. Does a big society have room to accommodate that sort of distinctiveness? I use that example not necessarily to endorse the Catholic position but to point to what is in jeopardy if the ethical motivations of our neighbours are defined too tightly by government that seeks to colonise the public square.

A further example might be the citizen-organising movement, of which London Citizens is the best known example. Much of the rhetoric of the big society refers to the need to train thousands more community organisers: as the Prime Minister put it recently:

“To teach potential community organisers how to identify the doers and the go-getters in each neighbourhood and recruit them to their cause”.

We shall see how that works out. I speak as a trustee of the Citizen Organising Foundation. The fact is that active citizens, the doers and go-getters, are people with strong convictions, beliefs and principles that cannot and will not be recruited to government priorities and programmes. Indeed, the United States’ experience would suggest that they will often empower communities to become truculent and unbiddable.

We begin to see the range of questions that we hope the Minister will have some opportunity to address in responding to this debate. In a brief introduction I cannot hope to produce an exhaustive list of issues for us, but I shall mention the questions of most concern. First, how will this Government handle the hitherto inflexible adherence to the need for solid, quantifiable evidence in evaluating policy and practice in the voluntary sector? Needless to say, some have been cynical about the previous Government’s actual adherence to this, some calling it policy that had evidence sprayed on to it or cherrypicking the evidence to suit their political priorities. This is a crucial point if the proposal is to devolve service delivery to the local level.

Secondly, in an area of central concern to the Church of England, how are we to understand the effects of new government education policies on our understanding of civil society? The Church’s engagement with formal education has its roots in a passionate concern for the poor and derives from a vision of the kingdom in which all may flourish. The test for all education policies is therefore surely whether they encourage partnerships throughout the system in classrooms, between schools and across sectors.

Thirdly, in local government, how far is the coalition prepared to go in reducing the extent to which local politics has become an arm of national policy? We have all seen the consequences in public disengagement from local democracy, low turnouts and cynicism. Can the new politics extend to relaxing this stranglehold, even when the result may be that some authorities neglect the sacred national targets imposed from Westminster? These are areas where political courage and vision will be needed if the partnership between government and civil society is to prosper.

A new kind of partnership is possible, and indeed crucial: one that is not based on an abdication of the state’s responsibilities but accompanied by an understanding that a real, not cosmetic, devolution of power will be required, together with an end to the kind of control that reduces volunteers to the status of unpaid servants of a centralised state. The qualities of altruism and selflessness upon which local action depends are forged not by the state but by the numerous communities and networks in which people discover who they are through common bonds with others. They need room to breathe.

We may in the past have allowed our politics to slip from the laudable aim of ensuring that no one is excluded from participating in wider society into an assumption that this entails uniformity. A community of diverse communities, such as my own diocese, will never meet imposed criteria of managerial neatness but will better reflect the way that people actually live. If we are to move away from the emphasis on managerialism, there may now be an opening for a new and vibrant politics in which policies are framed with a better grasp of the hopes, fears, values and concerns with which people really live.

In essence, the big society is surely an intangible network of trust and reciprocity, without which even the most rudimentary interactions cannot occur. Society is organic, not official. It cannot be established by law or fiat. It is delicate and needs an uninvasive, uncontrolling state that values, understands and strengthens the voluntary bonds between people. My hope is that this debate in your Lordships’ House will strengthen the understanding of those bonds and their place in the new politics of our day.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, we have had a remarkable, rich and lively debate and I will not detain your Lordships more than a few moments at this point. I am sure we would all agree that this has been as distinguished, creative and well-informed as we could have wished. We are all very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wei, for his remarkable maiden speech and the Minister for a full and clear response. I thank everyone who has taken part.

A number of significant themes have emerged. We will not rehearse them all now, but at the heart of them has been a clear and ringing reminder of the great strength of civil society in this country. It reminds us of something right at the heart of our national character—the extraordinary people giving extraordinarily of their time, energy and vision for the sake of others.

We have also been given some significant warnings in this debate. The ones that occur to me are these. We have been warned about too narrow a focus on economic growth rather than the quality of relationships. We have been warned about too much attention to proceduralism. We have been reminded of the real cost of volunteering and the need for the conditions of its flourishing, as based fundamentally on the building up of trust. We have been reminded of the profound need for creating the right conditions for a flourishing volunteer society, and the warning not to let this debate become a proxy for another debate about the need or otherwise for cuts.

Above all, we have been helpfully reminded of the capacity of this House to address with distinction some of the most significant issues of our day. My sense is that we have begun to set a direction for the new Government and I look forward with others to seeing how that direction is travelled in the months ahead. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion withdrawn.