Boko Haram

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my briefing is that Boko Haram is much more a Nigerian phenomenon than a global one such as ISIL. There are some links but that is what I understand. I also stress that the origins of Boko Haram go far back beyond President Goodluck Jonathan’s Government. It dates from the noughties, so to speak. Things have been getting worse recently but it is rooted in a range of underdevelopment problems in north-eastern Nigeria, such as overpopulation and government neglect.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, will the Minister join me in expressing his appreciation of those moderate Muslims who have spoken out in this country against Boko Haram and in emphasising the continuing need to be proactive in drawing together those communities that would easily find themselves pitched against each other in our towns and cities?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I will happily join in that. Boko Haram has almost certainly killed more Muslims than it has Christians. It is very much a radical Muslim movement, which is as opposed to the Sultanate of Sokoto and the moderate Muslims in the north as it is to others.

Church of England: Holistic Missions

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

That this House takes note of the July 2013 report by ResPublica, Holistic Missions: Social Action and the Church of England.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, the Church of England is on the verge of extinction, or so you would believe if you accept this week’s tabloid headlines. The report of the think tank ResPublica, entitled Holistic Missions: Social Action and the Church of England, presents us with a different picture. It presents a picture of a church which is present in every community, town, village and city and embedded in its localities. It is a church which baptises, marries and buries a significant proportion of the population, educates some 1 million children in church schools and serves the poor, the homeless, the lonely, the hungry and the distressed in often unnoticed but crucial ways.

The report’s central argument is that a nation cannot thrive and progress purely as a result of the success or otherwise of the market or the Government. These have both in different ways failed us. The NHS has been implicated in massive scandals of appalling care and resultant cover-ups. Our banking system has been the province of vested and bonus-seeking self-interest. In the United Kingdom, social mobility is stagnating and inequalities are rising and embedding. This debate arises from the conviction that we need to renew, recover and restore the transformative institutions which can make a vital difference. The institution primarily placed to do that is the Church of England.

I am delighted, as I am sure we all are, that this debate has attracted two maiden speeches. The noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence of Clarendon, brings to our debate an unrivalled track record of courage and resilience in challenging and shaping civil society, not least through the work of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle benefits us with his understanding of the challenges and opportunities of the rural churches and communities in Cumbria, as well as his particular portfolio among the Bishops in relation to the NHS. As one of those from this Bench who has the longest train journey to London, he usually comes exceptionally well-acquainted with the agendas of our meetings.

If we are to grasp the unique role of the church in social action, we must recognise that faith plays a vital part in motivating and energising voluntary action at every level. Some 79% of church members who responded to ResPublica’s survey have been involved in social action in the past 12 months, compared with the national average of 45%. According to the Sunday Telegraph, members of the Church of England give some 22.3 million hours each month in voluntary service.

I see that daily in my diocese. The street pastors in Leicester and the county towns have a transforming impact on street crime and vulnerable young people, especially on weekend nights. Our diocesan centre provides a base for the City of Sanctuary projects, reaching the most desperate asylum seekers. Our work with the Prince’s Trust transforms self-confidence and life chances for unemployed young people. Apprenticeships in churches and church schools are beginning to develop high quality training and work experience. Outreach youth work in the diocese now exceeds all the resource from the other agencies put together. This pattern is replicated up and down the country where the social mission of the church is indivisible from its spiritual mission—a reflection of God’s concern for all people, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.

Further, much of this work is done in partnership with other Christian denominations and other faiths. Indeed, co-operation with the faith communities around, for example, food banks and other forms of social provision, is becoming a hallmark of the Church of England’s work in many of our major cities. Not only is this work widespread but it depends on an institution which is exceptional in its reach and essentially focused on the local. Churches, especially the Church of England, act both as a bridge across communities but also essentially as a gateway into communities. Quite frankly, it is the established church which is uniquely placed to achieve almost universal access through its networks of staff and buildings, and its particular place in the story of every locality.

Speaking to the General Synod this week, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York emphasised that point. He said:

“Parishes up and down the country are striving hard to tackle the consequences of poverty … Indeed for a parish not to be doing something about it is becoming the exception rather than the rule. Take Middlesbrough … for instance, where churches of all denominations are currently running 276 activities designed to help the vulnerable. It has been calculated that these … amount to 800 hours of love-in-action each week”.

Many of those themes have been taken up recently in a major conference in Liverpool under the title “Together for the Common Good”, building on the social action tradition of Bishop David Sheppard and Archbishop Derek Worlock on Merseyside in the 1980s. This morning DCLG has launched its programme, Together in Service, to support faith-based social action across the country. The Near Neighbours scheme funds community cohesion by directly recognising the presence and effectiveness of the Church of England in every neighbourhood.

Across the country, much of the support for this work comes from the Church Urban Fund establishing joint ventures in places as diverse as Birmingham, Cornwall, Lancashire, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Nottingham. These local hubs bring churches together in common action and outreach. They build capacity and confidence, and act as a source of experience and stories through which policy and leadership can be shaped for the future. All that activity contributes to a much-needed debate about the common good and the kind of society in which we all want to live and in which the fruits of all our labours are available for the flourishing of all parts of our society.

There are one or two points that I want to put specifically to the Minister, but first I want to establish a general point. We do not from these Benches advocate the co-option of the Church into the wholesale delivery of welfare programmes on behalf of the state. Experience suggests that there is a danger here of the faith and voluntary sector being systematically undercut by the big corporations, which can drive down costs and perhaps quality of service to below that which the churches could countenance.

The report does, however, issue a major challenge that the churches and government need to take profoundly seriously. It is a challenge to rethink and rebalance the relationship between state and community provision through the churches. In particular, the report calls for what it calls “a new settlement”. This suggests a model of social action that focuses on service with the community rather than for the community. This model involves all parties in seeking solutions. As the report puts it:

“If we want to see powerful, resilient and faithful communities with the capacity to address their own problems, then people need the power to act for themselves rather than being dependent on services”.

That requires a devolution of power both from government and the private sector and a readiness to break up monopolistic power that leaves the churches and the voluntary sector sometimes out of the equation. It also requires government to think more holistically in terms of partnering with the churches in health, education, work and training programmes and so forth.

We on these Benches recognise that there is more that the churches themselves can do in this area. Much of this work needs to be done at local level, harnessing the networks and experience already in place. For example, efforts are being made to bring together the different levels of church social action. In 2012, a project was launched by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, under the title Resourcing Christian Community Action, which aims to be a catalyst to bring together current best practice in providing Christian care in local communities with the resources and knowledge needed to multiply this work across the country. The challenge in the report to the mission and public affairs department of the Church of England to set up a social action unit is a powerful one, but it suggests a top-down approach which may not be the most effective way of achieving necessary change in the dioceses and parishes of England.

Yet there is a great deal in the report to support. We support the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Faith and Society’s faith and localism charter to ensure trust and transparency between commissioners and faith-based organisations when preparing to commission services from them with a view to making contracts clearer and more open.

Secondly, we would advocate that more attention needs to be given by government to capacity-building the churches as long-term, sustainable and trusted partners. There is much in the report in that area that would repay study. Will the Minister respond, in particular, to the proposal that Big Society Capital should encourage a social investment platform with good links to church-based social ventures to act as an intermediary on lending to such groups? Here especially is an opportunity to replicate and scale up established and proven initiatives and to move on from the endless construction of new schemes sometimes devoid of a track record in order to exploit contracting opportunities.

Thirdly, will the Government's new commissioning academy include advice for commissioners on how to partner effectively with church groups and how faith-based social action is of huge benefit to public services?

The report rightly reminds us that we stand at a moment of exceptional opportunity. Far from extinction, the church is ready to play its part. Its great strength is in the creation of local networks of neighbourliness and civility which allow informal bonds to develop and reduce the demands for many aspects of state welfare. This is a vital part of the ecology of welfare provision because it embodies Beveridge’s conviction that strong state provision works only if there is a well-resourced informal network of voluntary action to support community resilience. The time has come to value that network more, to understand it better, to resource it more effectively and to enable it to play its vital and proper role in creating the common good that we all wish to see.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have read the report and I noted the noble Lord’s questions about how we will respond to its recommendations. I think it is much better that I write on that since they are, as he well knows, rather complex recommendations, and rattling off my answers in two minutes would probably be less valuable than the letter that I promise to send to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, yesterday at a question and answer session in the Jubilee Room, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury made the bold claim that there was probably more faith-based social action going on in this country than at any time since the Second World War. Whether or not it is possible to measure the accuracy of that claim, it is very clear from this debate that there is a high level of interest in this subject and a high level of support for faith-based social action—the social action of the churches in general and of the Church of England in particular.

I am very grateful to all noble Lords who contributed to this discussion. I shall not rehearse the points made by noble Lords, but will take firmly to heart a point that many made: the Church of England is but one player on this field. We heard so powerfully about the Methodist tradition of Lord Soper and John Wesley. It is impossible to be the Bishop of Leicester without being only too aware of the enormous variety of faiths and the enormous proportion of the population of the city who on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday are in places of worship and who are giving expression to their beliefs and their motives during the rest of the week in a variety of ways—without which, quite frankly, our common life in the city would be quite impossible.

As other noble Lords have done, I will pay particular tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, for her moving and telling speech and for the way in which her life is indeed a speech in itself about the need for constant attention to justice. She knows she has friends, support and enormous respect on all sides of this House. I want to pay tribute to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle for opening our eyes to what is now possible in Rose Castle. Some of us looked with envy on successive Bishops of Carlisle for living there, but those days are now over and the Church of England is putting not only that building but so many of its buildings to new uses in practical ways for the contemporary needs of our contemporary society. That is why the noble Lord, Lord Elton, will be pleased to know that there is much more support from here for the removal of the pews than he might suspect. I invite the churches in my diocese to invite me to pew-burning parties on a regular basis.

I think we have had a really useful debate. I am sure that the Minister will take note of what has been raised—as, indeed, will colleagues in ResPublica and elsewhere, who will continue to stimulate and challenge us on these matters. It is now some 43 years, I think, since I was a civil servant in Whitehall, working as a Second Secretary in the Foreign Office. I used to walk up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square and St Martin in the Fields. The experience of seeing one church attending to the needs of the homeless and destitute while also ministering to the occupants of Buckingham Palace, engaging in the campaign for the ending of apartheid in South Africa and involving itself heavily in the Covent Garden community projects and a whole range of other things inspired me to think that this was a way of life that really could transform life at the heart of one of the world’s great cities, and set me on the path to ordination. That vision has shaped so much of my work and is why I care passionately about the matters we have raised today. I am very grateful to all those who have contributed to this debate, and I commend this report to the further attention of the House.

Motion agreed.

Syria: Peace Initiative

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, Russian allegations were made. There have been investigations, in so far as it is possible to pursue investigations on the ground within Syria at present, and all the evidence to which I have had access suggests that the opposition did not have access to chemical weapons and certainly did not have the capacity to use chemical weapons on the scale on which they were used on 21 September.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that this shift in fortunes in Syria is very largely due to the relationship of trust that the United States Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister have developed in recent months, and that similar levels of trust will be vital to resolving other pressing international crises, not least with Iran?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I agree. I should also say that the British Foreign Secretary has worked extremely hard over the past nine months and more to come to terms with the Russians and to develop a relationship with the Russian Foreign Minister. The European Union high representative, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, has also done a great deal of work with the Russians on Syria and as part of the E3+3 on Iran.

Church of England: Appointment of Bishops

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It may simply be a useful movement towards transparency. I know there are those who would like the Church of England to remain as it was 150 years ago or more, but as a member of the Church of England, I am extremely happy that it has moved and modernised over the last few years.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that, typically, the Crown Nominations Commission consults some 100 members of civil society in each region to which appointments are made; that legislation to bring forward the possibility of women bishops is now before the General Synod and it is anticipated that it will be brought into law within two years; and that the Archbishop of Canterbury takes a very keen interest in the proceedings of this House, and will take careful note of any concerns about the speed of Episcopal appointments made in the course of this Question Time?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his question. In consulting when preparing for this Question, I was struck by how many of the people I spoke to said, “You have to understand that the workload of a diocesan bishop is enormous and that some wish to retire before the age of 70 because they feel they have done more than they can sustain for more than 10 to 15 years”.

Commonwealth and Commonwealth Charter

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, it is a particular privilege to stand as the appetiser to the speech of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, bringing, as he has already done to this Chamber in another capacity, a unique experience of global affairs through his visits to all parts of the Anglican communion. We on this Bench have so many reasons to be thankful for that and to appreciate at first hand the extremely high esteem in which he is held in so many of the countries of the Commonwealth.

There are three particular reasons why, as Bishop of Leicester, I felt it right to contribute to this debate. The first is because the history of my city in the past 40 years is quite inexplicable without reference to the Commonwealth. The Ugandan Asians, arriving 40 years ago after Idi Amin’s expulsions, set in train a series of migrations from the subcontinent, Africa, and more recently from around the world, which have transformed the culture, economy and reputation of the city for the better. They have also embedded networks of family relationships, friendships and business connections with Commonwealth countries in south Asia and east and west Africa in particular. Further, they bring a familiarity with the concept of Commonwealth as a network of different religions, cultures and ethnicities under a common leadership for the common good.

Further, the three world-class universities of Leicester, Loughborough and De Montfort all educate large numbers of young people from Commonwealth countries, as any visit to a degree ceremony demonstrates, with the immense potential that that creates for inter- generational influence and partnership. Those universities share the concerns of many others expressed in the Home Affairs Committee’s report about the serious effects of a restrictive student visa policy on the wider interests of the United Kingdom.

Secondly, I echo the concerns of others about the serious human rights abuses in Sri Lanka and the very questionable decision to hold the 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo. Some 5,000 Tamils have found their way to Leicester in recent years. They have their own temple, the priest of which is a Tamil refugee whose family were killed in the civil war. Many of these families know at first hand the consequences of the human rights record in that country, in which 12,000 Sri Lankans have disappeared, of whom the Government have confirmed that 6,500 are dead.

Recently, in his pastoral letter to the Church of Ceylon, the Bishop of Colombo called on members of the church to fast, pray and lament over the state of the nation, after what he described as,

“the complete collapse of the rule of law there”.

He went on to say:

“The breakdown of such accountability is a process that has been building up for the past several years.

It has now climaxed in the recent events that have seen both the Executive and the Legislature disregarding the provisions of the very Constitution which they swore to uphold and defend, giving the appearance of a country ruled on the principle that ‘Might is Right’.

The numerous warnings that the Church, other religious organizations and civil society bodies repeatedly issued have been ignored. There is currently a climate of fear and helplessness, where people remain silent rather than speak out against rampant injustice, intimidation, violence and falsehoods”.

I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, will be able to give the House some further assurance as to Her Majesty’s Government’s engagement with this.

Thirdly, I draw attention to the capacity of the Anglican Communion’s network of partnerships with dioceses in Commonwealth countries to plan and execute exchanges between individuals and communities for mutual learning and understanding. From Leicester two years ago, 24 junior clergy from towns and villages across the diocese visited Trichy Tanjore in Tamil Nadu in south India, establishing friendships and links that change outlooks and perceptions for a lifetime. They were followed by a group of young adults from sixth forms and colleges, experiencing at first hand a range of development programmes with tea planters, Dalits and fishing communities. Their experience “conscientatised” them to many of the issues around tax avoidance and the hiding of money from public scrutiny that so massively reduces revenues that could promote development.

At the same time, we are planning similar visits to our links in Tanzania. Schools from Leicester, Tanzania and south India are now in regular contact, and we are in the process of creating a triangular relationship between churches and communities in the United Kingdom, in Tanzania and in south India. These friendships and relationships are a vivid reminder that the Commonwealth is more than a political or economic entity and its significance extends beyond the political classes. I hope that that vision of the Commonwealth will be deepened and broadened by our debate today.

Big Society: Women’s Organisations

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, as I said, the consultation that was announced yesterday by my honourable friend Lynne Featherstone in the other place is all about seeing how we can engage with women’s organisations on the ground that have to deal with the issues that affect women in local communities. There are a number of questions in the consultation document, which, among other things, looks at the equality assessment impact of funding decisions.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, can the Minister explain to the House how the dramatic reductions in the staffing of national charities such as the Children’s Society assists the cause of women within the big society, in the light of the deficit reduction programme?

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, this is a recurring concern. When we are having to make difficult funding decisions —I say again that this is because of the economic circumstances that this Government inherited from the last one—it is important that local authorities make those decisions in a way that preserves those much needed front-line services. I can also say that the transition fund, which was brought in specifically to support voluntary and charitable organisations in these difficult times, has already made grants, of which two are specifically to women’s groups: the Domestic Violence Integrated Response Project in Leicester, which received £103,000, and the Incest and Sexual Abuse Survivors network in Newark in Nottinghamshire, which received £26,800. I hope that noble Lords will see that the Government, even in these very difficult times, are prioritising the needs of women.

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.