Voluntary Sector and Social Enterprise

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, owing to clerical error, my name was not put down to speak and I am thus speaking in the break, and have four minutes in which to deliver an eight-minute speech. I commend my noble friend Lady Scott both on securing the debate and on what she said. Like, I suspect, everybody else in the Chamber, I hate to think of where we would be without our voluntary sector, because it is still the harbinger of the best values that we have inherited and seek to sustain. It is values-rich at a time when, I am afraid, so much of the commercial world, especially the big commercial world, is values-depleted.

I want to mention the role of small enterprises and voluntary organisations particularly in community life, because I think that many of your Lordships will agree that, in our lifetime, there has been a dramatic decline in the vigour and vitality of community life. It is interesting that that word “community” has the same root as “common”, and it is the communality of our lives that has been so hacked back—the common man, the common law, common sense, common land, common wealth, common fate and common fortune. All those things have been put in jeopardy by the circumstances that we all know well: mobility, work, obsessiveness, a certain degree of excessive individualism and so on. It is the small charity, voluntary organisation and social enterprise which is absolutely integral and central to a revival of the “commons”, as one might put it. They are local, rooted and embedded; they know their patch and are known in it. As was the case in my young manhood, when businesses mostly had those characteristics, you inevitably become part of the community and contribute to it informally. You did not call it pro bono, let alone charitable donation. These local organisations, whether private or not, were so integral to effective community life.

I also want to say a quick word about auditing. A number of comments—for example, from the noble Lords, Lord Giddens and Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barker—have touched on the performance of business, particularly big business. The Public Interest Research Centre, a charity organisation set up in 1971—I was a trustee for 30 years and am happy to say that it still exists—had an idea whose time may now have come. Its main thrust was social auditing in public companies. I think it is well worth considering, and not just by government, whether it is not now time for us to look at what big companies and business entities, which are often global entities, do by way of social contribution as well as profit-making. I am thinking of things like minority hiring, environmental depletion and so on.

Finally I should like just to give a warning, if it is necessary, against any delusions about how much we in Parliament can achieve in relation to small, on-the-ground charities and social enterprises. I sometimes think that the torrent of laws that spew from this place have inadvertently created an attitude and expectation among people that they do not really need to contribute much and it is all down to government. Well, it ain’t.

My time is up so I shall sit down.