Active Citizenship

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Maclennan for initiating this debate. I pay tribute to the two excellent maiden speakers in our debate today. The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bannside, about the strength of societies which are diverse due to people migrating to them were particularly moving and I congratulate him on them.

I declare an interest as an employee of a new organisation, See the Difference, which trains and enables charities to seek support, whether money or volunteering, by making films and putting them on the internet. I shall return to the importance of the internet and social networking. I have also been involved in the voluntary sector for more than 30 years, either as an employee of various organisations or as a consultant. It is with that historical perspective that I want to approach today’s debate. In preparing for it I was thinking about what it is that makes a society a good society. I have concluded that size does not really matter: a big society is not inherently any better, qualitatively, than a small society. We all live in a number of different societies at the same time. A good society is open, transparent and inclusive, and has strong foundations. A good society is one where individuals within it know where the focal points of power and organisation lie, and are able to change it and make a difference.

The most compelling factor in active citizenship is that an individual can see the difference that he or she can make, or that he or she has made. When we discuss this subject, it is therefore important to look at the focal points in societies which endure. GPs’ surgeries, the health service, churches, different faith groups, synagogues, mosques and schools are all places to which people can come and influence the society in which they live. I, too, put in a plug for libraries. Those that are run with the assistance of professional librarians make for good focal points in a good society—as do voluntary organisations.

I want to talk a little about some of the things that have been said about the big society. There is great enthusiasm for it at the moment, but it brings with it a great deal of challenge to the voluntary sector at a difficult time. Noble Lords will have noticed what happened in Somerset last week, when, of necessity, funding was withdrawn from the entire voluntary sector. It is important, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, that we recognise that it is the enduring role of local government which underpins an active and coherent society in any locality.

I have a concern. In my work in the voluntary sector, I have come to learn that voluntary organisations’ biggest currency is novelty. When an organisation is new and what it is doing is innovative, it is at the height of its powers; but when it is not new and has become part of the landscape, but is no less effective or worth while, it begins to struggle. My concern about the big society and the things that I believe lie behind it, is that while it is about encouraging innovation and challenging the corporate world to take part in its communities, all that I have seen about it so far is comparatively short-term. I do not want us to look back in four or five years’ time on a range of wonderful initiatives which burst like bright stars upon our firmament and then died away.

I hope that with the resources they intend to put behind the development of the big society, the Government do not do what the previous Government did and set up a number of new bodies to administer it. They were cumbersome and they brought unnecessary competition to an already crowded field. I hope that the Government and the resources they deploy centrally—for example, community organisers and the citizenship organisations—will look to existing organisations within the voluntary sector, albeit with a new set of criteria attached to the money, and use the existing knowledge and expertise which is out there in the voluntary sector and deserves to stay and to be used.

Finally, my noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford talked about social networking. Twenty-six million of our compatriots are on Facebook. At least 13 million of them use it every day. The internet is changing. It is a place in which people have an engagement. It is no longer a place where people go simply to find information. It is a place where people set up and run campaigns, and they engage and challenge organisations. I have absolutely no doubt that, just as in the Obama campaign in 2008 and the Unlock Democracy campaign during the last election, there has been a sea change, and younger people will pursue that in all aspects of their lives, particularly in their civic lives, via the internet. We ignore that at our peril. If we do, participation rates, as my noble friend Lord Shipley said, will simply reduce. Social networking is where young peoples’ civic life is conducted. That is good and healthy. We in this House should not fear it. We should learn about it, understand it and encourage it.

We should enable voluntary organisations that are struggling to tackle the financial problems that they will undoubtedly face to look towards new kinds of support. For many of them, it will not come through taking on large-scale provision of public services, but it will be about engaging the enthusiasm of new supporters via means such as social networking.