Charitable Sector

Baroness Ritchie of Brompton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Brompton]

My Lords, it is my great privilege to be standing in this historic House in the company of so many noble and distinguished Lords. I thank you most sincerely for the very warm welcome that I have received since I arrived in this House in June. In particular, I thank my sponsors, my noble friends, Lady Hanham and Lady Morris of Bolton, and my mentor, my noble friend Lady Sharples, who has patiently tutored me in our practices and procedures. The Doorkeepers and staff of this noble House have also helped me to address one of the greatest challenges faced by new Peers—navigation around this House. Despite their help, I have on occasion thrown open one of Mr Pugin’s elegantly panelled doors, determined to make a suitably noble entrance on some great committee or other, only to find myself in a cupboard.

I am delighted to be making my maiden speech in this important debate on the role of the voluntary sector in civil society, led by my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach. My passion is working with the voluntary and community sector to transform the lives of the young. Like many other noble Lords in this House, I come here with a keen interest in the welfare of children and young people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and who have encountered difficult and challenging times in their lives.

My background is in local government, and for a decade or more I have been involved in providing services to children and young people and to championing their cause through a variety of roles. As statutory lead member for children in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, I am well aware of the difficulties that some families face, and in particular of some of the hard issues around child protection and safeguarding. Ours may be in large part one of Britain’s wealthiest areas but, like most London boroughs, we have areas of real deprivation and need. I pay particular tribute to our social workers. They endure constant criticism in the media, yet in truth they save many lives and I believe that they are generally part of the solution not the problem.

I have also been involved with UK Youth, a national non-uniform charity for young people which celebrates its centenary this year. I see great potential for the national citizen service which will give opportunities through a personal social development programme to a range of young people to play their part in civil society and build on the innovative work done by my noble friend Lord Wei and the Challenge charity.

I am acutely aware that those on the front line in charities can feel patronised by warm words from Westminster so I want to focus today on some of the practical measures that we can take to enable the sector to release the full potential of our children and young people. Starting near to home, voluntary organisations working with the young are particularly dependent on local authority grants and contracts, so I hope that we can encourage councillors in our own parties to sustain the funding of the voluntary sector, even in these difficult times. There are powerful arguments for doing so. In my own borough, for instance, we depend critically on organisations such as Family Action, which runs programmes for young carers and West London Action for Children, which does much to help those who have been victims of abuse. Axing the voluntary sector budget has sometimes been the first response of local councils facing financial constraints. Yet at election time, councils stand or fall on their ability to deliver excellent services cost-effectively—a challenge which the sector is uniquely placed to help them meet. We neglect it at our peril.

We must also recognise that even in the best of times, the state will never have sufficient resources to meet the full needs and aspirations of the young. We must help the sector generate income through social enterprise, facilitate partnerships with the business world and inspire a new age of philanthropy in Britain. This means looking at new forms of partnership between local authorities and philanthropists such as the Library Trust which is being pioneered by the City of Birmingham Council with help from Action Planning. I delight in the lead given by some of our wealthiest people who have chosen to devote their fortunes to giving a new start to the young, but sadly these people are often the exceptions rather than the rule. Perhaps our culture is to blame and if in years to come, we can give our great philanthropists even a tenth of the recognition heaped on our footballers, our country will be a better place.

Building the big society will also require the energies of the entire voluntary sector. Many of the organisations which make most difference to the lives of the young are faith-based and they need fair access to funding. The charitable sector in Britain has its roots in the church and today, from the Church of England Children’s Society to the youth workers in thousands of churches across Britain, there are men and women who are inspired by faith to help the young make more of their lives. The state cannot fund proselytism, but we can and we should work more closely with faith-based organisations which deliver the outcomes that we are looking for, without necessarily expecting them to mask their identity to secure funding.

I turn next to the challenge of regulation. We must recognise that those who are inspired to give their time to the voluntary sector have their hearts in service delivery and campaigning, not in regulatory compliance and bureaucracy. So I wish my noble friend Lord Hodgson well in his mission to help the Government identify ways in which we can make it easier to establish and run charities.

Of course, obligations run both ways. The current difficult times require a response from the sector in delivering services cost-effectively. For instance, do we really need an estimated 72,000 charities to be working and involved with children and young people? Openness to sharing services, to better partnership working and to mergers where the case is proven must form part of the sector’s response to a new partnership with government. Charities also need to guard against mission drift, by which I mean the danger of losing sight of the very vision and passion with which they were created as they tailor their activities to the dictates of government programmes.

Finally, I feel that we should stop seeing children and young people as passive recipients of services. We should encourage them—as, indeed, the sector is doing—to exercise real leadership in their lives. We have 12 million people under the age of 18. They are key citizens in our communities, with both the desire and the capacity to help shape their local areas and even society as a whole. They want to learn through doing, to take responsibility and to make their own mark positively. This has been a particular objective of the National Children’s Bureau, which I am proud to serve as a volunteer, pursued through its lead role in the National Participation Forum. Research undertaken by the forum shows that much progress has been made in children’s involvement in decision-making. I cite but two examples: Youth4U has enabled young people to shape local service provision and delivery, and the Disabled children’s manifesto for change has demonstrated how an often-overlooked and excluded group can shape and influence policy.

I believe passionately that if we can but mobilise the full energies of those charities working with the young, we will free a new generation from the curses of addiction, isolation and hopelessness. If we can go further and release the ambition and the capacity of our young people to lead, the big society will move powerfully from rhetoric to reality.