Community and Voluntary Sector

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing and opening the debate. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Porter, on her maiden speech.

This is an important debate because our Government have the chance to restore the mutually productive trusting relationships with civil society that we have enjoyed in the past and which have been eroded in recent years. I unreservedly welcome the words of my honourable friend the Minister, Stephanie Peacock, who said,

“this government has announced a commitment to reset the relationship with civil society and work together to develop a new Civil Society Covenant”.

As someone who started their working life at Gingerbread then moved to the citizens advice bureau and then worked for Michael Young at the Institute for Community Studies, I have huge commitment to this sector going back 50 years.

From the Ministers in the last Government I am afraid we saw attacks on charities to generate headlines and attempt to stoke culture wars. We should be pleased that the public has sound instincts on this. We all know about the campaigns to undermine the work of great charitable institutes such as the RNLI and the National Trust—it did not work. Attacks on the National Trust by political campaigners have included everything from its research into the historic places in its care to “secretly woke” scone recipes. Public trust in the National Trust has, I am glad to say, only increased since all this began, but it represents a waste of charities’ scarce resources. Let us hope that, under a new leadership, and with the influence of noble Lords opposite, there will be a change in attitude toward the voluntary sector.

As I said, the resetting of the relationship with civil society is wholly to be embraced. However, I have to ask my noble friend where social enterprises and social and community businesses feature in this new world. Because of an accident of supine government, the social enterprise world ended up in the DCMS, along with civil society organisations, several years ago. There are more than 131,000 social enterprises in the UK, with a collective turnover of £78 billion and employing around 2.3 million people. They can be SMEs or very large suppliers of public services. Therefore, this is not a small matter, as they match in size the voluntary sector. It feels that, at the moment, they are slightly losing out in the policy world. Unless I am mistaken, I cannot see any mention of social businesses in the proposals for the new compact.

If we wish to fulfil our manifesto commitment to build diverse business models to support the regeneration of our economy, co-operatives, mutuals and social enterprises have an important part to play. The same is true of civil society organisations, but the support and policy that they need are not the same.

I asked this question during the King’s Speech debate and I ask it again: how is that diversity to be achieved? How will social enterprises be involved in the important discussions around procurement, reform of our public services and things such as regional investment? I and the sector have long believed that social enterprises and social businesses should be the responsibility of the Business Department not the DCMS, because they are businesses. At the very least there needs to be a plan to promote and support social businesses. Will my noble friend the Minister help to organise a meeting with her honourable friend Stephanie Peacock, social enterprise leaders and me to find a way forward with this dilemma?