Big Society

Chris Heaton-Harris Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

I will try to abide by your advice, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) and the great dose of common sense that was injected into the debate by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw).

I wonder how many Opposition Members would be in the Chamber, compared with the few who are here now, were this debate entitled, “The Big State”. The Opposition do not care for the big society or what it stands for, because they prefer society to be based on the premise that the state must work its way into every nook and cranny of life. Those who prefer the big state approach do not in any way shape or form like any type of competing provision, which is perhaps why, over the past few years, the previous Government encouraged a large number of organisations, including charitable and non-governmental organisations, to take funds from the centre, so that they were that tiny bit more reliant on what the central Government hand gave them. I wonder how much money is taken by charities from central Government, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) described. Perhaps that is why Opposition Members are more focused on dependence on the centre.

There are many hindrances to the big society. We live in a society with a “Make a mistake and I’ll sue mentality”, which the previous Government encouraged in legislation. We therefore need massive public liability insurance. I am a soccer referee, and I must have extra public liability insurance just to put on my kit and blow a whistle every Saturday afternoon, in case a player injures himself while under my control and tries to sue me.

We need proposals to fix health and safety requirements, the massive number of Criminal Records Bureau checks, which I believe we are beginning to sort out, and the bureaucracy that many hon. Members have described. We also need to simplify gift aid to make it easier for everyone to give, and to encourage businesses to allow their staff to volunteer—DHL has a fantastic policy on that.

In my time in the House, I have been constantly surprised by the fact that those who work the hardest in society, and who have the least net disposable income—the “squeezed middle”, as I have heard someone call them—are the ones who go out of their way to give time to and help their communities. Those people are the big society. A number of Opposition Members asked who they are, and what the big society is, and then managed to define it in individual cases.

In my constituency, it is dead simple. The big society is a lady called Fiona Tompkinson, who is spending 10 days walking the great wall of China for Springboard, which is a charity, or it is Eydon village community soup kitchen, which raised money last week for the upkeep of a local church, or it is Nigel Smilie and Trevor Rowden, who are climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for the Daniel Worrall Memorial Trust, which was set up after a young lad aged just 20 was killed in a road accident. He was a keen sportsman, and he would love the fact that the trust in his name raises money for better sporting facilities for young people in his village. The Phoenix Centre, hospices, rotary clubs, Home-Start, Take Time to Make Time, which is a time bank, Diversity Fitness 4 Life, Brushes and Spades, which will make an old lady's garden look a lot better in springtime, are all wonderful organisations. If one scratches the skin of the society of Daventry, one comes to the wonderful rich fabric that is the big society, which does exist. There are national organisations such as the Special Olympics that are sponsored by big business, including Coca-Cola and the National Grid, but contribute massively to the betterment of life for those with a learning disability.

Therefore, there is a big society out there and I welcome the motion and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) on securing it.