Social Economy

Debate between Hazel Blears and Chris White

Tuesday 2nd September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)]

Having listened to the past three speakers, I think this is probably more of an annual general meeting than a debate. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), not least because she will leave the House, come what may, next May. It sticks a bit to say it will be disappointing to lose a Labour Member, but it will be disappointing to lose her expertise. The support she gave me with the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 was singular in making it progress through the House and ensuring it had the cross-party support necessary for any Bill to achieve success.

I will break with convention slightly and say how disappointed I am to see so few Members in the Chamber. I can only assume that they got lost on their way here. Those who understand what social value and the social economy are about will realise that these are some very radical, new and revolutionary ideas, but, as the right hon. Lady mentioned, some long-standing ideas have also newly re-emerged. As the author of the Act, I recognise that this is not day one: a lot of knowledge and work has been put into this field already. However, as Members have discussed, we have found a new period of momentum to do some great work.

To comment on what the former Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), said, when the Act started on the Floor of the House, there was a certain nervousness as to what its repercussions would be and what burdens it would place on businesses. I think this initial anxiety has been replaced by a level of confidence. Local authorities have become better and more successful at ensuring there is consideration of the wider benefits that their services can provide. The right hon. Lady mentioned Liverpool as one of the great examples. It was one of the first places I visited in my former role as the social value ambassador. I still hold a great memory of the Furniture Resource Centre. Rehabilitation, as the right hon. Lady mentioned, is an area where we can make the biggest difference through such work.

I am pleased with the role the Government have played. Obviously all Members who have got a private Member’s Bill through will know it is not possible to do so without the support of all Departments. Departments have made great strides in service commissioning and procurement. However, as the right hon. Lady said, there is potentially time for review. I think that 18 months is a long time—we dream of the Isle of Man—but it is still long enough that we can look at what has been achieved and whether these initiatives can be extended. Not only are the nation, its local authorities and Government Departments, adopting the initiative, but the world sees us a leader in the concept.

I have long believed that the closer to the community a service is, the better it is. Localism is key to this. It is a broad principle, based on the belief that we should devolve power to the lowest possible level. How we deliver everything, from our services to our local plans, should be considered by speaking to our constituents. We should ask our communities what they want, but what they really want perhaps is to be able to take on more authority. That is one of our greatest challenges. There are few Members present, but as people who believe in this concept, our task is to ensure our communities better understand what the social economy, social investment and social value are all about. These are simple ideas that we have managed to make quite complex.

[Hazel Blears]

The hon. Gentleman is making an extremely good speech. He has really hit a nerve on that point. We talk glibly about social enterprise and the social economy, but these words mean very little to ordinary people. The work he has done to make this come alive has been really impressive. Would he agree that one of the things the Social Economy Alliance—a whole range of organisations, ably led by Peter Holbrook of Social Enterprise UK—can do, working with hon. Members, is try to make those terms come alive to ordinary people? It is about getting people back to work, keeping them out of jail and those kinds of things. That is one of the biggest hurdles we need to get over.

[Chris White]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention. Peter Holbrook, amazingly enough, has the one signed copy of my Act. What he has done with it goodness only knows. I agree that there are many players in this area, because of the alliance, Social Enterprise UK, and all the charitable bodies and their umbrellas. Our local political representatives are key players and do fantastic work on the ground supporting their constituents. I believe we should make these things more accessible to them. I would not denigrate anything they do, and certainly not as a former councillor myself, but we are coming towards local elections. Whatever party people support, they should be able to put in their manifestos what they are doing to help local community organisations.

Public Services (Social Value) Bill

Debate between Hazel Blears and Chris White

Friday 25th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Hazel Blears]

The hon. Gentleman has shown a great deal of courage, determination and tenacity in getting his Bill this far, and he will certainly have my support. He was speaking about the sector being disappointed if the Bill does not pass. Would he admit to a tiny degree of disappointment himself that his original Bill, which I believe was tremendous news for the social enterprise sector, has been reduced in scope, in scale and in effect by the Government?

[Chris White]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that intervention. I appreciate the tremendous work that she has put into getting the Bill to this stage. All the work that she does with social enterprises is well recognised. Do I feel a touch of disappointment? I am a practical and pragmatic person. I want to see something that works, something to build on. That is why I am making the remarks that I am.

[Chris White]

I am about to conclude.

I appreciate that we all have a duty to ensure that the best legislation gets through the House. It is true in this case that some legislation is better than no legislation. This is a chance for us to send a message that when it comes to these important issues, we can all work together, we can prevent politics from getting in the way of good policy and we can be trusted to do the right thing when the time comes. I hope that given the hon. Gentleman’s well-documented support for the principles of the Bill and for the social enterprise, voluntary and community sectors, he will withdraw the amendments today so that we can push forward with much-needed reform of procurement. This is a chance that we may not get again for some time, so let us take it and see the Bill through to the other place and from there, we hope, on to the statute book.

[Hazel Blears]

I support new clauses 1, 2 and 3 and the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas). They are excellent amendments that enable us to debate how we want to see things develop, even if the Bill passes today, as I hope it will, in its current truncated form.

The Bill originally had five clauses. It contained a specific commitment to a national social enterprise strategy and strategies for local authorities. I said on Second Reading, some time ago, that I thought the Bill was small but perfectly formed, and that if it went through in that form, it could have a transformational effect on the commissioning that took place in our public authorities.

This is no judgment on the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White), but I am afraid that the Bill in its current form represents a huge missed opportunity to drive forward with momentum and impetus the growth and flourishing of the social enterprise sector. The original Bill would have tilted the scales in favour of social enterprise through social value and economic, social and environmental well-being. That would have sent a strong message to public commissioners that the Government really wanted to put their weight behind it as commissioners and would have produced quite a transformational effect.

The hon. Gentleman’s original clauses about a strategy have been deleted. I have no time for strategies that are just pieces of paper, because in my experience harnessing the full power of every Department requires a central spine that says to those Departments, “This is what we want to do. We will hold you to account. We want to see what you have done over the past 12 months and how you can take it forward.” I worry that without such a mechanism the push towards social value commissioning will be taken up only by the best local authorities, which are good at commissioning and understand, particularly in areas such as social care and education, that social value means more impact for the money spent. Good local authorities understand that and are becoming quite complex commissioners. They are commissioning with the users and clients involved and going out to the public and asking what they want to see. That is a holistic approach to commissioning.

However, as I mentioned in Committee, I am worried about the local authorities that lack the capacity, skill and understanding to carry out complex commissioning. The Minister gave some assurance in Committee that there would be support for those local authorities to ensure that they can take this forward. What the Bill says is really good, but I fear that it will fall somewhat short of the transformational effect that the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington wants to achieve.

The annual report proposed in new clause 3 might be dismissed by some as bureaucracy, but I know from my experience in government that requiring Ministers to come to the Dispatch Box once a year to report on what they have done and what the impact of that has been is a tremendous discipline to ensure that during the rest of the year they ask for regular reports and push for implementation. Unless there is a way of measuring and evaluating the social value achieved through a change in the commissioning process, I do not think that we will see the results that the hon. Gentleman talked about.

The hon. Gentleman says that he is pragmatic and practical, to which I can attest. My view is always to get what one can and then build on it incrementally, and I think that that is probably where he is now. However, I think that he is also quite determined to make a change, so I ask him to press his right hon. and hon. Friends in the coalition Government to say how they will measure social value and assess what difference it has made. In a year’s time, more commissioning will have social value at its heart. What work are we doing to hone in on how we measure social value so that we get a grip on this, because otherwise it will remain a fairly nebulous concept that is very easy for people who do not share the values to wriggle out of? I am sure that that is not what he wants.