Social Policy

Lord Bishop of Salisbury Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Salisbury]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the opportunity provided by this debate to hear how Members of your Lordships’ House might flesh out the bare bones of the big society and flush out Her Majesty’s Government’s thinking about how we are going to rebuild society. I emphasise the “how” because I am temperamentally suspicious of abstract nouns. What is “big society” shorthand for? Let me offer a simple translation into verbs. Are we here to get what we want or what we need for ourselves from each other or from them, or are we here primarily to learn how to give things to each other? Can we use this opportunity to look at the way in which we build our relationships, rather than at the mechanics of the levers of power?

Political parties of every hue have sought to win voters—or should we name it and say “bribe” voters?—by promising them things that they would get. Everyone assumes that the principal motive—if not the only one—is personal advantage or greed and that what each of us is interested in most is “me, me, me”. Two things follow from that. The first is that people become the kind of people they are treated as being—we have become a nation of self-centred consumers. Secondly, in a large-scale operation removed from the local, the personal and the particular, people feel that they are no more than cogs in a machine or statistics on a spreadsheet—they have no sense of being valued for who they are as persons in community; they are valued only for what they do or contribute.

Is this the only way? Are we to go on colluding with the assumption that the people of our country are either too stupid or too selfish to be treated in any other way? Think of what happens when snow falls and the ordinary patterns of life are disrupted. When that happens, people notice what others need of them and rather enjoy the opportunities offered to spend some time and effort on helping those who are in difficulties. In the aftermath of local disasters, be they flash floods or tragic shootings, we experience people and communities taken out of themselves, rising to the challenge and thinking first of others who are in need.

This is, of course, happening all the time—day by day, in every community, people are behaving like this—and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, said, in the pages of MBEs in the Honours List you can read of the huge range of things that people are doing. This is just the tip of a huge iceberg of selfless good will, but it does not make news—it does not sell newspapers. None the less, will it become the currency of our new coalition Government? As I understand it, each of the two political parties that now form the one Government has had to learn to give rather than to get in order to offer us a new way of being. Is this consciously modelling for us how they invite us to behave?

I am not so naive as to imagine that all this could happen overnight or to think that it can be imposed in a top-down way; we have to grow this pattern of belonging from the roots. For example, in my part of the country—most of Dorset and Wiltshire and a good mix of rather large urban and deeply rural communities—we called together some 80 representatives last November from every part of life. They were from business and finance, education and health services, the voluntary sector and the churches. There were local government politicians and officers, MPs and sixth-formers. We invited them to consult with us about what a common life could be and what would be the currency of this common life. What we found was a remarkable consensus. It was generally agreed across this very wide group that we had to be more engaged, understanding the choices that need to be made, taking some responsibility for being involved in them and giving our leaders permission to make them and take them. Secondly, we must be prepared to be less reliant on state provision, not living beyond our means, and continuing to care better for the environment. Thirdly, we need to live in a more social, altruistic way. Since then, we have been working together on how to enable people to be the people whom they say they want to be and to create the future that they say they want.

We have now forged an agreed tool in a facilitated negotiation process to be offered by the church, which will engage people from varying parts of society and from all types of human enterprise in Dorset and Wiltshire. It is aimed at developing a values-based and values-led strategic planning for the building and strengthening of local community and the common good. Based on a one-day or two-day conversation, the model will then move beyond consultation by encouraging participants to articulate the values that motivate them and then, to get further than a wish list for a particular issue, by negotiating values-based solutions not only towards which participants agree to work but which include mutually ensured accountability.

We are in the process of identifying a particular issue in each county that can act as a pilot for this process in the near future, confident that it will empower local people to work together to shape the common wealth. We hope to offer it as a tool, both to communities and to the new Government, as part of its big society initiative. Here is a very practical way in which we hope to be able to offer something that will change the way in which we do things: not just what we do but—again the adverbs—the way in which we do it. This is something concrete that the faith communities, the Church of England in particular, could offer to the nation and the Government through our presence, as my friend the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London said, in every corner of the land, and through our well practised experience of drawing together people from every stratum of society.

We recognise that it may not be possible to agree shared values and that limits of consensus have to be faced. There is a place for disagreement and, indeed, conflict, but there is no doubt that locally there is a will to create a common language, to foster trust and mutuality and to focus on facilitating hospitality and relationship—on how we work together and on the quality of relationships—rather than on tightly regulated and dogmatic programmes, as a means of arriving at a fresh approach to the problems facing us.

I hope that the Government’s vision for a big society is going to be about the adverbs—the values that determine how we work together—and not just a thin veil for a cost-cutting exercise. I greatly look forward to hearing the Minister’s contribution to this debate and what vision Her Majesty’s Government have for building, sustaining and enlarging the trusting partnerships that alone will create anything worthy of the name of society—a mutual bond of care, well-being and abundant life.

An invitation to give, rather than feeding the compulsion to get, is what will capture the imagination especially of the young, who have such energy and commitment to our future. As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said, that is how people get their confidence to act, not by being told what to do or being invited to contribute. People have to experience doing it. That is what grows their confidence. Only if they are trusted to do it does this take place and it is that basis of trust between people and communities that will add up to a big picture and a big society. Unless it is based and rooted entirely locally, however, and at a level where relationships really count, nothing whatever will happen except hot air.