The Big Society

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they propose to encourage people to participate in the Big Society.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, in view of what I may find time to say later on, I should remind the House that I am a member of Pendle Borough Council. I originally put down this Question for Short Debate what seems quite a long time ago in order to probe the Government and to ask them about community organisers and how those would work, and I will do that in the later part of my speech.

What is the big society and what does it mean? A lot of people ask that question, but not many people seem to know. Is the big society about residents looking after a little park at the end of their street or taking over a swimming pool, or is it about transferring the running of a Jobcentre to a private company? What is it?

I turned to what I thought was perhaps the definitive book on the matter, The Big Society, written by Jesse Norman MP, in the hope that it would be a manual that would tell me what the big society is. The book is an interesting, discursive popular survey of philosophy, economics and sociology that ranges over Plato, Socrates, Adam Smith, Keynes, Edmund Burke, Amartya Sen and, it seems, hundreds of others—a huge kaleidoscope of ideas picked from here, there and everywhere. At one stage, the book asks, “What exactly is the big society?”, but it does not seem to me to answer that question, although I enjoyed reading it. The book is certainly not about the big society as people think about it, which involves local volunteering, perhaps replacing state provision with community provision, competition in public services and so on. Rather, in setting out to deconstruct conventional market economics and centralised systems of state provision, the book arrives at a new sort of postmodern conservatism. At that stage, I realised that, although an interesting book, The Big Society would not be terribly helpful for me as someone who is not particularly interested in redefining conservatism—although, thinking about the Members of the Conservative Party in your Lordships’ House, I wondered just how many of them would give time of day to Jesse Norman’s book. He talks about institutions, competition and enterprise as being at the heart of the big society; I believe that the book is rather confused, but it is an interesting read.

Then I thought that I had better read the other standard tome, which is Phillip Blond’s book Red Tory. His book makes no mention of the phrase “big society”, I think because it was written early last year before the big society became an important term. Again, he has deep insights into the dehumanising consequences both of traditional capitalist structures and of centralised bureaucratic state provision. He comes up with the solution of co-ownership of quite small-scale public sector organisations so as to include both employees and citizens in the control of them. However, again, it is really about trying to redefine the Tory party and what it stands for, which is not really what I am about. I am looking for the big society as put forward by this coalition Government.

I come back to what most people think the big society means: community and neighbourhood empowerment, involving changes in the system to devolve power from the centre to communities and to local government; involving people in what happens in their area, which very often can be done through informal changes to the way in which things work—I certainly have a lot of experience, over my life, of trying to help to achieve that; and opening up public services to competition, charities, social enterprises and the private sector, which gives some of us very serious concerns that the result may be major disruptive changes to the way in which services are provided. What I really want to do is to come back to how the Government propose to stimulate local involvement in local communities, with perhaps local people running local facilities and local services.

That really comes down to the community organisers, which the Government said would be employed, or provided, in different communities in the country. David Cameron talked about a “neighbourhood army” of 500 full-time community organisers—which, at one per constituency, is not a lot; as those of us who have been involved in community work and development and politics over the years will know, that is very thin indeed—who would be backed up by 4,500 part-time volunteers.

Having done some research for this Question for Short Debate, I find that this work has now been put in the hands of an organisation called Locality—which I now know rather more about than I did—which is a sort of third sector quango-type body that does various work and is a federation of about 600 different organisations. In addition, an “Institute of Community Organising”—the ICO—is being set up to oversee the work after 2015. Indeed, there is quite a lot of stuff explaining what that is all about.

An organisation called Urban Forum—of which I had not previously heard—is also involved in this work. A community organisers briefing on the Urban Forum website sets out that:

“According to the Coalition Government community organisers will play an important role in delivering the Big Society by building community spirit, encouraging local community action, increasing the effectiveness of existing community groups, creating new groups and social enterprises and generally empowering communities to tackle the issues that matter to them. The Office of Civil Society has stated that the policy is based on the principles of Saul Alinsky and Paulo Friere”.

So far, so good. Alinksy, of course, is the man behind a lot of similar work in the United States.

Looking further on the Locality website to find out what was happening, I found that I had to go to something called “Jess Steele’s blog”. There is a lot on her blog. Indeed, the Locality website says:

“Jess is the director of innovation at Locality and leads on the Community Organisers project”.

It seems to me a bit odd that most of the information about what is going on is on someone’s blog. I have a huge printout of the blog, with which I will not detain your Lordships. It is quite entertaining, and a lot of it is arguing with other people in the community development and community organisation sphere about exactly how things should work.

A number of projects that have already been decided include 11 so-called kick-starters, which are based on existing respected community organisations. The interesting thing is how far it will be possible to extend that through existing respected organisations and how far in some areas there might be trouble because there are not suitable organisations to take on the work.

The Government are setting up a new system. Clearly, they are keen on generating new community involvement in the areas concerned, yet I find it strange that the same Government have just closed down, or are in the process of closing down, a system of generating community involvement that was set up and funded by the previous Government. I refer to the systems of neighbourhood management. There was previously a series of neighbourhood management pilots in different parts of the country, mainly in disadvantaged communities, and a separate series of neighbourhood management schemes funded under the housing market renewal scheme. Some of those were good, some were bad and some were very good, but there was a lot of experience there and a lot of involvement by residents, which has simply been discarded.

One Government came in and set up schemes to try to involve residents in their communities and did a lot of good work; another Government have come along and have withdrawn the funding from that. I speak from the experience in my own area of east Lancashire, where most of the neighbourhood management schemes have been completely closed down, although in Pendle we are trying to keep some of them going on a skeleton basis. Nevertheless, systems that exist and which have involved and enthused residents have been closed down. Perhaps in a year’s time one of these community organisers will come along and try to set it all up again. Yet if you have been involved with something and it has closed down, and somebody else comes along and says that they have a different sort of scheme, that is not how to generate enthusiasm and permanent support from residents.

I shall finish with some questions that I want to ask the Minister about community organisers. If she cannot answer them all today, that is fine. I am sure that she will write to me. Are all the areas that will have community organisers what Alinsky in America called poor communities, or will they be spread about everywhere? Can we have the terms of reference of the appointment of the community organisers, particularly the ones who have been appointed already? What do their terms of reference say that they will do and how will they do it? There is a real fear that they are top-down people telling other people what to do. To what extent will they build on existing initiatives and practices where they exist, like the ones that I have been talking about? How are they to be chosen and how are they being chosen? Are the posts being advertised and are people being appointed in a proper manner? What is the relationship between elected councillors going to be? What is the funding going to be? What monitoring evaluation and spread of good practice will there be? If the Minister cannot answer all those questions, that is fine, but I am sure she will write and answer them in due course.