Charitable Sector

Lord Judd Excerpts

Tuesday 5th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, if this debate is remembered for nothing else, it will be remembered for the quality of the maiden speeches—one powerful, well informed maiden speech after another. It really does augur extremely well for the future of our deliberations in this House.

I have to declare an interest. Like other Members of this House, I have spent much of my life in the voluntary sector, working both as a professional and as a trustee, which I still am.

It was during the bad years of the late 1980s when very nasty things were happening in Central America that I became fascinated by our work in that part of the world. I was a director of Oxfam at the time. I was on a particularly harrowing visit during which I had been to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, and I had seen the horrible consequences of what was politely called “low-intensity conflict”, which actually meant particularly vicious and nasty conflict.

I found myself in Mexico, where I was privileged to meet a very fine and outstanding bishop. I am not a Catholic but, my God, he impressed me. He was the bishop of San Cristobal and was always in trouble with the Mexican Government at the time because of his stand for the Indians in Chiapas. He was a very brave man. He was being threatened, yet he continued with his work. We were in his modest little house talking together. He had fluent English and we got on very well. I asked him, “Have you got a message that you would like me to take back to the UK?”. This was one of the most important learning experiences of my life. He said, “Yes, there are three things that I’d like you to think about. First, when you are talking about the kind of situations that you have been describing here in Central America, you can’t sanitise your relationship; you have to stand up and be counted”. Then he said, “In Oxfam, you talk a great deal about equality”. I still wake up at night sweating a little about the very pressing question that he put to me. He gave me a hard and firm look and said, “How far are these people with whom you’re working really your equals or how far are they the indispensable objects of your institutional needs?”. That is something that we all have to take very seriously. Do we have a kind of convoluted vested interest in failure, poverty and the rest because it enables us to fulfil ourselves and polish our virtue? He looked at me and said, “Frank, what is solidarity? It is a process of identification in the family, the community, the nation and, hopefully, the global community”. He said, “Solidarity for me is the process of deep identification and it is the real meaning of charity”.

I have often reflected on that because it applies every bit as much to the social challenges that charities face in this country as they do anywhere abroad. We talk about the poor, the deprived and the excluded, but how often do we talk with and for the deprived and the excluded? I came to the conclusion, as indeed did my organisation, that to go on treating just the symptoms would be dishonest; it would be to betray our supporters. One of the most important aspects of our work was advocacy—not just advocacy from intellectual conviction, although that matters, but advocacy based on the authority of experience and engagement. I am so glad that it has been referred to repeatedly in the debate that the real challenge to government and the rest is to encourage voluntary agencies and charities to speak out on their experience and to challenge society.

That brings me to my last point. We hear so much about the big society—and for somebody with my kind of background, there is an interest. What is the concept really about? Is it about very sophisticated, well intentioned occupational therapy for communities all over the country, or is it about enabling government to deliver services more cheaply and perhaps more effectively than through statutory bodies? As an old-fashioned member of my party, and with my political convictions, I believe strongly in a good, powerful and effective public sector. But are charities really about being part of the public sector?

The trouble is that if you go in for a contract culture in charities, you reach the situation that I encountered in a prison. Dedicated volunteers were working with young offenders on a contract that they had secured, which was to get young offenders into jobs. They discovered that for some of the young offenders to go straight into a job at that stage of their life was the last thing that they needed. They needed to develop their sense of social responsibility, their self- confidence and the rest before they could make a serious contribution in the employment market outside. The volunteers wanted to be able to think of things that were appropriate but they were told in words of almost one syllable, “Your contract is to get these people into jobs. That is how you will be measured. If you spend time counselling people you will lose the contract because that is not what it is about”. That is the trouble with getting too involved in the contract culture and the concept that you are in a charity that is just an extension of public administration of public service. The rigorous independence of charities is what really matters.

Forgive me for giving another example but obviously, because of the kind of life I have lived, I have many vivid examples. I was in Mozambique in the 1980s in the middle of that vicious war. I got to my destination only by relief aeroplane because the fighting on the ground was so serious. When I emerged there was a great crowd of people in a vast space; I can hear them murmuring now. Many had lost absolutely everything; some were naked. I talked to one family who had walked for days to get there. They had seen their seven year-old child chopped to death, thrown into their house and burned with the house. It was a horrible, vicious situation. But what really impressed me and left its indelible mark on me was the feeling of anger that came over me as I looked at the situation. I asked, “Why are these people in this situation?”.

If we are serious about the contribution of the voluntary sector and serious about taking an imaginative approach to charities and their work, more and more people should be enabled to engage in the social realities of the world in which we live and in the social realities of our own and international society. Having learnt from that engagement and that experience, they must be able to speak out with the authority that they have to inform the debate and to make something of accountability in our democratic system. Are we getting the right policies, and if not, why not? In the end, it is a matter of avoiding the temptation to go down what will be the plughole of civilisation by confusing consumerism and citizenship. If the voluntary sector has anything to contribute, it is to be making a healthy, vigorous society of informed citizens.