Social Policy

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester on securing this debate. It could not be more timely, as the new Administration begin to put in place a new strategy for shaping and delivering social policy. I apologise for missing the first minute or two of his introduction, but the quality of the greater part which I did hear was sufficient to show what an impressive introduction it was. I also welcome the Minister to her position on the Front Bench and, like the rest of us, I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wei.

The current fiscal environment demands that social policy and public services are recast to take account of the new economic reality, but the questions and challenges that that poses are immense. Not only is the scale of these issues already very significant, but, as the full effects of the recession play out, it will continue to grow. The Government are now looking at a situation where they will have to do much more with far less. Speaking as an advocate for the voluntary sector, I believe that must ensure value for money, efficiency and effectiveness of services in order to extract the maximum utility that we can from each pound of public spend. As a result, we must ensure that the policy frameworks around which those services are constructed are as focused and as appropriate as we can make them. I believe that civil society is in a unique position to help the Government to create those frameworks. The expertise and knowledge of the sector, whose strengths need to be harnessed, are an invaluable resource for the Government.

The Government’s big society agenda may well be able to provide at least a partial answer in meeting those problems. However, doing so requires recognition of the fact that building the big society needs not just civic action but organised civic action; that is to say, civil society organisations with business nous and financial capacity and a smart, strategic state working in genuine partnership with the sector. The danger that we face is a state that simply retrenches and leaves the big society to pick up the pieces.

There are two clear planks in the Government’s vision for a big society: empowered communities and more public services delivered by citizen-focused civil society organisations. Those ambitions are not without their history. The boundaries between what is done by the state and what is done by the voluntary sector have shifted backwards and forwards over the centuries. The state made a major advance in the 20th century, but it is now definitely in retreat. How headlong that retreat will prove to be is perhaps under negotiation, even as we speak. Over the past decade, there has been a growing political consensus on the strengths that civil society organisations bring to public services. Increasing levels of impact reporting are now formally demonstrating the immense value that the sector brings to shaping social policy and delivering services.

The key strength that the sector provides in shaping policy is in the role of the provider advocate. Due to the close nature of their relationship with their beneficiaries, civil society organisations are able to shape their services around individual need, and can then translate the lessons learnt from practice into policy. That exercise can be successful only when relationships of trust and mutuality exist—something which civil society is streets ahead of other sectors in creating. That knowledge must be used and applied by government in the design of effective social policy.

A major question is: how do we get from where we are today to where we want to be? How, practically, is the big society to be built, especially at a time when the state’s capacity will be hampered by massive public spending cuts? One thing is clear: success will depend to a large degree on the extent to which civic action can organise itself. Informal civil action—mutual support between family members and friends, for example—is the bedrock of our society, but clearly there are limits to what can be done through such informal activity

If you want volunteers helping children to read in school, reformed ex-offenders mentoring those released from prison to prevent reoffending or volunteers providing the elderly with company and conversation, you will need civil society organisations to manage and organise those volunteers. You will need those organisations to be efficient, professional and well led. If you want civil society organisations to deliver more public services, especially at a time when spending cuts mean that you also want efficiencies of scale and to pay providers only once they have achieved results, you will need those organisations to be businesslike, capable of scaling up and able to access working capital.

Furthermore, if you want civil society to shape policy, there will need to be formal conduits through which information and evidence of the impact of civic action can be collected, analysed and evaluated. Formalised organisations and networks are not necessarily a sign of inefficiency or waste. Infrastructure, both capital and organisational, is an important way of gaining efficiency, collating data and sharing best practice. It is imperative that that aspect is not ignored by the Government if they are truly keen on a big society.

How is civil society meeting those challenges? Consolidation is an obvious response to the need for greater cost-effectiveness. That is beginning to happen, still too tentatively, in a sector deeply imbued with traditions of organisational pride, but I predict that it will grow. Diversity is a good thing, but you can have too much of it. In the world of the visually impaired, which, as vice-president of the RNIB, I know a bit about, there are no fewer than 733 charities. The RNIB thus performs an invaluable service for government by bringing together the entire impairment sector—not just charities but the statutory sector as well, eye health and social care professionals and users of eye care services—around a UK vision strategy. That sets out a shared agenda which gives government and others a coherent and expert view of what the sector needs.

That both points to and facilitates a second requirement: partnership from the state. As David Cameron has said, building a big society will require a smart, strategic state, not one that simply retrenches. It will require a state that is proactive in supporting civil society—for instance, by acting fast to set up a big society bank. It will require a state that works with us in the sector to define the contours of the big society. Above all, it will require a state that does not think, even at the back of its mind, that the sector can simply pick up the pieces for free when the state decides to do less. It cannot, it will not, and in every sense the Government would pay a heavy price for believing the opposite.

Civil society organisations such as the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations have campaigned vigorously for the Government to take a mature partnership approach in policy formation. I believe that this is an offer that we should seize with both hands, particularly over the coming months when it will be critical to bring out the best in both sectors. Already the Government have courted controversy by ending the future jobs fund, an effective scheme devised by the third sector for producing real, long-term jobs, and the perverse decision to replace futurebuilders loans with grants. Dangerously, backward-looking councils have already started cutting grants to voluntary organisations. The sector and government must do more to work together in creating more positive social outcomes. Both sides are realistic and know that cuts in spending are coming, but a partnership approach in policy and delivery can ensure the least damage to vital front-line services. We should not underestimate this challenge, and now is no time to be romantic. However, I believe that a meaningful partnership between government and civil society is a vital plank in developing a more effective and appropriate social policy.