Social Policy

Lord Patel of Bradford Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel of Bradford]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss these important issues. I pay tribute to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for providing us with the opportunity for this timely and important debate. As a non-executive board member of the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, situated in the right reverend Prelate’s diocese, I have personal knowledge of his enormous commitment to partnership working with a view to improving access to services for the poorest and most disadvantaged communities. I add my welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and look forward to his maiden speech. I am sure that his passion, work and extensive knowledge of this area will serve the House well over the years.

Promoting effective engagement and partnerships between the statutory sector and the community and voluntary sector, including the churches and faith and non-faith organisations, has been at the heart of my entire professional life, so I greatly welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate on behalf of Her Majesty’s Opposition, as this is something about which I have a great deal of experience and, I hope, a little expertise. Together with colleagues at the research centre that I managed for many years, and with communities across the country, I have worked to develop effective models to build stronger communities—not expert-led models but community-led models, as they are the only ones that can truly tell us what works.

I take just one example from hundreds. Thanks to the Department of Health funding provided by the new Labour Government, we undertook a series of community engagement programmes across the country to assess the needs of black and minority ethnic communities around their use of illegal substances. This involved establishing and supporting a huge network of more than 400 black and minority ethnic groups and what might be termed “vulnerable groups” from the voluntary and community sector. That programme had some real and sustainable achievements, which were subject to a number of external evaluations. For example, more than 3,000 members of local communities were trained and supported in a range of engagement activities, while some 60,000 community members were engaged and consulted, leading to a sustainable impact on services through these community engagement programmes.

While I may not have been talking about the big society, something about which we have heard a lot over recent weeks and months, I feel that I have been doing something more important—actually doing things to bring it about. Despite all the talk, there seem to be few people who can say what the big society means. Indeed, this was evident throughout the election campaign. Let me therefore help the Government out by finding a definition that we can all understand. The big society is simply another way of telling people about the well established and crucial work done across the country by small and large voluntary and community organisations, self-help groups and neighbourhood actions, enabled and assisted by local government and a range of central government departments—indeed, much of the work that so many noble Lords are involved in. If I am wrong about this, will the Minister, whom I congratulate on her position on the Front Bench, give us a precise and practical definition of what the big society is, not just something that is opposed to something called the “big state”? How does it differ from what I have described?

Given my history, I of course wholeheartedly welcome the emphasis placed on involving communities and individuals in service delivery and decision-making. However, this is not a new planet that has just been discovered by astronomers. Rather, it is an example of the wisdom of the old adage, “There is nothing new under the sun”—or, to use another everyday phrase, which will no doubt be familiar to the Minister, “It is motherhood and apple pie”, and it will take a great deal more than talk to deliver it.

However, this Government will benefit hugely from the fact that they have not started with a blank sheet, as many great advances were made under the new Labour Government in this area, not only through projects in which I was directly involved, such as funding the community engagement programme, of which I have spoken, but a great many others, such as promoting participatory budgeting. That is an important process, which directly involves local people in making decisions on spending priorities. That is always important but never more so than now as we face the consequences of the £6.2 billion of in-year cuts recently announced by the Government.

These initiatives were not random but part of a coherent strategy set out in the White Paper Communities in Control, which set out for the first time to give people a greater and very practical voice in influencing change. Why, therefore, given the recent discovery of the big society, do the Government simply not commit to the principles and programmes of that White Paper, which was widely consulted on, and to developments such as Total Place, which proposes a radical reshaping of the services through place-based area budgets? The key partnership initiative was drawn up with local government and across government. It was a promising plan to join together local services and public bodies such as the police, councils and the NHS, not only to save money but radically to improve services, making them more personalised and more effective. It was starting to show how much waste and unnecessary bureaucracy come from multiple public bodies trying to achieve the same goal, leading to inefficiency and duplication without improving the lives of local people.

Despite the obvious agreement at local level among authorities and communities about the benefits of Total Place, I have not found mention of it in the programme for government and subsequent announcements. I therefore ask the Minister in her summing up to take this opportunity to guarantee to the House that the Total Place initiative, which has the potential to be a key framework for delivering effective local partnerships between government and civil society, has not been abandoned. If the Minister is unable to give us that assurance, I fear that the ground made under the previous Government in breaking down silos may be lost and that we risk having services that are inefficient and cost more as a result, at a time when we as a society—particularly poor and disadvantaged areas within our society—can least afford it. This strategic, joined-up approach is vital because, whatever words we choose to describe them—big society, citizen empowerment, community engagement—these good things are not easy to achieve. In developing our community engagement model, we encountered and had to use creativity and innovation to overcome a number of difficult and sometimes incredibly frustrating situations—for example, by establishing partnerships, creating trust, finding the best agency for delivery and finding and sustaining funding.

At the risk of using another cliché, I say that the devil will be in the detail. If my experience in this area has taught me anything, it is that achieving effective community engagement can be done only with adequate investment in those communities. Early in the life of the new Labour Government, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report Joined-up Places? Social Cohesion and Neighbourhood Regeneration observed:

“There’s a lot of money to be made from poor people as long as you don’t pay them to do it”.

It was precisely that situation that I and others working in this field sought to address and to which we have no desire to return. In developing our model of community engagement, we found that a number of key ingredients are necessary for effectiveness and sustainability. They include capacity building, through the provision of regular support, training—especially accredited training—and, crucially, appropriate resources. The role taken by the Government and the investment that they are prepared to put into enabling that to happen in helping to bring into being the big society will therefore be absolutely crucial. For example, volunteering, by which the Government also set much store, does not come cheap.

The Prime Minister, in what I must say was a thoughtful and wide-ranging speech last November, described the role of government in this regard. He said that it was,

“galvanising, catalysing, prompting, encouraging and agitating for community engagement and social renewal”,

and helping,

“families, individuals, charities and communities come together to solve problems”.

The programme for government gives a certain amount of detail on what this means in practice. I should like to highlight three key aims. First, on giving public sector workers the right to come together in employee-owned co-operatives to bid to take over the services that they deliver, I ask the Minister: how does this sit alongside the Government’s plans to reduce the public sector? To whom will they be accountable for quality and distribution and access to services? Secondly, on giving communities more information—for example, about local crime statistics—what would the Government want the community to do with such statistics? Thirdly, on more powers—for example, over decisions about planning and the closure of local services, and the right to bid to take over local statutory services—how will this affect the provision of affordable homes in the south-east or rural areas? Will it not simply encourage nimbyism?

The Prime Minister lists a number of practical steps to support these aims, including training community organisers; supporting the creation of neighbourhood groups; launching a national big society day; making regular community involvement a key element of Civil Service staff appraisals; establishing a programme enabling 16 year-olds to develop skills and start getting involved in their communities; and establishing a big society bank to provide new finance for neighbourhood groups, charities, social enterprises and other non-governmental bodies, supporting them to have greater involvement in the running of public services. I would not wish to criticise these aims or, indeed, any one of these practical steps. The question is rather whether this is what the big society adds up to—aspiration rather than practical investment and the sort of support and infrastructure that can really change things. I question whether the package is sufficient to achieve the transformational change that the Government are seeking, especially against a background of 20 per cent, or even higher, cuts, which we are told will be borne by local government and local services. If so much social innovation, social resilience and social service is now to be carried by social enterprise, can the Minister tell me precisely how much will be invested? Who will do the work? Where will the social entrepreneurs come from and how will they be trained, supported and sustained? That will be the practical test of an idea of which we all approve and want to see in practice.

As I said, I have major concerns in relation to the devil being in the detail. My right honourable friend the Member for Salford and Eccles, who, like me, has believed in and worked towards this agenda throughout her career and wishes to be a constructive critic, set out in another place last week three key tests for the Government in relation to their programme to achieve the big society: first, whether there is adequate funding; secondly, whether a proper framework will be established not only at national but also at local level; and, thirdly, fairness, such as whether capacity will be built in poorer communities to enable those living there, as well as those in more affluent areas, to step forward and take positions of responsibility. I echo my right honourable friend’s constructive comments and ask the Minister to give us more information, if she is able to, in relation to these three tests of funding, the national and local framework, and fairness.

To illustrate those points further, I shall focus on two of the practical steps described in the programme for government document: training community organisers and the establishment of the big society bank. In her response, can the Minister outline the following for the House? First, how many community organisers will there be and how will the Government ensure that they reflect the full spectrum of the society in which we live? How will they differ from community development officers in terms of professionalism, support and impact? What are they expected to do and how will they be paid?

Secondly, how much money will be allocated to the big society bank? Who will run this and ensure fairness? To whom will it be accountable? How will groups access funds from the bank? What steps will be taken to ensure that this is an inclusive process—how will the community and voluntary sector be involved in the decision-making process? What will the criteria be for selecting those who benefit from these opportunities and who will set and monitor the criteria? What assurance will we have that all groups—and I mean all groups, even those at the margins—will have an opportunity to access these funds?

On that last point, my experience over many years certainly tells me that most of the creative, innovative and successful work happens with local groups who are at the grass-roots level and who, on occasion, are not able to have the resources, expertise or information to submit a comprehensive grant application. Can the Minister tell us what pre-application support, advice and information will be given to these groups to ensure that the usual suspects do not simply receive all the funds? On the key test of fairness, even in these early days there have been some worrying signs that the big society could break down quite quickly.

Loath as I am to criticise a fellow Yorkshireman, I am, to put it mildly, not encouraged by the decisions made so far by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. Despite the rhetoric of devolving decision-making downwards, he has made decisions on the hoof without consultation, dictating to councils from his desk in Whitehall on a range of issues. This has included ordering them to put spending information online without consultation on cost or on how this should be done; stopping councils choosing whether to trial different ways of managing waste recycling by stopping pay-as-you-throw pilots; and trying to block Exeter and Norwich councils having more control over running services in their cities, leading to the Government’s first defeat in this place. As I have mentioned, he has let local services and local government bear the brunt of the 20 per cent or higher cuts in the £6.2 billion package of cuts. Recent figures released by his department show that it is cities, struggling seaside towns, former industrial towns and former coalfield areas that will be bearing the brunt of those cuts.

Rather than being targeted through a formula grant, which all councils receive, the cuts are being targeted through area-based and specific grants. In the main, these fund specific programmes in particular areas. Examples of programmes being hit by the cuts are: Supporting People, which gives vulnerable people the opportunity to live more independently—for example, helping elderly people to remain in their own homes; cohesion programmes to tackle all forms of extremism, such as the Connecting Communities programme in mainly white working-class areas, which has been entirely cut; and the working neighbourhoods fund, which tackles worklessness in areas of high unemployment.

I take an example from my own patch. We were proud to be one of the first NHS trusts in Leicester to take up the future jobs fund challenge, having employed several people with mental health problems in the first wave. Owing to the abolition of the future jobs fund by the Government, I am saddened that plans for further posts this year, including those for people with learning disabilities, have had to be cancelled. Clearly, this is hurting the most disadvantaged, the most deserving and some of the most vulnerable people in our society. It may be easy for us to stand in this House and talk about the big society and big sums of money, but such individuals are having to live with the reality of decisions made by this Government today.

The Government have rightly emphasised the importance of transparency and the power of information. Therefore, I ask the Minister to give us some guarantees that vulnerable people, who would be affected if these cuts went through, will be protected and to detail how the Government propose to monitor and to report regularly to this House the impact of the package of spending cuts on local government and local services, including the impact not only on different geographical areas but on particular spending programmes and population groups.

I am most concerned about that issue in today’s discussion. It is highly relevant to the serious financial decisions that are being made, which will have the most profound effect on those who have the least ability to fight back or to represent their own interests, not because they are somehow incapable or broken but because we simply do not listen enough. I passionately believe that our society is not broken; the thousands of committed individuals and groups that I have encountered in my work over the years have persuaded me of that. However, I believe that we need to continue to strive to fix the relationship between the political class or the public sector—call it what you will—and local communities. This situation will be exacerbated if cuts are unfair in their effects. Rather than demonstrating that we are all in this together, these cuts will hit hardest those who can least afford it, the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of our society.