Civil Society

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Prosser on introducing the debate and welcome the opportunity to say a few words. Before I set out an example of civil society, I want to do a tiny bit of scene-setting. As we saw this week, the UK is home to three times as many banker millionaires as the whole of the EU put together. The RSPCA has raised the pay for top executives into the £150,000 a year range, despite falling donations, and, in my view, is wasting money on prolific private prosecutions. Under the austerity regime that we are experiencing at the moment, when civil servants have been on an effective pay cut due to the pay freeze and pension cuts, the very top Civil Service levels have continued to receive eye-watering five-figure bonuses. I am as annoyed as Eric Pickles is at CLG at the failure to tackle the runaway local authority chief executive salary trough and the perks that are added to it. The Charity Commission, as it appears from the recent BBC “File on Four” programme, is busy certifying non-charities as charities. Seven out of 10 commissioners on the board are new and only one of them has any significant experience in the sector at all.

That is a bit of scene-setting for talking about civil society. Then I read Peter Oborne’s column in the Telegraph today. He says that the coalition has been brave and ambitious in challenging the official culture,

“dominated by the assumption that controlled, state-directed action held the key to national happiness”.

I have never agreed with that and I do not think that my noble friend has, from what she said earlier on anyway. Peter Oborne goes on to say that the programme of social change and economic reform,

“in its scope and audacity has no precedence in the post-war period, including the Thatcher years”.

The undertone of what is happening is extremely dangerous. I do not disagree entirely with everything that he says, but he then fails to ask who picks up the pieces as the state withdraws. That is the key question. If the policy is to have a shrunken state, which it clearly is—it has nothing to do with austerity in many ways—who picks up the pieces?

The effect of local authority funding being decimated is having a real negative effect on some of the frontline civil society organisations. On the one hand, local authorities are retreating from work by raising the bar of intervention—say in social services—and on the other cutting support to the private and third-sector operators in those areas. A young woman I met recently in one of our large northern cities works for an organisation that helps young people who are either homeless or in danger of becoming homeless. Her case workload left me staggered. It did not compare with what I had experienced during my 27 years in the Commons when qualified social workers carried out the work that she described. Social services have not even contracted out the work. They have simply raised the bar, saying that they do not do this any more, and their intervention comes only at the crisis level and then after lots of chasing up. This young woman had recently taken on supporting a very vulnerable female teenager who had run away from home several times and no one knew where she had gone. She had a drug history and was associating with much older men. For the princely sum of a pay rate that was a few pence above the minimum wage, this young woman worked over and above the call of duty in hours, support and liaison, and at levels which I know from experience qualified social workers did in the past.

This cannot be the way to pick up the pieces. As my noble friend said, it will end in tears. I fully appreciate that agencies at the centre and locally are having to make savings. I do not complain about that. I fully understand it and do not wish to be involved in a party-political dialogue about who is to blame. The fact is that that is the reality. It is obvious that the desire to replace services and shrink the state, which is certainly a central policy, is leaving gaps in areas that are difficult at the best of times. These areas were difficult when there was plenty of money. That is the point. By definition they are labour-intensive—very labour-intensive if one gets into the support of families. They are very challenging and often very sensitive. In short, they are the stuff that makes big headlines and calls for public inquiries when something goes tragically wrong in a specific case. That is the reality that we will be called to account for.

Slow growth and austerity are here for a while. I accept that. It would be ridiculous to work on any other basis. The population is ageing. More families are moving away or being moved away from social networks. These types of case will multiply. We need somehow to find a way properly to support the voluntary organisations. They are the bedrock and I am in favour of their not having as much red tape as local government. We need to do this not only with grants—finance is one area—but also with better routes into and support by the existing, remaining public services that can no longer fill their traditional roles. We have to accept that traditional roles are not being fulfilled by the statutory services, but they remain there with expertise infrastructure. We must find a way of enabling the voluntary sector, which is providing these services, to link in. We do not have that at present. It will end in tears if things simply carry on as they are at the moment. This is not all a call for more money. There has to be a better way of operating in the civil society.