Voluntary Sector and Social Enterprise

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stone of Blackheath]

My Lords, I declare a specific interest in this field. I chair DIPEx, an Oxford-based charity. We are currently internationalising ourselves and I will cite this as an example later.

I propose to Her Majesty's Government that they may wish to create a hub in the United Kingdom that would encourage and support other established British charities and social enterprises to internationalise themselves. For decades, through the British Council, with a budget of £600 million, Britain has promoted language and education and our arts and culture. That is good for Britain and good for the world. Many excellent charities and voluntary organisations have already successfully internationalised themselves, but others are struggling to create organisations that spread worldwide with the right disciplines and standards, and many as yet have not realised the vast potential and advantage to be had by becoming international.

Imagine if we were to encourage British charities and social enterprises—large, medium and small—to consider researching other countries with the same issues that they are addressing here, and linking with organisations in those countries to form international organisations. I envision that to be taken on by either a government ministry or the British Council—or even the City of London; it was hitherto the centre for the finance industry but could become a centre for world philanthropy, possibly using the City Bridge Trust, which was mentioned earlier.

To start with, if perhaps 100 charities came forward to internationalise themselves, the hub would create for them access to international legal structures, the ability to set global standards and access to branding, marketing and website publishing. Even if it were to cost an average of £50,000 for each of those organisations, the total cost to make Britain the hub for 100 international such organisations would be £5 million.

Let me cite DIPEx as an example. I am not asking for help: we are going to internationalise ourselves using our own resources. This is what we decided to do. The DIPEx charity has worked closely with the University of Oxford, and with the support of the Department of Health—it has funded us so far with £2 million of the almost £10 million we have raised—to create www.healthtalkonline.org, a unique online resource. It publishes people’s personal experience of health conditions.

So far, we have covered 70 health conditions, including 10 types of cancer, heart diseases, neurological conditions and diabetes, and life issues such as bereavement, pregnancy and the menopause. The website includes not only the experiences of patients but those of carers, families and friends. On our website, we receive 1 million hits a week and 3 million unique visitors a year. We now know that watching and listening to the experiences of others can have a major impact on a person’s ability to deal with their health challenges through personal empowerment, being better informed and a reduced sense of isolation.

Based on training and support from DIPEx UK, organisations in other countries want us to help them set up parallel projects in their countries. Universities and hospitals in Spain, Germany, Holland, Japan, South Korea, China, Israel, Palestine, Canada and Australia are involved. Together, we will establish DIPEx International as an umbrella organisation to co-ordinate the activities of the group, to collect and publish health experiences worldwide and combinedly to help with fundraising. We have decided to use £50,000 of the DIPEx charitable reserves for this. Oxford would then become an international centre for the highest-quality worldwide health charity. Already as a result of our activity Green Templeton College in Oxford, where we are based, now plans to create HEXI, the Health Experiences Institute, a centre for research into patients’ health experiences worldwide. DIPEx is just one example of a charity doing this.

The International Centre for Social Franchising sees numerous social enterprises whose success has been evaluated and proven; yet, frustratingly, its wheel is constantly being reinvented. These organisations should be replicated in other areas and other countries. The core idea and the accumulated experience should be the starting point for designing and delivering solutions elsewhere.

Today, I merely suggest to the Minister that he asks the appropriate ministry to arrange a conversation with the people involved, to see whether this programme might help the charity and social enterprise field from Britain to make valuable connections and to create new ways to spread aid and services to countries with which we wish to have relations. I propose that the Minister suggests to his colleagues in government that we perhaps arrange a two-day conference where we invite 30 or 40 people from this field who would be interested in helping to take this idea forward. The participants could include, say, five charities; five social enterprises—small, medium and large—the Social Enterprise Coalition; an international consultant in this field such as the Social Investment Consultancy; the Enterprise Bank; Prism the Gift Fund, with which I am also involved; some experienced lawyers in this field; some big UK-based international businesses to help with advice on internationalisation and perhaps funding; the City Bridge Trust; the International Centre for Social Franchising; the Charities Commission; and, perhaps, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, who promoted this interesting debate. I am sorry that I do not have the resources to research this more deeply. It is merely a suggestion but perhaps noble Lords will feel that it merits further research, discussion and action.