Big Society

Mel Stride Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) and the Backbench Business Committee on securing this valuable debate.

Let me start by looking at the origins of the Prime Minister’s conviction, which is driving the big society forward. It goes back to shortly after he was elected Leader of the Opposition six years ago. At that time, his commitment was very much informed by the work of the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and his founding of the Centre for Social Justice. In 2007, the Prime Minister stated clearly that the task of the next Government would be to reverse decades of social decline and that that crisis of social decline was every bit as great as the economic crisis that confronted the new Conservative Government in 1979. It is completely disingenuous of certain sectors of the media and of certain interests to suppose that the big society concept is some sort of cynical cover for spending cuts, and I am glad that some Opposition Members have acknowledged that that is not the case.

The difference between now and 1979 is that this Government confront both a social crisis and an economic crisis, which the Prime Minister probably did not foresee back in 2007. Those two crises are two sides of one coin, and one will not be solved without the other. This country has been living beyond its means for some considerable time—at least a decade. Throughout the boom years, we spent vast and increasing amounts of money on social problems that still persist, such as the 2 million or so people on out-of-work benefits, while new jobs were created but mostly filled by newly arrived immigrants. More and more money was spent on schools every year, but that did not reverse the relative educational decline of Britain compared with other countries.

Why do we have so many problems and what will the big society do to address them? I acknowledge the speech of the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), which was in many ways excellent, and I agree that the state and civil society are inextricably linked. However, I argue that things have got out of kilter and that over the past 10 years there has increasingly been a dominance of the state and a “Government know best” mentality. Let me give a few examples of the adverse effect that that has had. The Criminal Records Bureau is a laudable organisation, but it has become quite extreme in its intervention, affecting people who want to volunteer to drive one another’s children around. I am on my third CRB check, and I am just a school governor and a volunteer with an FE college.

Health and safety has got out of control, and I am delighted that the Government are going to tackle the excessive approach that prevents teachers from taking schoolchildren on much-valued trips. The risk of finding oneself on the wrong side of the law for intervening in a street situation is a problem, as is the fact that families are prevented from hiring carers or agency nurses to support their elderly relatives in hospital—I have argued with my hospital in Dudley about that. We have heard the reports about the treatment of older people in our hospitals, and if people want to hire additional support, they should be allowed to do so.

[Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case against health and safety legislation, which many of us know to be extremely onerous. Does she agree that another issue is the no win, no fee legal environment—the compensation culture—in which we operate, which puts an undue cost burden on voluntary organisations seeking to help in their local communities?

[Margot James]

I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent intervention; I certainly agree. The compensation culture has grown up over many years—to a certain extent, we have imported it from the United States. I hope our Government will address that significant problem.

The bureaucracy of the grant and contracting process at local authority level has put off a number of smaller organisations, which, every year, have to make their case afresh for the same grant or contract for the same service. They cannot get any core funding. We are committed to changing that, and change is long overdue.

Some charities have become overly dependent on the state, particularly at a local level, so that too much of their money comes from local authorities. They almost cease to exist as voluntary bodies, which takes away a great deal from their esprit de corps and the motive that drove their passion in the first place. In many ways, the tail starts wagging the dog. Small voluntary groups are tailoring what they do to meet the criteria of the next grant body that they approach.

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[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure and a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), and I congratulate the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), who is no longer in his place, on securing this debate. We on the Opposition Benches are enormous fans of the big society, not least because it cost the Conservatives an overall majority at the general election. Well, we thought it did until we saw their friends on the Liberal Benches.

I was happy to put my name to the motion, because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) suggested, the big society is absolutely fundamental to the Labour vision and to the Labour traditions of mutualism, co-operation and associationalism. However, there is a strong case for saying that we have lost sight of many of those traditions. We lost sight of them in the early 20th century, when we allowed clause IV to be written as it was, and we lost sight of them in the later years of our period in government, when we became over-regulatory and over-zealous in our admiration of the state. The hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) cited some of the Criminal Records Bureau’s activities, and that is an example of exactly where we began to go wrong.

As I think about how the Labour party begins to renew itself and ask questions of itself as we prepare for our speedy return to government, I think about our relationship with the big society and the tradition re-emerges.

[Mel Stride]

Before the hon. Gentleman processes on his speedy return to government, may I ask him something, as someone who has an interest in history and knows that he has an acute interest in history? That aspect of the state crowding out private and mutual endeavour was highlighted by William Beveridge in his report. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that Beveridge would look back now and say that the state had become too big, and that Labour Governments had played their part in that?

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. That is an acute question. I do not always accept the notion of crowding out, although there are times at which one can point to that.

The Labour tradition, as it has evolved, has sought to create a critical relationship with local government and central Government, and that is the difference between ourselves and Conservative Members. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West suggested, the enabling state is part of the Labour tradition. When we look back to where we have come from, as my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) will imminently explain in beautiful prose, we can go right back to the late 18th century to the traditions of Paine and of critiquing the functioning of the market while believing in market principles. This was based on a belief that the state was not always a force for good. As Adam Smith argued, the state in the late 18th century was often a force for arbitrary activities, clamping down on the rights of working people and interfering in proper market practice.

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[Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)]

I welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) on securing it and on shamelessly promoting the port of Dover throughout his opening address. Before I became a Member of this House, I knew that the port of Dover was important. After two months here, I knew that it was very important. After tonight, I know that it is perhaps the most important entity in the entire country, if not the entire world. I thank him for educating me on that.

There are some on the Opposition Benches who I believe also need educating, particularly having heard their rather thin arguments against the big society, including, first and foremost, that it lacks any clear definition. That charge was levelled by the hon. Members for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen). We have heard many Members today speaking eloquently about community empowerment, about opening up public services and about social action. Those are very clear definitions of what the big society is about. I accept, however, that the Government need to get better at communicating this message succinctly, particularly when we are in front of left-wing journalists from the BBC or the newspapers. We have to roll it out in a snappy two or three-sentence version in order to get it right.

We have heard a great deal about the big society simply being a fig leaf for cuts, yet many Opposition Members have accepted that the Prime Minister was talking about the big society well before there was any obvious need for cuts of this size due to the profligacy of the previous Administration. The big society is about a great deal more than simply resourcing. It is about the way in which society is organised and the way in which organisations are structured. It is about getting rid of top-down command and control, and replacing it with the empowerment of individuals, families and communities. It has also been suggested that we are on some kind of ideological crusade to attack the state. We are not on any such crusade, but implicit in a belief in the big society is an acceptance that the state has, in part, failed, that it is not perfect and that it has its limitations.

I want to dwell briefly on some of the work that was carried out after the second world war by a gentleman called Michael Young, who might be familiar to some Opposition Members. He was one of the authors of the 1945 Labour party manifesto. He went into Bethnal Green in the east end of London and sought out the deprivation that was to be the subject of his study. He interviewed members of every 36th household in the area. He certainly found deprivation there, but he also found something even more important—something he had not expressly sought to find out. What he found was best exemplified by an interview with a young boy who lived outside the area, who came home from the local school and said that his teacher had asked him and all the other children to draw their families. He said, “I drew myself; I drew my mother; and I drew my father”, but all the other children had drawn their mothers and fathers, nannies and aunties, grannies and so forth. Of course, what he was led to enunciate at that point was the big society—the extended family, the communities living in the east end at that time.

The socialist top-down approach to that problem was to destroy it all, bulldoze it and build the high-rise buildings that the socialist planners wanted to build, yet many of them were subsequently destroyed—exploded in the ’70s and ’80s. It seems to me that one of the most important things to grasp about the big society is the need to get away from that command-and-control, “we know best for you” mentality and to empower individuals, families and communities to take those decisions for themselves. That is why I particularly welcome the Localism Bill as part of the big society idea. I will conclude there to allow other Members to speak.