Public Services (Social Value) Bill

Mike Freer Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2011 Commons Chamber

Again, a proper, well-thought-through strategy might consider how to ensure that all communities are covered and monitored, and that the characteristics of areas and authorities where fewer social enterprises were being developed were thought about, understood and considered for further support. A strategy would also think through what roles other non-Whitehall players could play in the Government’s ambition for more social enterprises. Further education colleges could perhaps play a role in meeting the training needs that I have just described. Key voluntary sector bodies could perhaps offer further support, and NHS trusts, foundation trusts and mutuals that are already part of the third sector in that sense could certainly have a role to play in supporting further NHS spin-outs. A strategy could help to lock in those key non-Whitehall players to help grow the social enterprise sector further.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Before we move off new clause 1, may I draw the House’s attention to subsection 5(b), which contains a definition of “social enterprise”? As I read it, Barratt Homes would qualify here, because one could argue that by building houses it is improving social infrastructure; the provision of affordable homes meets the criteria. Section 106 agreements, which provide affordable homes for rent, housing facilities and health facilities, all meet those criteria. In addition, the definition could exclude those seeking to provide fair trade services, because they do not provide or improve social or environmental well-being in the United Kingdom. Will the hon. Gentleman clarify how that provision would actually be applied? Would it not, in fact, open the door to every business?

[Mr Thomas]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about Barrett Homes. I draw his attention to subsection 5(d) of new clause 1, which refers to the business being

“majority-owned and controlled in the interests of improving the social or environmental well-being of the United Kingdom.”

Given that Barrett Homes has a substantial shareholder base, it would be difficult to justify in any court of law that it met that definition.

The hon. Gentleman's interesting point relates to Fairtrade, too, and if the Government accept the new clause, a small amendment in the other place could help to ensure that Fairtrade organisations were not excluded. I am open to the idea that his suggestion might work and I gently suggest that it would require the Minister to have a slightly more open mind than he demonstrated in Committee. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will have more luck in encouraging the Minister behind the scenes than I did in Committee.

New clause 2 highlights the key role that local authorities will play in helping to grow the social enterprise sector. Indeed, many of the representations I have received about the Bill stress the importance of local authority commissioners for social enterprises. A requirement for a proper strategic look at the needs of social enterprises in each local authority area would mean that Conservative councils, desperate simply to privatise services, would have to at least to consider the merits of the social enterprise sector. They would do well to look at the example of the many Labour-run co-op councils around the country that are already doing much to encourage social enterprises to develop.

In Committee, a number of Members noted the danger of strategy documents gathering dust and achieving little, which none of us in the House of Commons would want to see. I accept that that is a risk, and new clause 3 is designed to help minimise that risk. I have been struck by the enthusiasm of many of the organisations included for consultation on new clause 3. New clause 3 requires an annual report to be laid before Parliament with the clear involvement through consultation of a diverse range of representative bodies from the sector and others, such as the National Audit Office, which, if it wanted to do so, could comment effectively on the success or otherwise of the commissioning for social value part of the Bill. The Charity Commission would be able to provide a view on the effectiveness of the Government’s strategy to encourage further charities that are social enterprises, while the Office for National Statistics clearly needs to be encouraged to develop statistics to enable the sector’s strength and performance to be properly understood.

Evidence-based policy making and proper evaluation of what has worked and what has happened so that one can learn from mistakes is surely always a sensible approach for Ministers and Parliament to encourage. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, Social Enterprise UK and Co-operatives UK are all strong, excellent bodies that could offer insightful comments to help Ministers and, crucially, Parliament, to assess the effectiveness of the Government’s policies for encouraging the sector to grow.

I was struck by the recent Public Administration Committee’s report “Change in Government: the agenda for leadership”, published in September. The Committee noted the Prime Minister’s promise on, among other things,

“re-empowering…communities as part of the ‘Big Society’”.

Two paragraphs on, it stated:

“The principal message of this report is that unless there is a comprehensive change programme for government, there will be little of the real change”

that the Conservative manifesto promised. There are three new clauses before the House today that all offer the chance of that comprehensive change programme for social enterprise to be embedded across Whitehall.

My final point on the three new clauses is to draw the House’s attention to the new suggested definition for the sector. In Committee and in her intervention today, my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) rightly raised the issue of an asset lock to protect taxpayers’ assets to stop them simply being transferred to the private sector. In Committee, my right hon. Friend received support for the principle of an asset lock from the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) and even from the Minister.

As I said in response to the intervention from the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), subsection 5(d) of new clause 1 seeks to add a key description to the definition of social enterprise which locks in any public assets transfer to the social enterprise. That matters because the Opposition remember the bus privatisation scandal of the 1980s. The bus industry was transferred lock, stock and barrel from public ownership to employee mutuals. It was not that long before the employee mutuals handed themselves over to what had become big corporate bus businesses. Those businesses gained the assets on the cheap while the community and employees lost some of the social value implicit in those public assets, which were taken out as profits of those private businesses to reward their shareholders.

I do not criticise the entrepreneurs who set up and now run the bus industry, as the rules at the time allowed them to do what they did. I am certainly not against privatisation. It has its place, although that is not everywhere and not all the time. If that is the Government’s intention for an industry or a particular part of a sector, however, we should have proper, transparent debate about its merits.

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[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

May I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) for the foresight, diligence and perseverance with which he has brought forward the Bill? He has already achieved much by influencing mindsets and stimulating public debate, and those involved in the commissioning of and bidding for public services have already become much more aware of the importance of social value to the process. So, even before the Bill has passed into law, I congratulate him on all that he has achieved.

In opposing the new clauses proposed by the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) I must say that if a key aim of the Bill is to stimulate and encourage creativity and innovation in the growth of social value and social enterprise, particularly locally, and if, as I think we all agree, we are on a journey in that respect, much can be achieved, as my hon. Friend has already demonstrated, without unnecessarily defining or delaying the process through a national strategy. Let us get on with it and see the Bill passed into law.

The broad potential improvements and impact of the Bill are substantial. I shall touch on some of them now and, if time permits, on some of the ways in which, in my local authority already, there is refreshed thinking about the importance of considering social value when awarding contracts.

One of the key merits of the Bill is its proposal to expand and embed the concept of social value in the bidding process for public sector funding, and that is true not just when social enterprises are involved, but when private sector providers compete against one another. Providers are likely to lever social value into many more submissions for public funding, and in that respect the Bill will have an exponential effect on the bidding landscape.

The Bill will, I hope, introduce more flexibility to tendering. When I discussed it with the head of CVS Cheshire East, she said that the tendering processes need reviewing and

“need to be relevant to the service that is being commissioned”.

She went on to say that

“grants are often used to encourage creative solutions to a need or problem…A tender often doesn’t enable this to happen, as the method for solving the need has already been set.”

Another way in which I hope the Bill will add social value is by opening up the often complex and baffling area of public procurement to smaller local social enterprises. They work at the grass roots of their community and with an ear to the ground, and they are often best placed to work most effectively for their communities and to add social value by levering in, for example, volunteering, but until now they have felt that the bureaucratic barriers to tendering have been just too great. For local authorities to say, “We welcome you, recognise what you have to offer and are going to proactively work with you through the application process to help you successfully bid,” will be a real step change for such enterprises.

Many faith-based organisations augment our local communities, adding so much social value through youth work and work with the homeless, the elderly, the addicted and the lonely and in many other areas, but in recent years they have felt discouraged from applying for public sector funding, perhaps because of concerns that in procurement their ethos does not tick all the right boxes. I therefore hope also that, as a result of the Bill, they will be encouraged to make such applications in future. So often, what injects faith-based organisations with their tremendous energy, dedication and perseverance springs from that very ethos, and in a truly diverse society let us celebrate, not seek to neutralise it, because at the end of the day all organisations have an ethos; none can be wholly devoid of one, or totally neutral. So let us welcome such valuable organisations fully into the public procurement process. The Bill sends out the right signals in that regard, and I welcome that aspect of it.

I now quote some specific comments on the Bill from social enterprises in my constituency and cite some examples of good practice among them, showing how very much they welcome the Bill. Plus Dane is a housing association based in Cheshire and Merseyside that manages 12,500 homes and works as a neighbourhood investor. Mike Doran, its manager, who is based in Congleton, said:

“I believe the Bill will be of great benefit both to organisations such as ourselves but also to the wider community of locally based social enterprises…The need to demonstrate social value within procurement activity will ensure that a double bottom line of both economic and social good can be generated.”

I congratulate Cheshire East council as a forward-thinking council in this respect which absolutely recognises the value that organisations, community groups and social enterprises can add to our community livelihoods. I am delighted that in the recent past it has worked with Plus Dane on various projects. Plus Dane is delivering grounds maintenance and environmental services to the local authority. It is providing training and work for young people who have been long-term unemployed or have a history of getting into trouble with the law, enabling them to go on to gain full-time employment elsewhere. Plus Dane is working with the council in the provision of house building, with 35 apprentices, and it is supporting the development of a local apprenticeship initiative in Congleton that has involved the chamber of commerce, Congleton town partnership and local schools. This type of project is laudable, and this Bill will encourage a far greater recognition of such partnerships across local communities, which can make an exponential difference.

Another example is an enterprise called Visyon, which provides advice to young people who are suffering from abuse, the results of family breakdown, bullying and so on. It recently acquired devolved premises in my constituency through the local authority community transfer of assets scheme. In this respect, I commend the work of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who did so much to instigate that scheme. The hon. Member for Harrow West, who is not in his place, talked about the possibility of assets going out on the cheap. Visyon has received a local hall that was not being used to its maximum potential. The local authority has awarded it a contract that will enable those premises to support the development of many other groups across the constituency and their work within the local community. It is not about assets being passed across on the cheap but about a broader, better and more beneficial use of those assets for the whole community.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington. I feel privileged to have been able to support him on the journey that this Bill has undertaken, and I will continue to do so in future. I look forward to its outworking right across our nation.

[Mike Freer]

I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) for getting his Bill this far. I characterise the remarks of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) in that my business career was in the private sector but I also led one of the larger councils in the country. To be honest, when I first saw the Bill my heart sank, because I shared the prejudices that so many others have had regarding social enterprises. It was only when I started to see the Bill progress and to understand more of what was being done that the scales fell from my eyes and I became a supporter of it. It is better that a sinner repenteth than not change at all, if I may mix that analogy.

Although I support the Bill, I have some concerns that I hope the Minister can deal with. I believe that the definition of “social enterprise” needs to be clarified. As I said in my intervention on the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), there are many private sector organisations that we may not believe to be social enterprises but of which we could argue that part of their business is to improve the social welfare of the United Kingdom, although we may disagree. That is why unless we specify what is a social enterprise—including types of ownership, not just outcomes—we could end up with a lawyers’ charter as many companies argue that they have a social angle to their enterprise and should therefore qualify.

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[Mr Hurd]

I am very much prepared to accept, as I have in public on many occasions both in the House and outside, that we are building on some excellent work, to which consistency is fundamental. The point that I made earlier was that it was a Labour Secretary of State who sent a very mixed message to the market by giving an explicit statement that the NHS was to be the supplier of choice. I am delighted that there now seems to be cross-party support again for a message that is more positive for, and supportive of, social enterprises and charities and the opportunity for them to deliver public services.

The hon. Member for Harrow West mentioned the Work programme, and he is right that it is early days. There is certainly some frustration and cynicism out there in the social sector, and I am listening to it and liaising closely with the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), on it. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that under one of the most important of the Government’s programmes, deliberately structured as a payment-by-results system to incentivise primes to work with organisations that have a track record and a good opportunity to deliver results, we have 300 social enterprises and charities in the supply chain. Depending on their delivery, I believe they are set to earn several hundred million pounds over the life of their contracts. That is definitely a step forward.

The Work programme is not just about encouraging different suppliers of existing services. We are trying to get the system to think differently about how services are commissioned, so we are working with four local authorities on troubled families with multiple problems. I think we all know from our constituencies that the state has historically not done a very good job of supporting such families. We are encouraging those local authorities to consider working in a different way and structuring a more holistic service based more on prevention and an openness to working with different suppliers under a payment-by-results contract. We hope that will lead to four new social impact bonds, to encourage social investors to come in and share some of the risk and return.

That action and activity is intended to break down what the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and others know is a tremendous aversion to risk in the system. No one can pretend that that is easy, or that publishing a strategy document or even Government guidelines will instantly break down the culture of risk aversion in the public sector. She rightly talked about the need to support commissioners better, because they are operating in systems that are tremendously averse to risk. I have sat around tables with commissioners who get what we are talking about and want to make progress and work more with social enterprises and charities to restructure services. However, I have had queues of people at the door saying, “You can’t do that.” I am sure she knows—she has been there—that the more we consider the matter, the bigger the challenge gets.

We are thinking afresh about how we support commissioners, and the Minister for the Cabinet Office has talked about our plans to set up a commissioning academy to try to support commissioners, develop more intelligent commissioning and raise the status of the profession and the qualifications in it. We want to develop learning resources that build on the best practice that is being developed around the system, and that is a serious project.

The Bill will add value to that process—perhaps not in ways that every Member would like, because we all know that politics is the art of the possible at a given moment and that there are compromises to be made, but we are on a journey. The Bill will complement the best value duty, which Opposition Members did not mention but which my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) brought up. That was an important piece of guidance from the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to local authorities, setting out an expectation that commissioners should consider the overall value of service provision, including economic, environmental and social value. That covered the full procurement chain for services and goods, and was a very clear new piece of guidance.

We believe that the Bill will complement that useful guidance by sending an additional signal to commissioners outside local authorities that, where it is relevant and proportionate, they should consider social value at the pre-procurement phase when they are considering commissioning services. That is how we can balance out the areas in which we think the biggest impact can be made now and our desire not to impose too many disproportionate duties and burdens on people who are doing already very difficult jobs. That is where we are comfortable with pushing the agenda forward.

[Mike Freer]

I am grateful to the Minister for his clarification of the guidance from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. Guidance is fine, but from memory I believe it is still open to a local council tax payer or resident to challenge a local authority’s accounts if they believe that the local authority has not achieved best value. We need to go beyond guidance and ensure that the legislation all lines up.

[Mr Hurd]

I accept that point, and to some degree that is what we are doing today. We are moving forward on that. My hon. Friend mentions the concept of the right to challenge, which had not previously been mentioned in the debate. Again, we are moving forward on that, because we are moving into a world in which there will be much more information about what commissioners are doing and how public money is being spent. Through the Localism Act 2011, which I am delighted to say has completed its passage through Parliament, the right to challenge is now set in statute, with regulations to follow shortly to clarify how it will work. That is progress on the journey that I have described.