Big Society

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making some good points, including the one about the proportion of income that charities are getting from statutory governmental sources. Should the Government consider stripping the charitable status from organisations that achieve 80% of their funding from the state?

[Margot James]

I would like to consider that suggestion more fully. It is a laudable one, which would address the problem of over-dependence, although I fear that too great a bureaucracy would be required to oversee such an idea, resulting in two steps forward and one step back.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy]

I am going to press on, because I do not have much time.

We on the left have always understood that for any organisation to work, it needs a sense of purpose and a common goal. It needs to know what it is trying to achieve, not just how it will try to achieve it. People can then be brought together around that current goal.

That leads me to my second point about why purpose is so important in the big society. It seems to me that in the points that are being made about it, a whole series of objectives are conflated, whether democratic engagement or increasing volunteering. We all understand that volunteering is not the same as voice, but the conflation of more meetings at a local level with encouraging more people to volunteer and looking to commission more within the voluntary sector seems to reflect a lack of purpose.

[Richard Fuller]

rose—

[Stella Creasy]

I am not going to give way, because the clock is ticking. I do apologise.

Either the big society is a programme about the devolution of power, with single, double or treble participation, or it is about encouraging more people to be involved in running services. A lack of purpose comes from not having a mechanism to ensure that the purpose of those processes is fair and balanced. We on these Benches are very clear that all the purposes of Government should be about achieving a more equal, fairer society.

Equally, there is no mechanism in a process-driven purpose for judging value for money. As a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I look forward to seeing some of the reports that will come to us. Above all, there can be no clarity about the tough choices that any Government or any public may have to make about the type of services that they want if there is no sense of what those services are intended to achieve. Why are free schools and encouraging people in the voluntary sector to work together more seen as the same thing? It seems like apples and pears.

That leads me to the second problem with the big society, which is that it does not show an understanding of the voluntary sector as it is currently constructed. The focus on processes obscures as much of the work as it illuminates and shows a misreading of the fact that civil society is intricately connected with the public sector as much as it works with the private sector. Many charities are little different from businesses, as I believe the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) set out earlier, and many people who work in the public sector do so with an ethos of care and concern for their communities. Taking the argument for reform of the state and using it to call for its abolition like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

The history of the co-operative movement proves that. It was set up as a form of protection against the absence of publicly provided services—to fill a gap rather than to replace those services. The modern voluntary sector is intricately interconnected with the state, whether through the funding that it receives or the people with whom it works. The voluntary sector organisations that many Members have mentioned having in their communities will struggle without a sense of purpose to draw people together.

We have to be clear that the voluntary sector in itself is not a panacea. Some voluntary sector organisations work well and others do not work so well, so there needs to be a sense of purpose and a series of tests to set against it. We must also consider the type of volunteering that people are prepared to do. We are seeing a rise in what people call “episodic volunteering”, and there are many questions about whether such volunteering can deliver the purported goals of the big society. There are questions about whether there will be the sustained involvement and participation that people wish to see, or whether people will be willing to turn up for a day to volunteer on a stall but not to volunteer in the long term.

That leads me to my third concern about the big society, which is that it shows a misreading of the nature of community. Basing our view of community on the “little platoons” that people are so fond of talking about makes little sense in a contemporary era when we can know and feel the consequences of riots on the streets of Libya, poverty in Asia or earthquakes in New Zealand. Connectedness happens in many different ways around the world, locally, nationally and internationally, and through many different life stages.

I appeal to Conservative Members to learn the lessons that we on these Benches did about the danger of reading too much into communitarianism and the work of Etzioni. I found it fascinating to find out over the weekend that Robert Putnam and Colonel Gaddafi had once met to talk about whether there was a connection between “The Green Book” and social capital.

If we are to secure change in contemporary society, we need a better way of understanding how and why people connect. We also need a better reading of how and why people are connecting in their current societies, given that nearly 40% of people already currently volunteer through formal organisations and a further 56% volunteer in informal ways. The idea that Britain is broken or a nation of people who are alienated from their communities is simply not true. Furthermore, there is a danger in forcing our vision of what community looks like on communities that may have many social networks but are not connected to the public sector. The big society needs a better analysis of the nature of community and community bonds than it currently offers.

That leads to my fourth concern about the big society, which is that it does not show an understanding of the resources that communities have to give to volunteering and public service. We can learn not least from the experience of the big society ambassador himself, who found that he did not have the time to be involved in the way that he wished to be.

Anyone who has worked in the voluntary sector knows that time, money and confidence are critical factors in securing the contribution that anybody can make. The big society needs a better articulation of how that time, money and confidence will be shared out more equitably among society, so that we can unlock the potential that many people have. Asking people to do so much in such a short period does not allow for the time and effort that is required to allow that potential to grow.

I urge Members to look again at a case such as Porto Alegre and see that it took 20 years for people to be involved in the delivery of public services in Brazil in the way that many now want here. Perhaps they should learn from New Harmony, a colony set up by Robert Owen in Indiana that for 20 years developed libraries, community centres and hospitals, and then fell apart because all the people involved decided that they hated each other. That is the reality of trying to get people to work together—it is complex, messy and difficult, and without a sense of purpose it is destined to fail.

That is why I urge the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) to read a little less Burke and a little more William Morris, who understood that fellowship is life and a lack of fellowship is death. We on the left understand from Morris’s work that fellowship was about not just asking people to work together but about the conditions under which they worked. He understood the tyranny of inequality and the ability to bring people together to work in co-ops.

I also encourage the hon. Gentleman to read Tawney, who talked about fellowship being expressed not only through relationships between people but through institutions. We see the national health service as the best social insurance policy that the nation can have, and we work together at many different levels to achieve such goals. We look to the purpose first, and then to the different models for delivering it, rather than starting with the process of volunteering and asking what it can do. I hope that in this short time I have set out some alternative suggestions, and I would be happy to discuss the matter further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in the debate and a particular delight to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White), who counts my mother, father and brother among his constituents. They routinely tell me what an excellent job he is doing as their Member of Parliament.

[Stephen Pound]

Get on with it.

[Richard Fuller]

I shall, indeed.

It has been interesting to hear people’s different perspectives on what the big society means, so at least we know that the big society is something. We might not agree on our perceptions of it, but I am with my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) in being quite comfortable with that difference of approach. For me, however, the point of the big society at this moment is about building institutions—other than state bureaucracies—that can deliver effectively the social goods and services that we all desire.

The bureaucracy was, as we have heard, always only one model, not the only model, for the provision of social goods and services, but over the years it has come to dominate the space in social goods provision. In so dominating that space, it has created other organisations that are less sustainable and resilient because of their dependence for their continuation on state funding.

Under the previous Government, new forms of charitable organisations evolved, and in fairness institutional forms will evolve over time. It takes time to create institutions; we have only to look at the construction of different forms within the private sector and other aspects of organisational theory.

It is also important to recognise the imbalance between bureaucracies on the one hand and charities, social enterprises and so on, on the other. Over the past 10 years, charities have in many ways been co-opted by the Government. If we look at the earned income of charities in 2000, we see that 40% came from statutory Government sources. Within just seven years, that percentage had risen to 52%. How does that help the independence of those institutions? How does it help to create resilience within them?

Not all charities are the same, however. The hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) heralded the women’s institute as the paragon of a big society organisation, but as Government Members know, women’s institutes do not claim Government money at all. Smaller charities have a far greater reliance than larger charities on individual donations: 64% of the income of very small charities comes from voluntary donations and private sources, and only 5% comes from statutory sources. For the large charities, those that are pretty good at cosying up to the Government, 34% comes from individual sources, and 38% comes from Government sources.

That mirroring of the state can also be seen in senior executive pay. On many occasions in the House, we have heard people talk about the growth in senior executive pay in local and national Government, and, as we look to the big society, people will have questions about whether the chief executive officer of Barnardo’s should be paid £166,000 a year, whether the chief executive of Action for Children should be paid £130,000 and whether we should really allow the chief executive of World Vision to sneak in at £99,994 a year without pointing to it. These are areas where we have to say that we need change. Do we see these social organisations as institutions in their own right or just as agents of the Government? If it is the former, we need to enhance their institutional strength.

I have some suggestions, many of which are already emanating from our Government. It is sometimes argued that giving people a tax deduction for their charitable donation will have the same result as gift aid, but I think we should change the system. People will respond more positively if they know they are going to get a tax deduction for their charitable donation. We do it for venture capital trust contributions and for the enterprise investment scheme, so why cannot we change the system to do it for charitable donations too? We need to look at ways of simplifying the rules and regulations. In particular, can we ease the rules on mergers and acquisitions between charities so that they can be done more effectively? Looking at the big society bank, can we ensure that we limit its scope to focus on those who are most important for society as a whole?

Most importantly, can we use this opportunity to create centres of excellence for non-profit bidding expertise? ConsortiCo in my constituency has brought together 35 charities to help them to bid for local government contracts. That is important, because many charities find it hard to access Government contracts. These organisations will become the platforms for outcome-based financing in future, and we need local centres of excellence to appear with their local government authorities in order to gain the experience of writing contracts that can be used for outcome-based financing. Fundamentally, the fight between charities and bureaucracies is not fair because bureaucracies hold all the cards. If we do not give charities the strengths to compete effectively with bureaucracies, we will not achieve the big society at this time.

It is a challenge for Conservative Members to implement the changes of the big society in this period of office, and it will govern and colour the context of our time. For Labour Members, however, the challenges are even more significant. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) said, they have to decide whether they want to continue to move forward with the reform agents in social enterprises and charities or to remain as guardians of the status quo.