Stephen Pound
Main Page: Stephen Pound (Labour - Ealing North)Department Debates - View all Stephen Pound's debates with the Cabinet Office
(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
I welcome the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), his party and his Government to the big society, which is something that we on this side of the House have been involved in since birth. It was what brought many of us into politics. Reference has been made by Members on both sides to Burke, Paine and Hobbes as the people who invented the big society, but it goes back a long way beyond them. It goes back to the time when man was a hunter-gatherer on the plains, when co-operation, camaraderie and esprit de corps mattered because people’s lives depended on them. This was reflected in all the great religions. Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all make reference to the concept. They all declare that there is such a thing as society, that the worship of mammon works against society, that we are our brother’s keeper, and that we should do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves.
The Prime Minister had a Damascene conversion five years ago, and I welcome that if it was a true conversion. If, however, it was about countering the Tory dictum that there is no such thing society, about domesticating the rabid right of his party for the purpose of electoral gain, or about airbrushing his party’s past, it will not wash. The Conservatives’ philosophy in the 1980s was that greed was good, that unemployment was “a price worth paying”, and that people should get on their bikes when they became unemployed. Many people on this side of the House, and in the community and voluntary sector, find it hard to believe that they honestly believe in the big society.
We remember the Conservatives’ record of voting against measures to promote unity, cohesion, equality and inclusion. Many of them might have changed their position over the past 10 years. Let us take the issue of gay rights. Where did the Conservatives stand on that, 10 or 15 years ago? I do not think that there are any Conservative Members here tonight who voted against that measure; those here now are mainly new Members. Where were the Conservatives on the issue of the minimum wage? Where were they on the issue of help for the most persecuted and the poorest in society? The Conservatives coined the term “broken society”. We remember Lilley’s list, and his singing and vilifying single mothers. We remember the damage done to mining, to the steel industry and to inner city communities. We remember hooray Henrys awash with money and champagne stepping over the homeless in the west end. That is the historical perspective.
I shall turn now to the present big society. The Minister’s Department has made a number of big mistakes in introducing the concept of the big society. The first was the terminology that it used. The term “big society” does not resonate with the person on the street. People do not live in a society; they live in a community. Perhaps the Conservatives used the term “big society” because it had some resonance with the term “broken society”. Perhaps they thought that the big society could heal the broken society. It sounds so simple and easy, but it is so trite.
The Department’s second mistake involves the need to apologise for past actions and show a little contrition. It was the Conservatives who broke society in the 1980s. It was they who increased inequality and gave the green light to greed. It was they who denied the very existence of society. I shall give the House an example. The story from the holy book of the Good Samaritan was perverted when Mrs Thatcher said that it was not about being good but about being rich. She suggested that if the Good Samaritan had not had the money to pay the innkeeper, the poor man would have died. That totally misses the point.
The Government’s third mistake was to party politicise this agenda without even having the support of their own Back Benchers. Where are their big beasts? I do not want to disparage anyone sitting on the Government Benches tonight, but they are all newcomers. Where are the big beasts? Many of them do not support this agenda.
Chris Ruane
He is indeed.
The Government are presenting the big society as a simple solution to a highly complex issue. There are big issues out there around which we can build consensus. It can be built around defence, for example, or around Northern Ireland or Iraq. Those issues can be depoliticised. Another example is pensions. We all came together over pensions, except that the consensus was broken by the Conservatives just before the election when they tried to make party political points on the matter. There was also consensus on the constitution in Scotland, when we had the convention.
That is how this important issue should have been approached. It is probably the biggest issue that western society will face this century. The fact is that, across the western world, we are atomised and alienated. There are many theories to explain that. They have been put forward in cogent arguments with statistics to back them up. Oliver James, in his book “Affluenza”, traces the cause of the problem to advertising and the promotion of an ideal that we can never attain. When we get on to the treadmill of trying to attain it, we lose our sense of direction; we lose contact with our families and communities as everything becomes about ourselves.
Robert Putnam’s fantastic book, “Bowling Alone”, identifies television as one of the biggest reasons for the problem. He found that an individual today spends more time in front of his TV than he spends at work. That has consequences for the amount of time he can allocate to his community, to his family and to society. Wilkinson and Pickett’s book traces the causes of the present situation back to inequality, which increased rapidly in the 1980s. Are we going to be able to get on top of the issues of advertising, TV and inequality without coming together? The Government think that they have come up with a great idea, but we have known about it for thousands of years. They have party politicised it.
The Government’s fourth mistake was to introduce this idea at the wrong time, when they knew that they were going to make cuts. Some of those cuts are necessary, but many of them are ideological. The budget for the voluntary sector last year was £36 billion, of which £6 billion came from local authorities alone. Labour doubled the amount going to the voluntary sector over 13 years. If the present Government are going to cut that budget and make voluntary sector workers unemployed, they are not going to win the argument with the Churches, with the trade unions, with the community and voluntary sector or with the Labour party. They need to build consensus.
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.
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.
Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)
I am grateful to have been brought into this seminar, as it has been called, on the big society and what it means. I am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller), who was keen to get involved earlier when there were endless discussions about what Baroness Thatcher said and did not say; I know that he has quite positive views about that. I am going to have to disappoint my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), who so brilliantly introduced the debate and got it off the stocks. He said that we would be talking about the post-bureaucratic age—well, I, for one, do not understand the post-bureaucratic age. I have learned from the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) about episodic volunteering, which I think must be a psychological disease.
I will deal with one or two facts about my constituency and what we are trying to achieve in making the big society play out a bit further, particularly in terms of regeneration. I also have a suggestion to top some of the practical suggestions made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford about what may help in increasing volunteerism.
We are all agreed, across the patch, that there is nothing new about the basis of the big society. As Members of Parliament, whether new or old, we all have a great deal of admiration for the voluntary groups that we meet, the numerous people we see volunteering, and their involvement in the committees that they sit on. I have often thought that one of the great defences of this country is that if Parliament fails and we get a dictator, no dictator would ever be able to cope with the quantity of committees and voluntary groups and control them across the country. Even getting on to the agenda of some voluntary groups would be difficult for any dictator. They stand there as a bulwark against future takeovers of this country, and they do a brilliant job.
I want to mention a couple of examples from my constituency. On Friday, I went to St John’s church, which is a redundant 18th-century church in the middle of Lancaster—a beautiful building that I knew nothing about, and to which I had been invited. Mary Halton, a neighbour of the church, singlehandedly created the Friends of St John’s and singlehandedly checks to ensure that the clock is working every day. She is not religious, but she lives near the church and values it. She opens it to other groups and is working actively with what was the Redundant Churches Fund to get things moving. She has not been compelled by the Government or asked by the council; she did it herself. We can all recognise such people in our constituencies and what they have done.
The Opposition have rightly asked what is new about the big society. I agree with my hon. Friends the Members for Stourbridge (Margot James) and for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) that all that is new is the recognition that there needs to be a rebalancing between the state, community and the individual. I am not talking just about the past 13 years and I am not going into the history of the Labour party, although I have learned from this debate or seminar that the left is still alive and kicking in the Labour party. That a Labour Member can stand up and say, “We on the left,” has taught me something valuable: we now have a real ideology to play with. Congratulations should probably go to the new leader of the Labour party for allowing that to function; it has not been allowed in the past 13 years.
My party agrees that the Government clearly play a valuable role and we do not underestimate that. However, individuals and communities feel that over the past 40 or 50 years, whichever party has been in power, the state has got bigger and bigger and has squeezed them out. I think that there is some truth in that.
Stephen Pound
Is the hon. Gentleman seriously suggesting, even for a moment, that ideology plays any part in the modern Labour party? I ask him to weigh his words with great care before making such assumptions or—dare I say it—accusations.
Eric Ollerenshaw
I thought that I was being positive. I take the hon. Gentleman’s strictures and accept that ideology does not play a part in the whole Labour party. I was saying that I am pleased that it now seems to play a part in part of the Labour party, and I regard that as novel.
I will give an example of what I was saying about the state. All that we have heard about from the Opposition is cuts, cuts and cuts. I hope that Opposition Members who criticise the Government will put the same criticisms to the Labour council leaders who are responsible for the balance of the present budgets. I remember from London politics in the 1990s, when apparently we had all the money, the massive amount of regeneration money that was poured into the east end. As a councillor in Hackney and as a member of the Greater London authority, I saw endless attempts to deal with problem estates when there was real money. Usually, that meant that outsiders came to the estates and that consultants were appointed. The Government passed the money to the development agency, which passed it to the council, which appointed administrators, who went in and sorted out what had to be done. I am not saying that no good was done, and there was certainly a lot of good capital work. I am talking in particular about the social regeneration schemes.
In particular, I remember one social regeneration scheme on a problem estate because it was examined by academics at East London university. It had the laudable aim of training the youth of the estate to use computers so that they could get better jobs. It took three to four years, the outsiders came in, the hardware was brought—it is probably still at the back of the estate community offices somewhere under lock and key—and the money was spent. The council ticked off the scheme as having done a good job. The development agency ticked it off as a good job with everything done. The Government who had spent the money—I think it was Department for Communities and Local Government money—ticked it off. Academics then chose it at random as a scheme to look at. When they went through the statistics of what had been done, the only conclusion they could come to was that either there were twice as many young people on the estate as the census said, or every young person on the estate had been trained twice on the same computers. They could never reconcile the figures.
To me, the big society is about the message that we missed in the ’50s and ’60s with the great slum clearances and again in the ’80s and ’90s with regeneration. That is the fact that however bad an area seems from the outside, it still possesses something of the big society and there is some community there, however bare it is. We have to work with that community, not introduce something from outside on top of it. We as a Government have to learn that lesson.
Labour Members say, “You can’t do this now, because times are bad”. I would put it the other way around. We want to be in such a position that when times are good, we have the structure on the ground to avoid the same mistakes. That is the purpose of the big society, and it is why it more important now than ever before that community organisers train volunteers.
The big society can be described as plain common sense—shall I say Lancashire common sense?—or localism, or whatever. I have tried to think of an alternative term to “big society”, but I cannot, so I will go with it, because it means the restoration of the balance between communities and individuals.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
This debate is ideological. It was a Labour Cabinet Minister who said that the man in Whitehall really does know best. What we are talking about here—it is one of the reasons the Liberal Democrats are such an important part of the coalition; it is one of the biggest areas where we agree—is the philosophical split between those of us in the coalition who believe that the state is built bottom up, and our socialist friends who think that the state is created top down.
If we go back to the beginnings of society—man in a state of nature—we see that there is no government, but there is society. Man is a political animal. There is society in our earliest history and forms. Government comes later. The problem with government is that, when it comes, it binds. Let us recall the image of Gulliver when he is bound down by the Lilliputians. Thousands of little people have crawled all over him and tied his hair to the beach. They have put ropes over him so he is stuck—he is tied down. That is what we saw in 13 years of socialist Government. The view was that, if it was not done by the state, it was bad.
We have heard a great array of examples from my right hon. and hon. Friends of what that means: the insurance policies for referees; and my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) needing £2 million of insurance. We have heard about the CRB checks. Bell ringers in my constituency are worried about having any children come to ring bells. Although large numbers of them ring together, they are frightened that the big state may not approve and may not say yes. We have data protection. I know that fellow rotarians are here in the House this evening. My own rotary club, Midsomer Norton and Radstock, takes old people shopping—a good thing to do, one would have thought. Members of the rotary club go around to local churches and ask, “Are there any elderly people who might need a hand?” What is the response? It is, “We are not allowed to give you the names of the old and the lonely because of data protection, because the man in Whitehall, who knows best, is fearful that you have evil intent and he will not allow that to happen.” That is why the big society is so important.
If we believe that society is built by individuals, their families, through communities, they are the ones who should make the decisions, raise the money and spend it according to the needs of their communities. One of the great cankers of socialism was that it took over the funding as well. Then we get into the argument about cuts, which is the great confusion in relation to the big society. It is a bad idea for charities to receive most of their funding from Her Majesty's Government because, as soon as they do, they become agents of the state and lose their independent action. They become subject to the rules, regulations and disbursement requirements that are set upon them by Governments. All that must be swept away. The Minister must cut Gulliver free. Gulliver’s hair must be released. He must be unbound. He must be able to stand up and stride forth.
Stephen Pound
As ever, the House is so much in the hon. Gentleman's debt as we move from the noble savage to “Prometheus Unbound”, spanning as we do Somerset rotary clubs. The logic of his comments would appear to be, and I speak as a proud member of Greenford rotary club, that we should, for example, get rid of the Charity Commission, because surely the dead hand of the state would apply just as much to that commission. Is he suggesting that it be cast into the dustbin of history?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman and fellow rotarian makes an excellent point. I hope that the Minister will consider thorough reform of the Charity Commission—set the people free!