Big Society

Debate between Stephen Pound and Eric Ollerenshaw

Monday 28th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[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.