This briefing is drawn from notes on David Cameron’s speech in Liverpool on 19 July 2010 in which he set out his commitment to, and expectations, of the Big Society and some of the actions Government intends to take to bring them about. Further notes and links to further relevant information are included at the end.
Commitment to The Big Society
Big Society is the ‘big idea’ on which David Cameron expects this Government to be judged and the legacy he wants this government to leave behind. It is an agenda to which he is personally and deeply committed. [DC] – ‘My great passion is building the Big Society. Anyone who’s had even a passing interest in what I’ve been saying for years will know that.’
What is The Big Society?
Big Society is, basically, the idea that people have an interest and responsibility to help themselves and each other without the State always needing to intervene (to regulate, ‘professionalise’ or fund what goes on as a result).
[DC] – ‘You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.’
Big Society will involve massive culture change so that people [DC] ‘don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities.’
[DC] – ‘For years, there was the basic assumption at the heart of government that the way to improve things in society was to micromanage from the centre, from Westminster. But this just doesn’t work.’
Instead, the government sees this kind of intervention as having led to budget deficits (due, by implication, to an over-large public sector) and failure. So, [DC] ‘over the past decade, many of our most pressing social problems got worse, not better.’
Big Society is therefore not about [DC] ‘(pouring) money down the throat of wasteful, top-down government schemes.’ But it could be about investing small amounts of time-limited effort to enable communities to crack problems for themselves and others.
Making it happen
There is an emphasis on presenting Big Society in a different way to the initiatives of the past government (eg ‘New Deal for Communities’, neighbourhood renewal or ‘the Respect agenda’). Big Society is not as simplistic as cutting public services and seeing what happens. For example: [DC] ‘There is no one lever we can pull to create the Big Society in our country. And we shouldn’t be naïve enough to think that if the government rolls back and does less, then miraculously society will spring up and do more. The truth is that we need a government that actually helps to build up the Big Society.’
[DC] ‘For a long time the way government has worked – top-down, top-heavy, controlling – has frequently had the effect of sapping responsibility, local innovation and civic action. It has turned many motivated public sector workers into disillusioned, weary puppets of government targets. It has turned able, capable individuals into passive recipients of state help with little hope for a better future. It has turned lively communities into dull, soulless clones of one another. So we need to turn government completely on its head.’
Government wants to avoid prescribing the answers but instead has put forward a general rule: whatever ‘unleashes community engagement’ is the right thing to do; and whatever crushes it, is the wrong thing to do.
Within this general rule, the government expects three strands of activity. Which are:
1. Social Action – [DC] ‘the success of the Big Society will depend on the daily decisions of millions of people – on them giving their time, effort, even money, to causes around them…. government cannot remain neutral on that – it must foster and support a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy, social action.’
2. Public service reform – replacing centralised bureaucracy with approaches that [DC] ‘give professionals much more freedom, and open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need.’
3. Community empowerment – [DC] ‘We need to create communities with oomph – neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them.’
David Cameron described some particular actions the Government will take:
1. Decentralise. [DC] ‘We must push power away from central government to local government – and we shouldn’t stop there. We should drive it down even further… to communities, to neighbourhoods and individuals.’
2. Be More Transparent. [DC] ‘If we want people to play a bigger part in our society, we need to give them the information… for example, by releasing the data about precisely when and where crimes have taken place on the streets we can give people the power not just to hold the police to account but to go even further, and take action themselves – for instance, starting a new neighbourhood watch scheme, youth club or an after-school club if they realise that’s when most of the trouble begins.’
3. Provide Finance. [DC] ‘We believe in paying public service providers by results. It encourages value for money and innovation at the same time. But the potential problem is that you can lock smaller organisations out, because they don’t have access to start-up capital. So government has a crucial role to play in bridging the gap – and indeed, more widely, in connecting private capital to investment in social projects.
Specifically there will be:
A Big Society Bank – set up to help finance social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups through intermediaries using the money from dormant bank and building society accounts in England.
New powers for local communities to take over the running of parks, libraries and post offices. More powers to plan the look, size, shape and feel of housing developments.
Vanguard Communities will be recognised – [DC] ‘When I go up and down the country and speak to council leaders, social entrepreneurs and local activists it’s clear to me that there is a real hunger out there to do more – to take on more responsibility and have more control.’ In four parts of our country – Eden Valley in Cumbria, Windsor and Maidenhead, Sutton and in Liverpool – there will be ‘vanguard communities’ to act as [DC] ‘the great training grounds of this change’.
There is no one set model of what these vanguards (note: not ‘pilots’) will look like or do… they will enable learning in a range of contexts about how best to foster Big Society. Leadership can come from different places; the scale and detail of what is done will vary and will include, for example: devolving budgets to street-level, developing local transport services, taking over local assets, piloting open-source planning, delivering broadband to local communities, generating their own energy. In Liverpool, for example, there is a volunteer program so that local museums can be kept open for longer. In Windsor and Maidenhead, people will be paid to recycle and there will be transparency in public spending.
Government will support Vanguard Communities by lending them civil servants to break through obstacles and bureaucratic log-jams.
Community Organisers – [DC] ‘We will… work with communities to help identify and fund a community organiser for each area. These will be trained people who know how to stimulate and organise local support for – and involvement in – community action.
Government anticipates problems and objections to its agenda and to the idea of Big Society, but [DC] ‘This is not an initiative. We have not hired a Czar. These are not ‘pilots’ that will be ‘rolled out’.’
The distinction between this approach and the New Labour way of doing things is implicit… it is an empirical approach rather than a centrally planned one. The implication is that there will be experimentation and that anyone can get involved and help lead the change. [DC] ‘This is a big advance for people power.’
Call to arms
[DC] ‘For years, government has been about putting up barriers to local action, loading on the bureaucracy, piling on the forms, making life so much harder for people who want to make a difference. Today, government is saying to the people of Eden Valley, to the people of Windsor and Maidenhead, to the people of Sutton, to the people of Liverpool: What is it that we’re doing that’s stopping you from doing what you want to do? How can we stop stopping you? And how do we stop stopping others?’
The four vanguards are only the start. [DC] ‘I want other forward-thinking, entrepreneurial, community-minded people and neighbourhoods in our country to come forward and ask for the same freedoms, the same support too. If you’ve got an idea to make life better, if you want to improve your local area, don’t just think about it – tell us what you want to do and we will try and give you the tools to make this happen.’
Further Information
The Big Society Bank is expected to open in April 2011. It will make available unclaimed assets and money in dormant bank accounts as loans to voluntary groups and charities. The government’s right to use these assets was established by laws passed under the previous government. A central reclaim fund run by the Co-operative Bank is to be set up by the end of 2010. The Co-op estimates that the first distribution will be in the region of £60m-£100m. There are an estimated 500,000 dormant accounts in the UK worth around £500m. The Big Society Bank is expected to be a ‘wholesale’ bank (lending to other financial institutions with expertise in investing in voluntary groups, rather than competing with them in the ‘retail’ market for finance). Organisations with experience of financing social enterprise include, for example:
Aston Reinvestment Trust is a local ‘social investment fund’ which operates in the Birmingham area www.reinvest.co.uk
Big Lottery Fund was set up by the previous government to channel lottery funding to community groups and to projects that improve health, education and the environment www.biglotteryfund.org.uk
Capacitybuilders is a non-departmental public body (a ‘quango’) set up by the previous government which provides finance to improve the quality of support and advice available to charities, voluntary and community groups and social enterprises www.capacitybuilders.org.uk
Charity Bank set up by the Charities Aid Foundation www.charitybank.org
Esme Fairbairn Foundation and Lankelly Chase Foundation – examples of established grant giving charities, see www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk and www.lankellychase.org.uk respectively
Triodos Bank – an ‘ethical bank’ with a track record of lending to projects with environmental and social benefits www.triodos.co.uk
Unity Trust Bank is a specialist bank for social enterprises, charities and trade unions www.unity.co.uk
Community Organising is an approach to building networks and the capacity to take joint action within communities (including neighbourhood communities and ‘communities of interest’ which could be youth groups, or churches and other faith groups). It originated in Chicago, was developed and described by Saul Alinsky and played a part in the Obama presidential campaign in 2008. Some relevant organisations in this country include:
Citizen Organising Foundation is a London-based centre of community organising activity www.cof.org.uk
Community Network 4 Birmingham is a CN4B was set up in 2008 by people from various Community Networks (informal groups, voluntary and community organisations and active citizens) in Birmingham to support and promote the development of community networks in the city www.cn4b.net
Women Acting in Today’s Society is a network of women’s groups in Birmingham and the Black Country which uses a community organising approach www.waitsaction.org
National Citizens’ Service is a voluntary community service to get young people involved in work that benefits local society and gives them skills and experience. Government announced that pilots will take place in 2011 with funding for 10,000 places for school-leavers to take part in activities which could include outdoor challenges and helping the local community. Organisations in Birmingham that have made public their interest in being involved in delivering NCS include:
Ackers Trust
Balsall Heath Forum http://www.balsallheathforum.org.uk/
Castle Vale Community Housing Association http://www.cvcha.org.uk/
For more information about NCS see http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2010/100802-grants.aspx
Vanguard Communities – the first four were announced by the Prime Minister in July 2010. They are: Liverpool, Sutton in London, Eden Valley in Cumbria and Windsor & Maidenhead. A further round of announcements is expected in the Autumn of 2010. In the meantime, information about what is actually being tried and tested in the vanguard areas is thin on the ground but, for example:
Engage Eden is a joint body involving active citizens, community groups, business and the local council. It is led by communities and is expected to build on work undertaken by the council in partnership with them including the launch of community land trust.
In Windsor and Maidenhead, the council is paying residents to recycle and wants to raise a tax on club owners to pay for extra policing. There are also plans to extend a transparency scheme so voters can see where the council’s money comes from and goes to, and expand a programme allowing residents to say how they think the budget should be spent.
Vanguard areas are also expected to pilot local energy regeneration and Government reforms of planning and licensing regulations.
