Interviews

Liberal influence: Andrew Hind interviews Lord Rennard 1

Finance | Andrew Hind | 29 Mar 2011

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard is chairing Acevo’s Commission on Big Society. He told Andrew Hind that the voluntary sector should do more to help shape the government’s Big Society plans.

As man and boy, Chris Rennard has been a Liberal Democrat activist. He was a professional campaigner and agent before becoming the party’s chief executive. Now he is playing a prominent role in articulating civil society’s vision of what the Big Society agenda should achieve.

Lord Rennard's political and civil base

AH:  You became active in the Liberal Democrats from the age of 12. What was it that got you interested in political and social action so early?

CR: I grew up in Liverpool. My father died when I was three, and my mother became severely disabled when I was nine. So I ended up with a lot of caring responsibilities. I got to know a Liberal councillor in the area who helped the family with various problems and issues, including my mother's benefit issues. He was very good at helping with things like that. And I started asking questions about politics. I was very interested in politics generally. I asked questions of teachers at school, I saw things on the news and asked my mother, but I found the councillor was very good at explaining a few things to me. And he suggested that perhaps I would be interested to come and sit in on the meetings. And I was, and I just sat at the back as a teenager and listened to some of these political meetings and got more engaged.

AH: And then what about the interaction between political action and civil society as we now call it? Presumably the interest you had in politics was to get involved in helping shape people's lives for the better in some way?

CR: Yes, the Liberal party was strong in Liverpool in the 1970's, in a way It wasn't in other parts of the country and it was quite distinctive in some of the ways it wanted to run the council, in terms of support for the voluntary sector, and what was called at the time, community politics, which was devolving power to neighbourhoods and individuals and communities and not seeing the council as the answer to the problem, but as support to the voluntary sector. It supported cooperatives, and things which other parties considered perhaps eccentric at the time.

But it attracted me and I found it interesting. Perhaps if I had grown up somewhere else, I might not have got so attracted to the cause of the Liberal party and the Liberal Democrats. But it was an interesting cause in Liverpool.

AH: And what about your involvement with the charity sector? You were telling me a bit earlier on about your mother dying very early probably from a smoking-related illness, has this been an influence?

CR: People in my view often get driven in life by their early experiences, things they feel strongly about. And my mother died when I was 16 of hypertensive heart disease. Smoke was obviously a big factor, therefore something I always felt quite passionate about, is not encouraging people to take up smoking, therefore I am at the moment a member of ASH – Action on Smoking and Health, a cause I've supported strongly in politics, in parliament and through ASH itself. I felt I was a victim of tobacco when my mother died, my younger brother also suffered severe ill health which was tobacco-related, so I feel quite passionately on that cause.

Also of course, I grew up with disabled parents, my father actually was disabled, he died when I was three. And I found there were bureaucratic problems in terms of issues like benefits, I therefore also grew up in a single parent household.  And twice I had experienced the fear of homelessness. Once when I was three when my father died, when obviously I didn't understand it. But when my mother died, a very real experience of homelessness. Therefore one of the causes which I've always supported, and to which my wife and I contribute to, to this day, is Shelter.

I think sometimes in your early life you get passionately committed to various things and it makes you want to do something. Some people will do it through the voluntary sector and charities. I agree with doing that obviously, but also I thought I could help pursue some of the causes I felt passionate about through politics, and change things that way.

My wife was a teacher, she was in early years education for 37 years, therefore I've always felt very strongly about the things she argued about in terms of investment in a child's education before the age of five. For every pound invested, it was calculated that perhaps seven pounds was saved in later life in terms of those people who had the benefit of nursery education -  perhaps they were more likely to be employed, they were less likely to be unhealthy, less likely to commit crime. Therefore I saw a passionate case for things like that. I felt you could do a great deal for society, public services and health education, in the charity and voluntary sector, or perhaps by engaging in politics, to help those good causes, and that's what I've always wanted to do.

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Importance of campaigning

AH: You hear a number of politicians who say the role of charities these days should be mostly about delivering services and not about campaigning and engaging in political activity. Yet ASH must be an example of a charity that discharges it's charitable objectives pretty much exclusively through campaigning and seeking to influence the views people that have.

CR: Sometimes I think you can only improve peoples' lives by campaigning and by changing things. On Monday, I was at the crypt of St Martin in the Fields, for the launch of the memoirs of Des Wilson, the founding director of Shelter.  And it was from that venue that, in 1966, Des Wilson launched Shelter. 

In his memoirs he makes a very passionate case for how Shelter could help provide some emergency accommodation for homeless people by raising funds to help people who are either completely homeless or almost in destitute condition, what you call the 'hidden homeless'. But it could only ever achieve things in the longer run, if it persuaded politicians and people in government at every level, to take the issue more seriously, and do something about it, and campaign for changes. And in the 60's and 70's this caused some difficulties with your predecessors in the Charity Commission, who perhaps felt that all charities should do, is what was expected of them in Elizabethan times. Collect money for the poor and distribute it.

But if you really want to help the disadvantaged in society and you want to change things for the better, you have to change the way in which things are decided, and to me it seems entirely legitimate for good causes to campaign in a non-party political way, but still in a political way, for changes that they seek to support.

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Commission on the Big Society

AH: Now we had better talk a bit about the Acevo Commission on the Big Society. How did it come about that you were invited to chair this?

CR: Well Stephen Bubb approached me in the first instance to be a member of the commission. Because he was keen to add people who were not necessarily at the top of all the main parties, but closely involved in each of the main parties, together with people from the voluntary sector itself and the church, recognising the role that often faith-based organisations have in what might be the Big Society.

I think he felt that it was very important that the voluntary sector spoke for itself on the potential definition of Big Society, some of the barriers that existed to achieving what people might want to achieve through it, and some of the ways that government at all levels could potentially help. And I think if the Big Society is to mean anything, then it doesn't mean being dictated to by big government as to what the Big Society might mean. If it's not about big government, then the voluntary sector itself has to help shape what the vision is of Big Society and point out to government at each level how it might help achieve that vision.

AH:  How is it going so far? I think you had your first meeting in January? And you're undertaking a series of discussions with voluntary sector groups and going around the country hearing what people want to say to you?

CR: That's right. We've had a monthly meeting since January. We've had a lot of individual meetings, over 60 voluntary organisations and charities have actually met with us or given us submissions. We've had a number of hearings around the country. So far, London, Birmingham and Liverpool. We've had perhaps a dozen voluntary sector organisation at each of these meetings giving us their views about what they think could be the Big Society, how they would want to see it defined, how they'd like to be helped  achieving it, and pointing out some of the barriers towards what politicians in all parties say they want to have.

AH: And what's the timetable Chris, in terms of when you're hoping to report?

CR: We aim to conclude our report by April and publish it in May.

AH: Quick work.

CR: Indeed, but we hope in time to influence government thinking. The coalition agreement covered maybe the first two years of parliamentary sessions, and we know that the government will be thinking about the questions that will need to be addressed, for the second half of the term, and, in the summer and autumn, will start trying to answer some of those questions in terms of its program, and we would like to influence that.

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Liberal Democrats and the Big Society

AH: I want to talk to you about your role not just chairing the Commission, but also as a Lib-Dem peer. We've heard a lot from the Prime Minister and the Conservative part of the coalition about the Big Society, we're beginning to hear more from Labour, but we haven't heard a huge amount from the Lib-Dem side of the coalition. Can you fill us in?

CR: Well I think the first thing the Liberal Democrats would say is that we don't think the Big Society is that we think it’s actually quite an old concept. We would actually argue in political philosophy terms, that perhaps it's quite close to the concept the Liberal party was advocating strongly in the 1970's. But much of the concept goes back centuries if not longer than that. And that in some ways we feel that to try and suggest that it's either completely new, or it's the province of either one political party or philosophy, is probably undermining the concept.

I think Liberal Democrats see themselves very much as third sector champions, people who have always been prepared to say it isn't necessarily for the state to have all the solutions. We probably feel that the Labour Party, at times, has been uncritical of state action, but also that those parties on the Right have perhaps been uncritical of the failings of the market. Therefore the Liberal Democrats have always thought that actually allowing people to do things themselves, for themselves, in their communities, communities based on geography, or communities of interest, is just as important.

And we've also looked to people who want to do things without a profit motive, often with a good way of doing things, and want to see people who actually do things in their life that aren't necessarily just based on the personal profit motive recognised.

AH: So Labour's view which seems to be coming through more strongly at the moment, that this is their territory that they need to reclaim, you don't have a great deal of time for that perspective?

CR: I think people shouldn't fight over whose territory it is. I think that's actually undermining to the concept. I think it's more important to recognise that there are good values behind the concept of Big Society, and that those values go across all parties, and have lasted for a lot longer than recent years. 

But how are we to achieve it? It would be much easier to achieve some of these things in a time of plenty than a time of famine. That's quite difficult. They're wasting all our time arguing about who is responsible for the famine or what's the scale of the famine. The issue is how could we actually change the way in which government functions, at all levels, how to actually enable communities to control more things for themselves, and how can we encourage civil society to thrive.

Also how do we support people making these initiatives and how do we encourage people to be more philanthropic? We're probably the second most generous country in the world in terms of philanthropy, but we're still a long way behind the States. How can we do things to encourage people to be more philanthropic?

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Big Society defined

AH: So your definition of the Big Society really embraces those last few points you've made, does it?

CR: Yes. I think those are all key parts of any Big Society vision but it's true, we always have to look at issues like how can the public services best be delivered, and public services can sometimes best be delivered by the state. And there's always a role for the state in safeguarding certain things. But there are many ways in which you can open up things and say, 'the state can sometimes be too big', or 'too prescriptive' - and therefore allowing other people to offer services, subject to the safeguards of the state.

How do you change cultural values? One of the organisations that came to us to say, 'well look, one of the problems at the moment, is that it's much easier to set up a youth gang, than it is a youth club. And if you wanted a youth gang to terrorise the neighbourhood, there would be no barriers to it' - You want to set up a youth club to prevent such things happening, and there can be a lot of barriers in terms of bureaucratic levels, whether it's just the level of CRB checks, or further bureaucratic problems. And there are issues in terms of securing long-term funding that is sometimes required to do these sorts of things. So actually trying to change things around so it's easier to set up youth clubs to do positive things than it is to set up young gangs to do negative things must be part of what it's about.

AH: But you think that the Prime Minister is on to something as a general concept?

CR: I genuinely believe that he is. I happen to think that his views on this issue are very different to what might be considered to be the Thatcherite views of the 1980's. In 1987, Mrs Thatcher famously said 'there's no such thing as society'. Well it seems to me one of the reasons why David Cameron has problems on the right of his party is when he talks about the Big Society, it's a pretty explicit rejection of the years of the 1980's Conservative government.

I believe he genuinely wants to strengthen society and sees ways in which perhaps government can help develop the Big Society, rather than him do it. Of course it's made difficult particularly by the economic constraints at the moment.

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Funding constraints

AH: Coincidently, your background in Liverpool coincides with one of the sort of hot spot problem areas for the Big Society concept, doesn't it? The recent withdrawal by Liverpool City Council from their ‘vanguard’ status as a test bed for the Big Society. In a world of cuts in local authorities of getting on for 30 per cent, how can local authorities engage voluntary sector organisations when there's no funding to oil the wheels?

CR: When I met with, I think eight different voluntary sector organisations in Liverpool and I took the policy advisor to Acevo with me to the meeting, I think we had grounds for concern that our meeting might be dominated by talk of the council’s withdrawal from the project, and the level of cutbacks being made by national and local government.

But instead what we found were organisations simply saying 'Well actually, we are determined to succeed as best we can, whatever the circumstances, however adverse. In many ways the need for what we do is now even greater than beforehand, and of course funding is very problematic, but if anything can be done to help us in any way, deliver Big Society things, we want to do that irrespective of any party political row about ownership of the idea'.

That they recognise that there is a campaigning battle to be won, and we want to be able to demonstrate, perhaps to even people who are cynical about Big Society models in the Treasury, that if you look at a proper cost-benefit analysis of what we're doing, we can actually prove that there can be a saving to the public purse in the long-run, if there's some expenditure in the short-run.

And I think that's one of the cases the Acevo Commission must take up. Helping demonstrate how, in many ways, for some expenditure in the short-run, there can be significant savings in the longer-run, and that must be the sort of language that the coalition government ultimately wants to accept.

AH: And what sort of activity would you want to see some short-term investment in, in order to reduce running costs longer term?

CR: Well I think there's been some very clear examples, within the voluntary sector on things like prisoner rehabilitation. You can point to the St Giles Trust, and you can point to how they've been able to accept a payments-by-result system, because they've been so good at reducing re-offending. One of the problems is people want to cut crime, but perhaps one of the best ways to cut crime would be to cut re-offending. Traditional routes haven't been as successful as governments would like them to have been in doing this. If organisations like the St Giles Trust can reduce re-offending, you can cut the cost of prison, you can cut the cost of crime.

But also I would argue that the value added by many organisations is to emotional well-being of society as a whole. And that's something David Cameron says he's very keen to monitor and increase. Sometimes you can't do a cost-benefit analysis on emotional well-being. But if people feel happier and better, if they feel perhaps less in fear of crime, then perhaps they are going to feel less stressed. Stress is a big cost to the health service. Perhaps they're going to feel healthier, perhaps they're going to perform rather better. And actually things that make people feel better about themselves - there's a rule in management basically that performance is linked to self esteem. And it seems to me, many things the voluntary sector can do, is help raise the self esteem of people.

When I was in Liverpool, I went to see personally the Liverpool Lighthouse Project in Anfield, where they are giving real pride and self esteem to young people who might otherwise be playing truant at school. And they are engaging them in drama and singing. And they are making these young people feel very proud of what they do. Now these young people talk to you just about how they feel so much better, they feel like they're doing something worthwhile, but also you look at the crime statistics around the neighbourhood and you see the car crime has fallen dramatically in the time that the Liverpool Lighthouse Project has been encouraging young people to come in and engage.

AH: But where does the Liverpool Lighthouse Project get its funding from Chris, it can't do this on thin air, can it?

CR: No it can't. And I think something like 60 per cent is state funding and therefore a case has to be made, and actually I would help make that case to say that actually the state has to continue to fund and support organisations like that.

At the same time, the organisation itself is very determined to improve its own fundraising capacity. Some of its support is of course based on faith, it's a Christian-based organisation in the first instance. And of course they are talking to people who feel strongly about these sorts of issues and will support them. But I will help make the case to say that they have to have significant state funding otherwise there's even more state expenditure in future.

AH: This is the point that Dame Elizabeth Hoodless was making a few weeks ago wasn't it? She gave the example of local libraries, saying there are plenty of people who could be persuaded to come forward and volunteer to help, but that she won’t get people coming forward and taking sole responsibility from scratch, to run a library. Do you see a contradiction in this in terms of the Big Society? What some would say is happening at the moment is that local authorities are making cuts in some of the easier areas - civil society organisations, charities and so on, rather than perhaps restructuring their own workforces?

CR: There's a clear problem here, and at the very least, it's to do with phasing. By making the economies very quickly, a number of local authorities will feel that they have to cope with almost all the redundancy costs which they face in the short-term, rather than being able to capitalise them over a much longer term. And they have their statutory obligations, clearly they feel more pressured to cut from voluntary sector support than they do from some of their core services.

Now some people will argue that we need to try and change the way in which local authorities prioritise so they don't cut back on the voluntary sector disproportionately. But the best way, in my view, that government nationally could help local authorities in that direction would be to allow for things like more generous capitalisation of redundancies and for the more generous phasing of economies, recognising that economies must be made. If the economies have to be made at a very rapid rate, then it gets very hard to do this.

A number of local authorities would argue very sensibly, that if they had a bit more time, they could work with the voluntary sector, to make sure that some of these key services which nobody wants to lose are actually saved and preserved by the voluntary sector, helped by voluntary sector involvement in the long-run. But if these economies are made too quickly, that simply can't happen, and there is a danger that things are lost that can't then be replaced. A very clear danger of that.

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Public service delivery

AH: A lot of people think this issue of trying to broaden the provision of service delivery and encouraging corporates and voluntary sector organisations to come in and so on a good idea, and that the quality of services provided to citizens is all that should really matter. But commissioners and local authorities are going to be under huge pressure to decide on price alone in this resource-constrained world that they're operating in. In those situations, what is to stop the very big corporate organisations from scooping the pool because they've got economies of scale that they can offer, and what is going to protect the ability of smaller voluntary organisations to be able compete for these contracts?

CR: There is a great deal of concern at the moment, particularly within the NHS, that competition is based on quality, not on price.

AH: Or should be based on quality, not on price.

CR: Yes, should be. And that's an argument that I think will be had within government, within Parliament and is certainly out there in the country at the moment. It seems to me that there is a lot of concern within the voluntary sector. They may well actually approve of the idea that public services are more open, particularly to the not-for-profit or voluntary sector, but recognise that that must also mean opening up potentially to private competition. But a level playing field is required for that and the concern is that too often there are barriers to good not-for-profit organisations which would like to actually offer some of these services, but are simply not regarded as being large enough, or substantial enough, or secure enough, and the bidding process and the bureaucracy involved in that is a barrier to them. They would like to see those barriers removed, and I think it would be a healthy thing if we were able to offer alternatives. But the offered alternatives must be based more on quality of service and provision than making somebody else's profit.

AH: Chris White's private member's bill on this, which is designed to require social value to be taken into account by commissioners, interestingly seems to be something that the government is happy to support and see get onto the statute book. Do you think that's going to happen?

CR: I haven't looked at that bill in any detail but those sorts of things do seem to be very important in what we might actually do. And I think the voluntary sector is very keen to be able to talk to government nationally and locally and work in partnership to achieve those sorts of things.

I think the biggest concern we get within the sector, is that too many things, contrary to what Big Society says it's about, will start to be top-down and imposed. But if it's to work well, there needs to be genuine partnership of national and local government and the voluntary sector on these things.

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Dependence on the State

AH: Chris, you've been very clear about the fact that this is not about differences between party political views, rather it is about finding ways in which all of these different organisations can combine to help citizens improve the quality of their lives, but I'm just interested in your perspective. A lot of people would say that the very significant increase in public sector funding into the voluntary sector over the years of the Labour government, has led to a sense of excessive dependency by a number of charities. Is there concern that the concept of charity existing, in a sense, to challenge government and to argue against the status quos, might be compromised if some of these big charities have very large amounts of funding coming from the state?

CR: Potentially yes, but at the same time, I have a concern that some people say that we need all these things to happen with purely voluntary and unpaid efforts. I think it's rather naive to think that people can just come forward as unpaid volunteers and run what needs to be run.

When you look at the size of some of the big charities, they are the size of FTSE 250 companies. And no one would suggest that a company that was a FTSE 250 company should be run entirely by volunteers, without having professional staff. The voluntary sector and volunteers require premises, some security of long-term funding, training, management, accounts, etc, and people to help organise volunteers to do things. If volunteers are giving up their spare time, or even if companies are enlightened and allow people some time during the day to volunteer for activities, you can't simply have volunteers take time off work, troop down to some place and volunteer to do things. It doesn't make sense. And therefore, I think those people who are concerned that charities are becoming perhaps too professional, like businesses, need to recognise that actually the business of volunteering does require professional support.

At the same time, clearly when the government has got into great financial difficulty. And I would say very roughly, putting the national economy into the context of say a household: A household is perhaps spending £40,000 a year, earning £30,000 a year and building a £40,000 debt to the credit cards and the banks. The problem which I think others in the voluntary sector now recognise is that the government needs not just to cut back that £40,000 year expenditure to a £30,000 a year, to a sustainable long term level, but it's got to repay some of that £40,000 because the interest payments, which were running at £168 per day, are actually just postponing the problem, and therefore you begin to explain to some people that it's not a question of cutting back the household income from £40,000 to £30,000 a year, it's cutting back that £40,000 a year to £20,000 a year for a while in order to repay the debt.

You see the scale of the problem. And therefore I think a lot of the voluntary sector understand the public sector deficit and do want to work with government and say how can we do things to fill whatever gaps there may be.

That may take time, but if we can think about tax incentives, we can think about encouraging and rewarding philanthropy, perhaps we can think about rebalancing the honours system. It's something which I think we should consider doing, I think that very often people through the honour system are rewarded for doing a good job, but only for doing their job. Perhaps people who decide they'll do something not for personal profit, but for the good of society by working or volunteering in the charity sector for less than they might in the private sector. Or people who choose, having earned significant sums of money in the private sector, to give a considerable part of it to charity, could be rewarded. We do reward those people to a degree in the honour system at the moment, but maybe there's a way we could reform it rather more.

I've heard a discussion that perhaps people who, even at local level, do good voluntary work might get a letter from the Prime Minister. But where I grew up in Liverpool, I can't imagine many people saying oh good I got a letter from David Cameron, I'll put it on the mantle piece. But I do think there are ways in which we can see people more properly rewarded.

You look to the way in which the Merseyside Community Foundation hold their annual Spirit of Merseyside Awards and they fill Philharmonic Hall, a big hall in Liverpool, every year and have done every year for five years. And they're actually rewarding people who are doing good voluntary sector projects and making them feel good about themselves, and encouraging local publicity. Perhaps this issue of reward and recognition is more of a local thing than a national thing, but at every level, we have to think about how we can encourage and reward people to engage in doing these good things.

AH: That might be a very good part of the set of recommendations you come up with from the Commission. Now just two more questions. You're part of the coalition government, what would you hope to see in terms of tangible difference on the ground in communities as a result of the Big Society initiative by the end of this Parliament?

CR: Well of course you've asked the most difficult bit at the very end of that question by saying at the end of this Parliament. Because if Big Society is to achieve anything, it's a fundamental attitudinal change on the part of a lot of people and organisations. And I don't believe we'll see that within, necessarily, the next few years, I think it's a much longer-term thing. But if we look longer-term, if we could argue that attitudinal change in government and society, over the decades, we'll see things done quite differently.

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Role of the House of Lords

AH: Finally I'm interested in the role of the House of Lords in terms of the influence it has over shaping the role of civil society, because there are a number of experienced peers in the Lords, with very extensive backgrounds in the charity world and social enterprise and so on, and I just wonder if you think the Lords is having as much influence as perhaps it could over this Big Society debate?

CR: The House of Lords does have to potential to change a lot of things. I think it's healthy that there isn't actually a coalition majority in the House of Lords, but if you look at important issues such as the Public Bodies Bill, in the House of Commons, inevitably the whipping system means there can be a lack of scrutiny, and too much party political consideration, and not enough consideration of the issues.

In the House of Lords, you can see the major changes, and the major concessions we made on the Public Bodies Bill by peers of all parties acting independently of their party, and by cross benchers. And you see, within the House of Lords, many people with a great deal of experience of the voluntary charity sector able to use that experience to actually show how the government has very simply got a lot wrong with the Public Bodies Bill, and that's been changed.

I think we will see big changes in the Public Bodies Bill as a result of what the House of Lords does. And I think we'll possibly see changes in future years about the way in which government behaves through the House of Lords also.

But the House of Lords has little control, in fact no real control over financial issues. That was the previous stages of House of Lords reform. It was recognised that the House of Lords shouldn't have say in financial matters, that goes back to arguments at the time when the House of lords resisted a Liberal government introducing the old aged pension and the beginnings of the welfare state. It goes back to people's budget and Lloyd George in 1909, and then the Parliament Act of 1910, and then I think in 1948, it was made even clearer that the House of Lords couldn't interfere with budgets or financial issues. So it's hard for the House of Lords to influence some of the things that would be important to achieve the Big Society, that relate to finance. But it could still be very important in an attitudinal change by government at all levels and society, to say you could do things in a better or different way.

AH: Well let's leave it there Chris. Thank you very much.

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