Two days after the Chancellor unveiled his latest plan to cut public spending and outsource large swathes of public services, the minister for civil society has outlined his ideas for boosting the capacity of charities and social enterprises to provide them. Tania Mason reports.
It could be 2004 all over again. An election approaches; the charities minister suddenly finds tens of millions of pounds to build the capacity of voluntary organisations to do even more good work. Except that then it was a Labour charities minister and the money was destined for a programme called ChangeUp which would be executed through six “hubs”. The current government’s new capacity-building programme doesn’t yet have a name and the details of how it will be delivered to the sector are still sketchy; Wilson promises more information in the new year.
He is determined, however, that his scheme to help social enterprises and charities to change up a gear will be more sustainable than the previous administration’s attempt. Labour’s hubs managed to swallow around £80m of taxpayers’ cash yet are nowhere to be seen today. Whether their impact had any lasting effect cannot easily be measured, but Wilson has his own view.
“My main message is about sustainability. I’ve looked back at things the last government did and most of it was pretty unsustainable. I come from a small-business background, I know what it’s like to build an organisation, to look after every penny, to try to win new contracts, to try and build the business, in the same way that social enterprises and charities are. I’m very focused on making every penny count and I don’t think the last administration was quite so focused on that.”
At this I can’t resist asking him about the Big Society Network, which was handed more than £3m of public and lottery funding without competing for it, even though its projects showed little evidence of success or accountability. He points out that this all took place before he became minister but he accepts that it “didn’t go perfectly”.
“The National Audit Office looked at it and made some recommendations and there were some minor criticisms in there. We accept it didn’t go perfectly but I don’t think the Cabinet Office did anything wrong in terms of the systems we used.
“When you try an innovative solution to things sometimes you make a few mistakes and I think everybody would hold their hands up and say it didn’t run perfectly.”
Investment and Contract-Readiness Fund 'an incredible success'
He is, however, a great fan of his government’s Investment and Contract-Readiness Fund, which he describes as “an incredible success” and “one of the most effective £10m that I think government has spent in a long time”.
It’s clear he wants to get more of that kind of investment into the sector. His announcement that the government is planning a huge new programme of outsourcing services was accompanied by heavy hints that tens of millions of pounds would be made available to help charities win the contracts to provide these services. He wouldn’t divulge details but did confirm that a new £100m fund would be announced in the new year, while also pledging that he wanted to construct a support system that all organisations could “plug into”, whatever stage they are at in their development.
“At the very bottom it might be some kind of social incubator fund, or it may be you need to plug into what we previously called an investment and contract-readiness fund. It may be you need something to help you get the first step on the ladder with funding so we’re going to announce something around that in the not-too-distant future. And then we’ll obviously have Big Society Capital that is working through intermediaries.”
This sort of capacity-building boost isn’t something that will be required in perpetuity, he says – it will be more like a ten to 15-year programme of support. He adds that the government is looking at issuing contracts in a number of new service areas over the next few years and insists that it has learned lessons from the problems faced by the voluntary sector in its efforts to help government deliver the Work Programme and Transforming Rehabilitation.
Wilson states: “Over the next five years we need to see a massive transfer of funds from the centre of government out to localities, communities and regions and that means we need to do a lot to make government departments understand better how they can commission out more services.” He quantifies the amounts that these new contracts will be worth as “billions of pounds” and enthuses about “a complete transformation of public services”.
‘Charities have every right to campaign’
However, Wilson’s sharp focus on service provision doesn’t mean that he is against that other, potentially more controversial function of charities – campaigning.
“I believe charities have every right to campaign and speak freely about any issue that is in line with their core work. Charities are very experienced and knowledgeable about things they are involved in and I think we as a government should listen to many of the things they have to say. But what they must not do, and the Charity Commission guidance is very clear on this, is that they must not stray into the party political.”
Before Wilson became the minister for civil society, he lodged a complaint to the Charity Commission about some Twitter activity by the Family and Childcare Trust. He recalls: “Social media was still quite new, everybody in the sector was still getting to grips with it and they ran a campaign which had many characteristics and similarities to what the Labour Party was doing. I felt that needed to be looked at in terms of guidance because it wasn’t something the Charity Commission had looked at before and I felt that the charity concerned would be helped by some guidance on the issue.”
He says the Trust responded to his complaint “in a positive way”. “The charity learnt from it and came to see me and apologised that it did look a bit too close to the Labour Party, which wasn’t their intention.
“The Charity Commission certainly found they should be careful in future and everybody in the sector was given some guidance for the first time about use of social media and social media campaigns. So yes, you can campaign on issues, but don’t be seen as party political.”
He doesn’t believe the Commission’s campaigning guidance, CC9, needs reviewing, however. “The guidance is very clear, I think,” he said.
Shawcross ‘rebuilt the Charity Commission’
He is generally positive about the Commission overall. “The Commission has been through a very difficult time because it was left in a fairly weakened state when William Shawcross took over and he had to rebuild systems within the organisation, had to rebuild the management of the organisation, and he had to get it back to some core focus, which is making sure that the charity sector is run in accordance with the rules.
“They weren’t doing enough inquiries and investigations into what was going on in the sector and now they’ve upped that significantly and I think that’s the right thing to do. They are a proper regulator of the sector now. They’ve still got more work to do – a lot of work to do on their IT systems for example - but the leadership is strong, the non-executive board is much stronger and it’s making a real impact.”
He supports Shawcross’ focus on terrorist infiltration of charities, contending that the risk of letting the problem go unchallenged is too great.
“It’s a fairly small number of organisations overall that are involved in this type of activity but however small it is it needs to be rooted out firmly. We can’t have collections being made on the pretext of charities to sponsor terrorist organisations. That is not the country we are and that would do enormous damage to the charity sector so I think the Commission is absolutely right to make sure that it’s not happening.”
He is somewhat less ebullient about the sector’s umbrella bodies. “I see there are two parts to the sector really – those that are getting on with their work delivering services and helping people in their communities, and then there’s the politics of the sector, which is very tangled and sometimes a bit overly negative.
“There are a number of representative organisations who seem to spend a lot of time in competition with each other, and that sometimes means that they are trying to make noise for the sake of noise. That’s a longstanding thing in the sector that people tell me about.
“For example Acevo has this manifesto that they are promoting quite hard at the moment and NCVO have a number of things they are pushing quite hard. And then there are the things that have been around for some time like lobbying and campaigning – but the people on the ground are mostly interested in delivering their services and having the stability and sustainability to keep doing what they are doing. That is my really big interest, delivering sustainability on the ground for all those social enterprises and charities that need it.”
Success equals sustainability
Asked what he considers success will like at the end of his tenure as minister, whenever that may be, Wilson doesn’t hesitate. “That’s easy,” he says. “Making sure the sector is sustainable without these huge peaks and troughs that it’s had to deal with in the last seven or eight years.”
This will need to be addressed not just with funding, but with “support, training, best practice – a whole series of different things”.
“In the near term it’s about capacity-building and getting commissioning right - because they are two things that will trickle down and make sure the sector is able to respond to the billions of pounds that I want to see going out into the sector over the next few years.
“The sector has got the right people, the right attitude, so many skills built up over so many decades. They’ve got innovation, inspiration, and all these clever schemes - if we can take advantage of that then we can absolutely transform public services, so I’m really enthusiastic about the future.”
