The Big Society has succeeded and charities have more volunteers and more funding than when the government came to power in 2010, minister for civil society Rob Wilson said yesterday.
Speaking at a hustings event run by All Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society in Parliament, Wilson said Big Society was about “devolving powers, devolving responsibilities, getting communities involved and encouraging volunteering”.
“That’s exactly what has happened,” he said. “Volunteering has gone up. The amount of money going into charities has gone up and the number of charities has gone up. There are a big number of successes that this government can point to.
“There have been a couple of references to Big Society today and people are talking about it as if it has been some kind of failure. Actually, we have a bigger, stronger society today that we had when we came into power in 2010.
“I’m sorry that people seem to think that we live in this miserable country with all these miserable public service and all these miserable communities."
He said Labour shadow charities minister Lisa Nandy was in danger of outlining "a very miserable and downbeat view about this country’s prospects”.
But Nandy said the government had not succeeded in improving life for charities and communities.
"Big shiny national initiatives are not the right thing to do" she said. "They don’t always deliver what you think they are going to deliver.
She said that to succeed in building initiatives like the Big Society it was important to start from the bottom up, and build resources around small voluntary services.
“If you go to communities like mine in Wigan and look at where the assets are in communities, we don’t have huge economic resources but we do have social resources," she said.
“If you want to help rebuild communities form the bottom up, you go to individuals that are doing that and package the resources around them so that they can make a dramatic difference together with their communities.”
'Leave communities to it'
Nandy said the government was wrong in “trying to tell charities what to do” and needed to “step out of the way and leave communities to it”.
“One of the great benefits of the devolution agenda is that on the whole, CCGs and local authorities will understand this because typically they work with those organisations as well and they understand which organisations deliver value,” she said.
“It’s always a difficult thing for national politicians to be able to cut out the middle man and go straight to communities because we are not embedded in those communities and don’t necessarily know who the great people are that are doing things that we should be seeking out and supporting.”
Nandy said the charity sector was facing a struggle as a result of waning communities.
“There is a bigger agenda here that has an impact on the voluntary sector. If people, families and communities are struggling the sector will be struggling too because they are picking up the pieces,” she said.
“Over the last few years we have seen around this country, more and more charities being pulled into quite simply, feeding and clothing families in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Think of what those charities could be doing, helping communities to draw on resources and talend if they weren’t increasing being pulled into doing that. What a tremendous waste of potential.”
'Reaping rewards of social investment'
But Wilson said the voluntary sector was reaping the rewards of new funding initiatives.
Pointing to social investment, Big Society Capital, and social impact bonds, he said: “We are reaching a tipping point in the next year or two when we will be able to unlock billions of pounds of social investment”.
“Social impact bonds and social investment is still quite new,” he said. “It is imperative that when you are doing something new and different that you continue to learn from that. But the broad view is that what we are doing is right."
Wilson said a newly elected Conservative government would want to see localised funding and smaller voluntary organisations getting better access to government contracts.
He said the Conservatives differed from Labour by favouring devolution over a “socialist command and control” approach.
“I think that the sun comes up every morning, the moon goes around the earth, the tide goes in and out and that is the fundamental philosophical difference between the conservatives and socialism,” he said.
“Labour want to go for a command and control system and think the state is the answer to the problems. We don’t think the state is an answer to problems, we think that many of the organisations represented in civil society are," he said.
"Decades of previous Conservative governments have tried to solve those problems within communities – harnessing the innovative ideas and potential to grow of those local community organisations that are involved on the ground."
