The voluntary sector should not just be viewed as a “delivery partner” in terms of its impact on society, the chief executive of sector umbrella body, NCVO, told an event in London yesterday.
Kate Lee – who took up the role of CEO last autumn – made the remarks when asked about her hopes for the Civil Society Covenant and newly established Office for Impact Economy.
Lee said: “I think civil society is absolutely at the heart of the impact economy.
“I'm bound to say that I think the power of our charities, the power of our broader civil society, is that we bring that absolute knowledge of lived experience, and we really understand the problems that we're trying to solve as an impact economy.
“So, I think the first thing I would say is that civil society has a huge amount of brain. It's not just a delivery partner, which is often where I think we get pigeonholed, but we also have huge insight. And I think we have a real skill in being able to hold the impact economy tightly to social purpose.”
She added: “The covenant, for me, brings an exciting opportunity to look at a clearer set of principles of how civil society and government, particularly will work more closely together. I think that's really exciting.
“I think we bring trust, experience, insight, data, and what we know is that where civil society is engaged early in the setting of government policy, where those conversations are at the strategic level early on – rather than a tactical operational level, once that policy has been decided and most decided, and we're screwing around trying to work out and make it work – that the policies generally are stronger.”
Sector ‘retrofitting itself’ to policy changes that don’t work
When asked about what she would like to see from the government, Lee said she would ask how it plans to engage with civil society before it establishes policy positions.
She said: “This is about engaging communities early in the setting of policy, the design of systems, the design of processes […] How do we get to that earlier? Because the sector is still spending a lot of time retrofitting itself to policy changes that have been made that don't work for it.”
Lee cites the rise in employer national insurance contributions as an example of a policy change that was “imposing a [cost] on the sector that is already on its knees”, adding that “we need to be talking through these challenges earlier”.
However, she said the recently announced National Cancer Strategy was an example of the government successfully consulting with charities, praising it for having “a sensible set of conversations before we even launched that strategy”.
