One of the biggest challenges to successfully creating the Big Society is the difficulty in getting small groups of people to work together effectively, according to RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor.

Taylor (pictured) told a Green Alliance event on the Big Society on Tuesday that: “In my experience, in four out of five cases, dysfunctionality breaks out.

“Horrible people drive out good people much more easily than good people drive out horrible people.”

When he asked the audience for a show of hands if they recognised this to be true, the response was virtually unanimous.

Taylor said there was a risk the Big Society would turn out to be “great in principle but patchy and disappointing in practice”.

He said another major challenge facing the government was how to maintain the credibility of the Big Society agenda in the short-term when it was highly likely that society – “if by society we mean community sector activity” – would actually shrink because of public spending cuts.

“If we understand the Big Society to be community-based activity, preventative activity, then society is about to get smaller, not bigger," Taylor said.

“The first challenge is for the government to have a credible story about the Big Society during this process by which it gets smaller.  Because I think the credibility of the concept is in doubt.”

But minister for civil society Nick Hurd replied that it was a bit much to infer that society would get smaller because of the spending cuts.  “The voluntary and community sector is not a proxy for community, for society,” he said. "Yes, there will be a reduction in expenditure to the sector but there are hundreds of thousands of civil society organisations that don’t rely on statutory income at all.”