Minister for civil society, Nick Hurd, admitted yesterday that some civil society organisations (CSO's) would "be lost" in the period between the public spending cuts taking effect and the new opportunities afforded by the Big Society becoming available.

At a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society, Lord Newton of Braintree told Hurd (pictured) that while a lot of the government’s aspirations for the Big Society were “worthy and capable of being achieved in the long-term”, the worry is that during the transition period a lot of voluntary organisations will “go to the wall”, often because of factors central government can’t control like local authorities cutting funding to the sector.

“Associated with this is the worry about the near disappearance of core funding and the move to contracts,” Newton added. “At the end of the day if you don’t provide core funding, the organisations to bid for the contracts won’t be there.”

He said the £100m bridging finance offered by the Transition Fund sounded a lot but wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things.

“Can the Transition Fund get us through from where we are now to where we might be if everything else works, or do we find ourselves with all these desirable aspirations met but no sector left to benefit from it?”

Hurd replied that the government had been very clear that local authorities should look to make savings internally before cutting voluntary sector budgets but the reality is that “some local authorities will get it and some won’t”.

“Some will cut the things that are easiest to cut and we will lose some things in that process,” he said. “Our challenge is to minimise that loss, and those local authorities that take a different view, we will throw a spotlight on.

“But the sector can’t be immune from cuts, and is this a difficult and awkward period of transition? – yes.”

Hurd added that the total sum of applications to the Transition Fund had surprised him: “The multiple is much lower than I expected.”