Minister outlines plans for massive transfer of services to voluntary sector

08 Dec 2014 News

The new minister for civil society wants to see “billions of pounds” more public services delivered by charities and social enterprises over the next few years and plans to embark on a massive new capacity-building programme to enable it to happen.

Rob Wilson MP, minister for civil society

The new minister for civil society wants to see “billions of pounds” more public services delivered by charities and social enterprises over the next few years and plans to embark on a massive new capacity-building programme to enable it to happen.

In an interview with Civil Society News on Friday, Rob Wilson laid out his proposals for a wholesale outsourcing of services to the sector, and hinted that a new £100m fund that he mentioned in his Giving Tuesday speech last week would contribute to getting charities ready to take on more service delivery.

Two main priorities

He said his two main priorities in the near-term were to expand the range of public services that can be provided by civil society groups, and to help get them to the stage where they can take on more delivery.

“I think that the days of believing that the government is the best deliverers of public services are more or less gone,” Wilson said.

“People who are closer to the coalface and who understand their communities are much better at delivering services than governments run from Whitehall and to some extent even governments run from their county hall.  

“So my belief is that we need to push much faster this whole idea about commissioning out services that can be delivered by charities and social enterprises.  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 of thinking about how we smooth out and make easier the commissioning process, and make government departments understand better how they can commission out more services.

“We need to make organisations more aware of how they can get those contracts and how they can bid for those contracts, and we need to support much more capacity-building in the sector so that these contracts aren’t seen as beyond the capacity of those organisations.  

He said he plans to construct a support system comprising finance and other mechanisms so that whatever stage of the development cycle a sector organsiation is, there will be something available to help it scale up. 

"So at the very bottom it might be some sort 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.

“Three-quarters of organisations don’t need or want it, they get their funding where they get their funding, but for those that want to grow, to get involved in government contracts, who want to grow their social enterprises, this a route they might want to take and the idea is that these things will all be in place so they can get finance and support.”

Learning from the Work Programme

Pressed about the difficulty that voluntary groups face when trying to compete for contracts with large private sector conglomerates like Serco or Capita, Wilson said it was still very early days for voluntary sector public service provision.

“The number of big contracts we’ve been putting out has been quite small in number. They are big contracts but there have not been that many of them – the first big one was the Work Programme and we learnt a lot of lessons from the way we did that.  

“Transforming Rehabilitation is a lot better than the Work Programme was and although the sector didn’t win outright itself any big contracts, 35 in total of the supporting organisations out of 50 were voluntary sector. And again we will have learnt lessons from that and it is my view that we can put a focus on that over the next six to 12 months and really put a rocket under it.”

Boosting contract-readiness support

Wilson is a big fan of the Investment and Contract-Readiness Fund currently administered by the Social Investment Business, and it’s clear he wants to make more of this type of support available.

“I look at the contract-readiness fund and the incredible success from every pound invested by the government, how that’s been accelerated by the amounts we’ve been able to get in from private funding sources as a result. It’s been one of the most effective £10m I think government has spent in a long time.”

He went on: “This sort of funding won’t need to go on at huge levels forever, it’s something like a ten to 15-year programme to make sure the sector can step up to do what it wants to do. People in the sector desperately want to step up as far as I can see because they’re doing such a great job in their local areas, so why shouldn’t they scale up and move to a regional model or a bigger model.”

He said the government was examining a number of services that are currently delivered by the public sector that have the potential to offer “quite substantial contracting-out arrangements”.  He wouldn’t say which ones.

In a wide-ranging interview with Civil Society News, Wilson also covered charity campaigning, the efficacy of the Charity Commission, the Big Society Network debacle and the sector’s internal politics. Click here to read the full interview.

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