The sector must stop looking to government to solve its problems and needs to "renew itself" if it is to survive and flourish in the difficult period ahead, NCVO chief executive Sir Stuart Etherington said this morning.
Throughout his wide-ranging address to the NCVO's annual conference, Sir Stuart highlighted various things that the government could be doing to better help the sector but also emphasised that in the tight fiscal environment, it could only do so much.
He said the open public services agenda is the “right direction of travel”, and that government’s pursuit of the mutual model is a “vote of confidence in the values and models used in civil society”.
However, he added: “I fear we may be seeing a slow motion car crash in the form of the Work Programme and I shudder at the thought that other government departments believe that this is the model for the future.”
Existing commissioning and procurement practices are incompatible with the government’s aspirations for a bigger society, he said.
And the pendulum has swung too far in favour of contracts for public service delivery at the expense of grants.
Referring to a finding from the biennial UK Civil Society Almanac published by the NCVO today, Sir Stuart said that in the recession year alone – 2008/09 – there was a £500m cut in the real value of government grants.
“How many voluntary organisations lost their grant that year?” he said. “How many users lost the services they relied upon?”
Sector rose to the challenge in recession
However, the Almanac also showed that during the recession, when demand from beneficiaries grew, voluntary organisations expanded the volume of services even when they knew their own income was falling.
“The evidence is clear,” Sir Stuart said, “the sector swum against the tide. It rose to the challenge.”
But amongst members of the public, levels of involvement in civil society remains “stubbornly flat”.
“I worry that we are now relying upon a ‘civic core’, a group of committed individuals who are giving a disproportionate share of time and money,” Sir Stuart said.
He also noted that the sector finished the last decade with less collective free reserves, in real terms, than it started with ten years earlier.
“This is, in many ways, a dispiriting analysis,” Sir Stuart admitted.
He urged NCVO members to use the Compact to ensure a fair deal from government, and said the government needed to do some of the difficult things it kept putting off, like modernising gift aid.
“We and the Charities Aid Foundation have been asking government to push on with this for some time, yet little progress has been made on bringing this expensive paper-based system into the 21st century. This is not a failure of policy, it is a failure of delivery.”
Sir Stuart concluded: "We may have come to the end of a golden age, but I think it's clear that a better future is possible.
"We can renew ourselves if we stand together, not fight amongst ourselves or fight with our partners in the private and public sectors. And we must cntnue to draw upon the roles and values that make us distinctive, that reming me every day that we are a sector."
