Politicians too often treat charities as instruments of the state, and this view is "wrong and dangerous", delegates at the Labour Party conference heard earlier this week.
Ed Cox, director of think tank IPPR North, told sector delegates at the Labour Party Conference that politicians have an "instrumentalist view of the charity sector" and "seem to treat charities as a means to an end".
He said the Conservatives "see charities as the socially acceptable face of privatisation and public services", while at the same time the Labour Party views charities as "a source of political support".
He said these attitudes mean political life "too often overlooks the huge variety and diversity that exists across the charity sector".
Cox said that there is no more sense talking about charities as a single group, then there is talking about businesses or political parties - they cannot be grouped in a "generic sense" other than for a few reasons.
He said we often forget the 90,000 small charities with less than a £60,000 turnover, and that when we talk about charities we rarely mean those, yet "they are the real life blood of the charity sector in this country".
Cox said that the second reason why an instrumentalist view of the sector is too often wrong is because the relationship between the sector and government is too often seen as "patriarchal rather than complimentary".
Conversations in government are too often about the programmes that can be used to support the sector in a paternalistic way, he said, and how the sector can be managed through different groups and channels, with the attitude being who has and who has not got power.
He said this is also seen at a more local level in the relationships between local authorities and charities, with battles over who best represents the communities' view, rather than recognising that each has a "complementary role".
His third and final point was that "too often an instrumentalist understanding of the charity sector overlooks the intrinsic value of the charity sector in its own right".
Sometimes, he said, "people just want to help one another without the incentives of money, without some political gain, without wanting to run services, or start up social enterprises. They just want to do something to help one another."
Cox said that this was "the best aspect of the [Conservative's policy on the] big society". He said that the current migrant crisis is a great example of this coming together.
He added that autonomous charities are often "more innovative than any state sponsored, financially motivated" policy.
He said: "The autonomous action of charities, especially at the neighbourhood level, is actually the foundation of our social and democratic renewal.
"Rather than bemoan the state of the Labour Party or the wider political system, we should be looking at the voluntary and community sector to inspire some sense of political renewal. Not to recreate the Labour Party, but to create a democratic renewal in its own right."
Cox concluded: "For me, the intrinsic value of the voluntary sector is in its autonomy. It's value is in what it does that is never seen, and what it will do which we have yet to start to imagine".
