Radical solutions needed to create Big Society, says Maude

09 Jun 2010 News

The coalition government will strive to find ways to properly resource civil society to enable it to be in the vanguard of the Big Society, Francis Maude told an audience of sector representatives today.

The coalition government will strive to find ways to properly resource civil society to enable it to be in the vanguard of the Big Society, Francis Maude told an audience of sector representatives today.

In his first major speech as minister for the Cabinet Office, at the Action Planning conference, Maude said that government realised it can’t just “retrench and hope that voluntary activity will spontaneously leap to fill the vacuum”. So government will concentrate on driving costs out of government itself rather than just turning the tap off public services, he vowed.

He said society was facing political, economic, fiscal and social change that requires radicalism, and that “civil society can be in the vanguard of Big Society”.

“We want to change how public services work and not just to save money,” he said. “We will give more power to charities and social enterprise and the individuals they serve.”

He reiterated previous Conservative policy to move to payment by results and “full cost recovery plus” to enable charities to grow their successful models. “We need to pay up… and not penny-pinch,” he said.

And he pledged that the coalition would make the Big Society bank “happen soon” in order to provide effective working capital for the sector to grow.
 
He went on to say he was convinced that the key to success is being “super-local and almost microscopically granular in our approach. We can not only save public money but increase happiness with this approach.”

But Lesley-Anne Alexander, chief executive of RNIB and chair of Acevo, challenged Maude on this, saying she was not sure this was always the right approach. “Sometimes people need the community that can be provided by larger organisations,” she said.

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