Sir Stephen Bubb says that the voluntary sector needs to be at the heart of designing and delivering public services.

British public services have long had a difficult relationship with voluntary action. Before the twentieth century what little social security that existed was laid on by charities and friendly societies. Voluntary and mutual association was essential. In health, social care and poor relief citizens had to work together or suffer.

In the twenty-first century we live longer than at any other point in the welfare state’s history, and inequality continues to widen. Only the politically irresponsible want to cut up our social safety net for good. But we do have a significant challenge ahead. In an ageing, less deferential society whose population is divided in its relationship to globalisation we do have to rethink our ‘mixed economy’ of public services if it is to be politically and financially sustainable in the long term. Our task is to recover Britain’s mutual, democratic heritage whilst preserving the state’s unique ability to guarantee a national safety-net from cradle to grave. This demands a close but independent relationship between state and civil society.

People’s quality of life did not immediately improve when the ‘welfare state’ took shape between 1908 and 1945. In many instances their lot got worse. The mixed economy of welfare provision weakened many long-standing mutual associations, and it was not until after 1945 that they were satisfactorily replaced by the state. The social historian Pat Thane observes that successive social reforms had long been seen as ‘a threat to working-class independence both collective and individual’.

Even when public services did start to take their current, comprehensive form, they ignored the traditions of mutual self-help that built up in voluntary action before the twentieth century. It was somehow forgotten that citizens need to be closely involved in the design and delivery of their own services. I do not think it should only be small-state liberals who lament the decline of voluntary association, of citizens taking responsibility for decisions about their service usage. The conservative historian John Vincent, for example, believes ‘the advance of public responsibility caused a retreat in popular participation’.  But today we also see ‘Blue Labour’ thinkers criticise hierarchical Fabian statecraft from the left. The twentieth century welfare state preferred to do things for citizens and to them, without necessarily giving them significant choice and voice in the nature of the services they used. There is widespread agreement that this must change.

Charities, social enterprises and community groups can both directly provide the public services of the future and also help the public sector to recover the mutual ethos that it has all too often never had. They can help guide public services to focus on holistic prevention of complex social problems, on greater volunteering and citizen participation, and towards better delivery of services given the money available. An ageing population with complex needs is best served by a complex, adaptive public service ecosystem with a wide range of voluntary organisations free to innovate in their work on the front line.

In health and social care services, a particular area of my interest, this debate is already firmly underway. It has been difficult in the last few years to argue that within the fiery debates about ‘public service reform’, ‘choice’ and ‘competition’ there lie some fundamentally important questions about the nature of the state in which we want to live in future. When we have the technology and knowledge to do better, there is no reason that all citizens should receive a lowest-common-denominator service provided by the state alone. If I wish to die at home rather than in hospital, or if I opt to have surgery in a particular hospital close to my house, why should I not be allowed to? This is a challenge to commissioning authorities, who should not be directed by the altogether simpler financial logic of procurement. They must be open to building the best available service that current thinking can devise, and one where a plurality of providers gives citizens a choice of service types and locations. They should not be afraid to entrust not-for-profit voluntary groups, be they charities, social enterprises or others, with providing more public services and with agitating for culture change across the public sector.

Health and social care shows the other important side to voluntary organisations; their ability as trusted advocates for the rights of the politically disenfranchised.  While the NHS is regarded as sacred to many in our country, the politicians who run it are certainly not; Ipsos MORI’s regular surveys of public trust show charities are consistently trusted by 60-70 per cent of people whereas politicians are lucky if they exceed 20 per cent trust.  Communities of place, interest or need – such as people with sight loss or older people living in an isolated town – will best get the social services that they need not if their services are run by political elites but if their voices are united in a flexible mutual association that is responsive to their wishes. This idea that the user’s voice should be represented at all levels of public services was too often lost in the post-1945 welfare state. The advocacy and awareness-raising of the voluntary sector has been central to changes like the move of mental health services from in-patient to community provision. Even worse, in recent years government has sought to deny voluntary associations many basic rights to voice, through ‘gagging clauses’ in public service contracts for back-to-work and rehabilitation services, and through legislation that limits campaigning like the Transparency of Lobbying Act. This must change.

I hope that in my lifetime and beyond our country’s extraordinary heritage of voluntary action will be strengthened and expanded. But a focus on ‘independence’ should not distract us from the fact that voluntary organisations should deliver more public services, and they can teach the public sector how mutual citizen action can produce better social security. Charities and the wider social sector should instead be at the heart of the design and delivery of a sustainable mixed economy of welfare, a future that ACEVO’s work on social sector consortia is already pioneering. It is time voluntary organisations reached their full potential and were freed to speak truth to power. This will leave our whole society better off.

Sir Stephen Bubb is chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations.

• This article is part of a series on the future of the voluntary sector being published by Civil Society News ahead of the publication of  a collection of essays by Civil Exchange.