Big Society Conference Report
Peter Hulme Report from "Building the big society": a 1-day Conference organised by Civil Service World, Untd, Community Matters and Citizens UK
30 November 2010 on Stamford Street, South Bank
Click here for conference website and speaker presentations
Opening remarks: Cliff Prior (Conference chair) CEO, Unltd
'Big society development is going to be chaotic and organic. It is about asking can I do it or can I do it. It's the idea from Philip Blond (The Red Tory) that big government has failed, big business exploits people so we need big society instead.
Third of us volunteer according to the Social Entrepreneurship monitor. Traditionally volunteers were older people from more middle class background. But the new social entrepreneurs are emerging from young people living in more pore areas. Volunteering is being driven by adversity.
We should ask: how many light bulbs does it take to change a person? How many new ideas and information do we need to give to people before they realise it is up to them to become involved in society. Being asked is usually the biggest trigger for becoming a volunteer.
Why is it easier to start a youth gang than a youth club? Because there is so much regulation (CRB checks and health and safety rules).
Ended with the assertion "the only resource we have is the motivation and passion of our people".'
How Big is Society? The Citizen Perspective
Alex Oliver, Director, The Futures Company
Presented results of market research on public perception of ideas around the big society. She showed a graph that many more people aspire to be part of a community than 20 years ago. It had peaked during 2005 - new labour but was still strong under the conservatives.
She showed a scale of people from community organisers who are the most involved to people not at all involved in civil society at the other end of the scale and participants in civil society in the middle.
'Reasons why people volunteer (according to her research)
Meet new people
Enjoyment
Improving something
Satisfaction of "giving something back" to the community
Having more control of things: e.g setting up a sports group to enable your own children to participate.
Only 5% of people said financial incentives would encourage them to volunteer. So it is very important not to confuse personal incentives with market incentives. Following principles important:
-responsibility
-mutuality
-involvement
Barriers to involvement
-Lack of time (most reported)
-Don't know (6%)
-Never thought about it (10%)
-Don't think it will change anything
So there are at least 16% of people who could potentially be enabled to volunteer if given the right information and had the benefits explained to them.
Some other fears of people about volunteering included:
-Fear of over commitment
-Fear of being taken advantage of
-Lack of confidence
-Fear of youth (some older people seemed to have swallowed the "broken-britain" rhetoric that all young people are yobs.
-Lack of people like me doing it
-Don't know where to start. This was especially the case with younger people who are perhaps used to immediate feedback (e.g. when calling call centres) and don't expect to have to wait weeks before hearing back about something.
-Red tape and public liability were also seen as taking the fun out of volunteering.
The speaker drew attention to a scale of responsibility in volunteering.
Community >>>> Public Services
Engagement >>>> Responsibility
Its easier to get people to volunteer in their own community where they feel engaged. If you start asking people to take on more responsibilities and public services then they start to feel alienated and taken advantage of.
Recommendations to encourage volunteering
1. Increase flexibility
2. Provide essential support - avoid language of responsibility and give a clear structure where volunteers fit into.
3. Promote inclusivity - sometimes churches and charities are sometimes seen as "wierdos" and in the area where the research took place (Bexley Heath) the local authority was seen as more neutral.
4. Provide information hubs - eg council volunteer services.
Questions
-Some organisations which aren't neutral (eg religious groups) still want to do good things. Where do they fit in?
Response keep it small, keep it personal and promote a culture of mass engagement. Initiatives work best when people feel part of them.
Chair suggested that Big Society was about moving everyone up the participation scale.'
How can the centre support a Big Society?
Ann Watt, Deputy Director - Big Society Policy & Analysis team, Office for Civil Society, Cabinet Office
'Big Society is about turning government upside down so that it starts to provide an enabling role. Release power and information. Making people feel free and powerful enough to help themselves in their own communities. People should no longer turn to officials or local government when they need something doing.
Organisations that she mentioned included Do It, Leap, Time Banking, Volunteering England and NALC. The speaker mentioned the latest documentary by Ian Hislop about The Do Gooders (19th century reformers e.g. William Wilberforce). I found it interesting that in those examples social reformers were mainly calling for more legislation and government regulation not less.
Key policies of Big Society:
1. Promote social action: eg. Through a national citizen service for young people.
2. Public service reform: especially reforming the commissioning of services
Modernising Commissioning Green Paper
3. Community empowerment: e.g. cabinet office is funding the training of 5,000 community organizers. There is currently a call for tender. They will target areas of low social capital. Localism bill
Key principles:
Decentralisation: vanguard areas community budgeting.
Transparency: new right to data
Capacity Building: Big Society Bank expect to be launched April 2011
Building a stronger civil society
Better Together paper of the cabinet office should be read as a best practice guide for practitioners.
Other flagship government policers will include a £100m transition fund to help civil society and local authorities adjust to the changes. It will be available to organisations with turnovers between £50,000 and £10m, who have lost out from cut-offs of statutory funding
Audience questions:
Where is accountability? Central government will not set targets but she thought they will need to have 5 or 6 indicators to measure the growth of the big society.
What is the evidence base that big society will be more effective? Speaker said she needed to go back and think about this.
The Engagement Ethic - Giving Citizens a greater say in decision making
Neil Jameson, Director, London Citizens
'After 45 when the welfare state had been established civil society fell asleep. We left everything to the government. We forgot that it is our responsible to make things happen. Matters of the heart and soul cannot be the responsibility of government. Civil society created the government, it also created the market. But now it must hold both to account.
London Citizens is made up of 200 organisations. It aims to harness the power of citizen groups. Especially their relational power. All members must give an annual fee of £700 to £2000. It is accountable to its members.
Citizens aims to promote participation, organise and strengthen democratic activity and promote a feeling of experiencing power and responsibility.
Profesor Leyard wrote a book called Happiness that said that happiness comes from participation and family life.
Spirit Level is also worth reading for its focus on how social problems could be solved by more focus on equality. Everyone (even the better off) would feel happier if they were more equal. Research from Northampton University in a recent newspaper article shows that poverty not ethnic division are much more likely to produce conflict in a community.
Citizen works by setting up public inquiries. The inquiries investigate issues like the way asylum seekers are treated. Everyone has the chance to give evidence.
Accountability assemblies to hold local politicians to account are also help. For example before the last election a "4th Debate" was held by Citizens. Unlike the other two debates citizens could participate fully. Members of community groups could express their concerns + first hand experience, for example of child detention. Politicians made several public commitments in response to this debate with a packed Methodist Central Hall.
Citizens is based on the work / theories of Paulo Frerer (Brazil) and Saul Alinski.
Principles of letting everyone work within their own experience, harnessing cold anger rather than hot anger. Etc.'
Questions:
Are organisers just parachuting into communities? Citizens make no apology for this. They act as a catalyst - brining together coalitions, faith groups, trade unions of people who may not think they have a shared interest. It doesn't suit everyone
Aren't some people always excluded? Eg. The severely disabled or women or children experiencing domestic violence, who are excluded even within their own families.
Giving Communities more Power
David Tyler, CEO, Community Matters & Member, Big Society Deregulation Taskforce
'His organisation had written a report for the government on creating a thriving neighbourhood meta-community:
Bidding
Boosting
Blabbing
Backing
Burdens
There organisation has 1,200 members who are all community organisations.
56% of their members use buildings owned by the Local Authority. 25% have under a 10K turn over.
Report recommends that commissioning should be more pro-social. Service deliverers need to build strong communities as part of their contract. Civil society organisations should be recognised as key drivers of change. A drive towards efficiency through consolidation should not sacrifice the importance of small scale organisations.
Competitive tendering can be anti-competitive because only a few large organisations + private companies have the skills and resources to bid for large contracts.
Legal requirements on an unincorporated community organisation are very large for the individual.
VAT arrangements can be punative.
The government needs to consider the triple bottom line of social economic and environmental outcomes.
Community organisations need to be involved not only in the delivery of services but also the shaping and monitoring of services. The social return on investment model is not a useful model for community organisations because it leaves too much out.
There need to be developmental models for commissioning public services - ie small amounts are given incrementally to help the organisation grow to take on more services.
Every community organisation needs a building. Hopefully the new Localism Bill will put in place ways that community organisations can acquire community buildings from the council in a way that will make sure they continue to have a community benefit. There is already a loss of infrastructure through transfer. In some cases councils are looking to make money by selling their assets to the private sector.
Ownership of building by the voluntary and community sector is good because it gives those organisations an asset and security of tenure. However, it needs to be done in the right way. In some cases structures that have high maintainence costs could be demolished putting modular eco-structures in their place that could be added to or taken away from depending on need.
Needs to be a national network of community organisers. Members want these people to have roles in planning, brokering, and amplifying the voice of voluntary organisations. There needs to be a new right to data.
Burdens: Red tape task force has been set up by the government and the speaker is a member. It seeks to get rid of the 30 page grant forms and licence restrictions which organisations already have.
For example if a group wants to play music they should have 2 licences. If they want to show a video they should have 6 licences. Reducing the burden of legislation may not mean removing regulations but making them clearer and easier to comply with.
The big society needs an infrastructure for community organisations but it doesn't necessarily need to be hierarchical. The hierarchical model of Capacity Builders doesn't seem to have worked.
Community Matters sees itself as neutral as to the different approaches:
Community Development
Saul Alinski
Social Entrepreneurship
All different models of community organisations that can come under the same umbrella.'
Delivering the Big Society Locally
Philip Coppard, OBE, CEO Barnsley Council
'Barnsley is a geographically defined local authority because of the coal mining. The urban areas are all in the East, to the east of the M1 because that is where the coal is. The west of the area is largely agricultural.
The social infrastructure, civil society and employment was all based around the coal industry. Then the pits closed. In 1993 it was the nadir of Barnesley's development and they have been trying to rebuild communities ever since. 26,000 people are now claiming incapacity. There are low skills and low aspirations. The BNP are active. The area is highly dependent on public sector funding. Under new labour a lot of money went to community capacity building.
From neighbourhood management to community budgets
Four case studies of community redevelopment.
Kendry Neigbourhood management pathfinder. Sink estate - built a new shopping centre, capacity built community groups, created child care facilities, created community infrastructure - was very expensive but successful. Burglaries went down 88 to 17 per 1,000 resident satisfaction went up 57% to 88%.
Case study 2. This was rolled out to other estates on a cheaper scale (10m over 4 years) but it worked.
Case study 3: Friends groups set up to help run public services. Eg adopting part of a park to put in flower beds etc. They compliment not replace the work of public servants. Takes a lot of staff time: attract small grants, arbitrate, staff attend meetings. But it pays off.
Case 4: Families intervention project. It was very expensive but key family members were given training in supporting their own family members.
Got some grant money to analyse and innovate on relationship between civil society and public servants. Some public servants better at having relationships with civil society than others. Need to put public servants at the disposal of the community and not in charge of it.
Community Budgets:
Integrate services at a neighbourhood level. Set up partnership boards include councillors and prominent / active members of the community, to be in charge of different parts of the budgets. Different levels of services:
Client based services: personal budgets, ASS etc.
Neighbourhood Services: e.g. street cleaning, park maintainence etc.
Areawide services: e.g. fire, schools etc.
Need to avoid the government response of beating up on communities and individuals. It is not a lifestyle choice to be on benefits but there just aren't enough jobs in Barnsley.
Need to focus just as much on the Enabling factors as the protective factors. Ie give people the skills to get out of a smoking addiction not just telling them how bad it is.
Big society should not be:
Not a conservative brand
Not political cover for dismantling the state
Not DIY Public services'
Behavorial Change in the Big Society
'John Bromley - Director, National Social Marketing Centre
Units involved in behaviour change in the big society
Nudge Unit: changed to behavioural change unit
Promoting Social Enterprise
Your Square Mile
Big Society Network
Big Society Bank
Happiness Index
Need to move from the expert knows best model
Expert defined objectives > strategies, programmes and plans > implementation: adapt to consumer wants + needs.'
Helping Local communities create a Big Society
David Prout, Director General , Department for Communities and Local Government
What is the role of central government in a more devolved world?
Adrian Brown, Research Fellow, Institute for Government
