Does Hackney need a Big Society?

Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron delivers a speech at The Conservative Party Big Society conference in central London, Wednesday 31 March 2010. Photo By Andrew Parsons

Last month Prime Minister David Cameron set out his plans for the coalition government’s Big Society idea, purportedly devolving power away from Westminster and to local communities. However, the Big Society initiative is attracting critics from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

The Big Society is in theory about rolling back the state and devolving power away from the politicians in Westminster to local authorities and communities. The project is designed to encourage communities to take responsibility for determining how their area should be governed, while promoting the delivery of public services by social enterprises, local charities, community organisers and voluntary groups. As the Prime Minister said himself, it is about “galvanising, catalysing, prompting, encouraging and agitating for community engagement and social renewal”.

Yet though it all sounds good on paper, there are concerns in some quarters that the rhetoric of the Big Society has so far not been translated into policy.

Gabriel Chanan MBE, an independent consultant on community development and former Director of Policy and Research at the Community Sector Coalition, says: “[The Big Society] has potential, but it depends on how exactly it is going to be delivered, and whether it does grow into a coherent program and concept of how the activities will interact at public level with local services, especially now that these public services are being cut”. Otherwise, he warns, “the programme could just be a distraction from the cuts.”

This is the heart of the matter. Despite the Prime Minister proclaiming that the Big Society’s funding will pour forth from dormant bank accounts, eyebrows are being raised about an agenda that asks more of the voluntary sector at a time when its funding is being cut.

For the Hackney Council for Voluntary Service (HCVS), the cuts in funding and grants have already had a significant impact. This year, Hackney Council has made spending reductions of £3.8 million, and the Team Hackney grants programme, which is run by HCVS and supports a wide range of local community projects, has suffered a 33% reduction in grants this year. The previous £750,000 funding that was available to HVCS to deliver local projects is now down to £500,000, meaning a potential loss of 46 part time and full time jobs, 230 fewer volunteers utilised and 5,600 fewer beneficiaries.

“As the cuts really start happening, it is likely that any devolution of power and crisis in public finance could mean further cuts to local grant programmes which will have a detrimental effect in that there could be less money for local community groups to deliver projects,” says Jake Ferguson, Chief Executive of HCVS. “At present there aren’t established systems to passport money directly from central government to local community organisations, and history tells us that when times are hard, funding for local community and voluntary sector projects become harder to maintain.”

Within the Big Society framework, Chanan emphasises the need for “some form of fairness” into how funding would be rebalanced. “What is needed is a more sophisticated exercise in which we actually look at what the affect of different kinds of cuts would be, and where the voluntary and community could seriously take more responsibility,” says Chanan. “But at the same time, we also need to look at what more support the voluntary sector would need in order to take on more responsibility.” Without this support or necessary resources, any serious devolution of power from Westminster to the man on the street is simply impossible.

The other problem facing the Big Society is the makeup of these proposed new-look social enterprises and public sector profiles and how they deliver their services. Chanan argues that much of this is down to a sloppy use of the word ‘community’. “Looking at it in terms of population of a given place, there is practically no way to devolve anything to that whole population, other than for the local authority to do it,” says Chanan. “But if you look at all the actual examples of this devolving, or contracting out, or service level agreements, it’s actually from the public authority to a specific organization. It rarely represents more than a proportion of local people.”

Furthermore, whichever organisation takes on those responsibilities relative to the community takes on the same problems faced by the public authority in how to relate to the local people. Such a move may thus do no more than pass responsibility from a larger organisation to a smaller one.

HVCS prefers to see investment distributed between the 2000 groups already delivering services within the borough, rather than grants going to a new set of community groups: “Smaller, local organisations may not be the main beneficiaries, [as the process] called ‘commissioning’ […] often favours larger local and national voluntary organisations and private firms who have the capacity to write good funding applications and economies of scale to provide cheap delivery. However, they often struggle to engage local people.”

So is there a possible alternative? Well, take Lambeth Borough Council, for example, led by Steve Reed. He is challenging the Prime Minister’s vision by transforming Lambeth’s local government into what has been branded Britain’s first-ever cooperative council, seen by some as the Left’s answer to the Big Society.

Whilst this co-operative approach is different from the Big Society in that locals who help run services qualify for certain dividends – such a possible council tax rebate – the flaws in the agenda are the same. The politicians we elect to our councils to make decisions can potentially dodge their responsibilities behind a façade of giving local people control, and public services will be placed in the hands of smaller and potentially less democratic, less accountable organisations. As Chanan argues, the Big Society idea has potential, but in its current form it has the air of “a hope and a prayer” about it.