Big Society Empowerment Policy – going in the right direction?

When the authors of a report which gave a constructive welcome to much of the Big Society agenda in the Spring produce a longer follow-up, and write that ‘the objectives of community empowerment and personal responsibility are in danger of being lost’, it’s worth taking a closer look.



Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller’s paper The Big Society and Public Services: complementarity or erosion? is available with its predecessor at their PACES consultancy website, and I won’t try to summarise its 38 pages here. Important to their argument is the distinction between community organisations, and the bigger voluntary organisations and social enterprises. While the former are by far the largest part of the sector (The National Survey of Third Sector Organisations found 70% have two or fewer staff members, and 56% no full-time equivalent staff), the thrust of policy is now towards commissioning and taking over community assets, which are only within the capability of the latter.

Will this help empowerment (one of the three pillars of Big Society)? ‘Running public services makes voluntary organisations more, not less, dependent on the state’, write Chanan and Miller, who worry that empowerment is in danger of becoming the poor relation, and call for a policy specifically for community groups. They emphasise the role of community development (though their views on it will not be uncontested), and call for the familiar recipe of grants and infrastructure support.

They point out that the sums involved for the state to support this key sector are relatively trifling, and argue that ‘if we think it is healthy for people to take a more active interest in their locality . . . this will not happen simply by withdrawing the active role of the agencies who in reality have the major role in determining local conditions’.

There’s much more in this report, of course, which I hope will be widely read.