Keep thinking Big

It may have failed as a slogan, but the Big Society may change the way we think about public services and public life

By Asheem Singh

Focus groups didn't like the Big Society, allowing Labour to make rare comedy capital in an otherwise drab campaign by caricaturing it as a DIY state. We perform open-heart surgery on our neighbours, collect the bins, provide victim support on the telephone and then rush off to teach economics at the local school. The coalition could have put the idea to bed, along with the politically difficult commitment to raise the inheritance tax threshold and the bizarre idea to give a £3 weekly bonus to married couples (a rare, rather post-modernist example of policymaking by “sign”). Yet the Big Society remains. For what failed as a slogan could potentially be one of the most radical governing principles in recent history: one that transform our public services, transform our civil society and change the way we think about public services and public life.

For decades we have attempted to bring about social progress through the centralised state and the individualised market. Both have failed. Too many of us are still poor and stuck in a life that has no economic options. Drawing heavily on the work of Robert Puttnam, Francis Fukuyama and the work of ResPublica Director Phillip Blond, the Big Society suggests that the way to change our social political and economic outcomes is to “associate” with one another: to get the state and the market to start working properly again.

Government has striven for years to engage more people in the business of public service delivery, so what is different about this attempt? First, the real philosophical ballast behind it. Previous attempts to platform or involve the voluntary sector in public service delivery did so in a piecemeal, experimental fashion. The voluntary sector was seen as an emergent good; something that could build social capital as a surrogate organ of the state. The Big Society flips this on its head. If association is the goal, then civil society organisations trump the state as the means to deliver good. So, for example, no more NHS as “preferred provider”. No more state monopoly on setting up schools. Instead: associative models, like co-operatives, able to perform buyouts in public services. Community right to buy, and community asset transfer. It goes on.

This bring us to the second, key point: how the Government has used the narrative, By melding these themes into a strategy – the “only big idea of the election campaign from any side”, as David Cameron called it - the party that forms the plupart of the Government has demonstrated a level of commitment. A progressive arc stretches across the frontline team, from the leadership, through the Cabinet Office, to Oliver Letwin, Francis Maude and to Civil Society Minister Nick Hurd, to ministers such as Greg Clarke at the DCLG. Without that level of commitment, the case for anything from scrapping voluntary sector programmes to enforcing scale-based value for money criteria that kill service delivery participation by smaller providers would be harder to argue against: now there is real voice within Government in an increasingly arid funding environment. Happily, other partners in the coalition back this commitment. An eavesdropping philosopher might have raised an eyebrow when Nick Clegg argued that “Big Society” was actually a synonym for “liberalism”, but however questionable the syllogisms of the Deputy Prime Minister, it showed that for his part, he was game.

No civil society organisation can do more to help people if it has less money to do it. No civil society organisation can expand if the long-term commitment of volunteers and funders is not there. If Labour's nightmare parody is not to become the nightmare present, the Big Society rests on the contention that there is latent demand among people to do more to help. My most recent publication for ResPublica, The Venture Society, argued that there is indeed such latent demand and highlighted what Government could do to help one section of such people: social entrepreneurs. These are the people who drive the ventures, from youth clubs to ethical businesses, such as coffee company Cafe Direct, that use the market to achieve social good.

One in 30 people is employed in social ventures full time in the UK today, the highest in Europe. Plus, about 250,000 are attempting to set up a social venture. There are some 62,000 social enterprises – social ventures that have become formal business vehicles – with an annual turnover of about £24 billion. Yet our research shows there remains this latent demand to do more. Unless they have private or family money, financial support reaches just 1 per cent of all social entrepreneurs. Fieldwork suggests that 36 per cent of social entrepreneurs who receive support create ventures that work so well they can be replicated again and again. Getting enough support to just 10 per cent of these, means that another 8,500 viable, sustainable social enterprises could be created.

The Venture Society proposes that government works to join the small, local incubator hubs or “lablets”, such as the SHINE hub in Leeds or social innovations hubs in Walsall, with larger central organisations that can provide supply-chain brokerage and innovation. Pilot funds would allow successful local incubators to replicate or franchise, or interested groups to set them up in their own areas.

International experience suggests that putting advice and funding at the heart of the community dramatically boasts the number of start-up enterprises. Key to this success is a strong connection of the hub to the local area. In the longer term we back the development of a capitalised social investment bank, targeted tax breaks for new investment vehicles and a community reinvestment act, all of which would help tailor and grow this market and funnel social venture capital where it needs to go: to the local, not to the centre.

This sort of infrastructure building is a form of radical economic change: a new economic model for the poorest members of society. When the campaigns are done and the message is worn, this is the next, more radical phase of the Big Society. It is something different from what Labour used to call “capacity building”, for it is not state-sponsored or dependent. It is not standing back and doing nothing: the laissez-faire of market individualism.

Social entrepreneurs need one kind of infrastructure to marry private money and expertise, to get more value into their start-ups. Volunteers need yet another if they are to turn a one-off act into a long-term commitment: they need guidance, a sense of training and growth. So expect to see, along with more opportunities for civil society groups to get involved in service delivery, similar new models and innovative infrastructures that combine private and public resources more effectively to service civil society; that go with the grain of what is already out there rather than reinvent the wheel. This is the good society updated for the 21st century. And if the government sees it through, five or ten years from now, those focus groups that were once indifferent to the Big Society might well think again.

To find out more about this article, visit: http://www.respublica.org.uk/sites/www.respublica.org.uk/files/The%20Venture%20Society%20Final.pdf

28 May 2010

Asheem Singh. Deputy Director, ResPublica