Is the voluntary sector immune to producer capture? I thought about this question when reading the other day the views of veteran film maker Ken Loach. The director of Kes, Raining Stones and countless other powerful pieces of social realism, was urging people not to donate to the homelessness charity Shelter while it was in conflict with its own employees over plans which may worsen the terms and conditions of some of the charity’s staff. In defending the action of Shelter management, its chief executive, Adam Sampson (a recent speaker at RSA), said ‘People give us money not to benefit our staff but to benefit those we were set up to serve – the poor, the vulnerable, the homeless – and my moral and legal duty is to use that money as efficiently as possible’.

‘Producer capture’ is one of the key concepts imported by New Labour from the nostrums of neo-liberal economics. It describes the process whereby the goals of an organisation reflect the interests and prejudices of its employees (the producers) rather than those it is supposed to serve (the consumers, customers or citizens). More precisely, given that workers in a customer-friendly organisation will see their own interests served by serving the customer, capture is evident when producer interests are not aligned with those of the consumer and it is the former that predominate.

New Labour reformers in large part accepted the neo-liberal charge that public services – sheltered from the disciplines of competition or profit – were prone to producer capture. This insight contributed to some of New Labour’s most important public service reforms. It also legitimised rhetoric critical of public employees. This rhetoric (remember the ‘scars on my back’?) also contributed to the public service morale problems which have plagued this Government despite extra investment and higher public sector pay.

I am often asked to speak on issues relating to that nebulous concept ‘the third sector’. With all the major parties taking every opportunity to sing the praises of, and make more promises to, the third sector I feel honour-bound to challenge the consensus, arguing that the voluntary sector is as prone to producer capture as the public sector.

If you were to plot the sectors as lines on an axis of producer capture, I suspect the voluntary sector would be the longest. In other words the third sector contains both the least producer captured and the most producer captured organisations. The former would include small community based groups run on a shoestring by low paid employees and volunteers while the latter might include (naming no names) well-heeled high status NGOs that have managed to make themselves almost immune to any tough questioning about the actual impact of their work. A trustee of one of these organisations recently described to me spending a whole day being shown round its offices before eventually bursting out in exasperation ‘the offices are great, the staff lovely but when am I actually going to meet a client?’.

If this was an essay not a blog post I could spend more time exploring producer capture in each sector. It is, for example, a difficult concept to apply to the private sector. Last week many people were outraged at the profits of energy companies at a time of rising prices and fuel poverty. But many of us complaining are also shareholders in these same companies through our pensions funds, life insurance or savings. So where does the producer interest lie? This is, by the way, one of the issues we will be exploring in our Tomorrow’s Investor project (for which we’d love another sponsor or two!).

For now let me end with a plea to avoid ‘sectorism’. The private, public and voluntary sectors are different in systematic ways, but it is more obfuscating than illuminating to ascribe any characteristics, including producer capture, to a sector as whole.

In Manchester on Monday to talk about our project on pro-social behaviour. We are getting a good response as we go around the city and in the evening I was asked to speak to local government officers and members from the greater Manchester area. I began my talk by referring to two articles in Monday’s Manchester Evening News.

The page one lead was about the impeccable behaviour of Manchester City fans in the one minute’s silence to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Munich disaster. Six thousand, predominantly young, men had put aside a lifetime of hostility to United and not one of them had broken the pledge of City fans to respect the silence. Contrast this with the story on page two reporting that the North West is the worst region in the UK for attacks by gangs on fire crews attending emergency call outs.

The success of the minute’s silence was based on a sophisticated and concerted campaign. The way Manchester had responded as a city united in grief fifty years ago was constantly emphasised. There were many reminders that City had lost a former great – Frank Swift – in the crash so they could mourn for their own and not just United’s loss. City fans’ websites hosted long debates and agreed amongst themselves that it would be letting City down not to respect the ‘minute’. On the day United gave every fan a free scarf – with sky-blue scarves for the City fans. There was an iron fist inside the velvet glove: a proclamation from City that any fan seen disrupting the minute would get a life ban, but everyone knew this threat would have been unworkable if thousands had ignored it.

So it is possible to persuade people – even people resistant to authority – to do the right thing but it takes thought and effort. The day after the talk, the Head of Public Affairs at Canary Wharf, Howard Dawber, told me about an initiative in a nearby area, the Isle of Dogs. Fire crews facing false call outs and attacks on a local estate had explored the reasons for the problem. They had come to the conclusion that it was because the youngsters found fire engines and fire crews exciting. So they put together a set of activities which brought the fire engine into the community and provided youngsters with opportunities to ride in the engine, undertake an adapted form of the fire crew training and even wear an adapted uniform. The effect of all this was that not only did the false alarms and attacks virtually dry up but that the fire service had an unprecedented level of applications to join from youngsters on the area.

It takes effort, innovation, commitment but pro-social initiatives do work and the results can be spectacular.

I spent the weekend on a very intensive personal development course. It was challenging and ultimately inspiring. I am making lots of changes in the way I think and act as a consequence (email me if you want to know more about the course).

So, I was already in a slightly strange place when I arrived to chair an all-day conference hosted jointly by the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Office of the Third Sector. The conference of local authorities and third sector groups had been organised around the announcement of Government’s plans for what are called ‘community anchors’ (cross cutting, community based third sector organisations). Only one problem.  The night before the conference, ministers had pulled the announcement. So there we were, 200 people, including two ministers, to discuss the implementation of a plan that had been shelved! As it turned out the conference was fine, and I suspect many of the ideas that came out of it will be reflected in the plan when it does finally see the light of day.

The plan was pulled because of an unresolved argument about whether central government could specifically earmark the community anchor funds or should devolve the money to local authorities merely with guidance as to how it should be spent. However this argument is resolved, it does at least show the Government is taking seriously its commitment to reduce the funding constraints and targets it imposes on localities. Ministers, interest groups, and commentators tend to speak with forked tongue on devolving power. We attack the Government for centralisation but then protest either at ‘postcode lotteries’ or when money that has previously been earmarked for a particular policy or scheme we favour is made subject to local discretion.

This week saw us recruit our 27,000th Fellow. This is fantastic news and mainly down to the hard work of our brilliant fellowship team. We are also recruiting more Fellows through the recommendation of existing FRSAs so let me also thank all of you who have helped us reach this milestone. Onwards to 28,000!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a company in possession of a decent turnover must be in need of a corporate responsibility programme. It’s certainly trendy – think Google’s “do no evil” tag. The RSA is very trendy too, and we’re currently looking at how an RSA Network could support SMEs in fulfilling all their social responsibilities (including turning a profit).

The argument about sustainable business development hasn’t been won yet. A recent Economist carried one of the best idiot’s guides yet to the potential pitfalls of the fashion for CSR. Is fixing the world what business is for? On a pragmatic level, does it mean having to actively build social responsibility into every part of your business or will the oddn philanthropic donation do?

Consider the CSR question in the context of the UK’s small to medium enterprises (SMEs). The majority of us working in the private sector are employed not by big corporations but enterprises of fewer than 100 employees; their social and environmental footprint is huge. But when upwards of 30% of small businesses go bust after the first year, turning a profit first and foremost is a matter of survival.

Having to respect other bottom lines (environmental, social, progressive working practices) is an unrealistic burden, some say. We want home-grown entrepreneurship, local businesses and economic diversity, so how exacting can we be of SMEs?

The RSA Network’s challenge is to reconcile SMEs’ bottom lines with their impact on the world around them. The aim is to rethink CSR not as a big business luxury, with a small number of high profile wins, but as a huge number of small gestures.

Anyone with practical insights into how we might make that happen should keep an eye on the Networks platform for details of how to get involved. To be continued…