Is time running out for the Big Society?

February 8, 2011 by
Filed under: Politics, Public policy, The RSA 

Having been ill for about five weeks and not had time to get to the doctors (I can feel your sympathy even as I write), I am reduced to short shallow blogging. But illness is also a prompt for a relevant joke:

Doctor to patient: I’m afraid I have some bad news and some very bad news.

Patient: What’s the bad news?

Doctor: You have only 24 hours to live.

Patient: Oh no! What’s the very bad news?

Doctor: I forgot to tell you yesterday.

Given recent events I see myself as the doctor and the friends of the Big Society as the patient.

A week last Saturday, a day after the last meeting of the friends, I wrote this:

“ …but the definitional issue is not the biggest problem. If one way of measuring the Big Society is the amount of third sector activity, especially that which relates broadly to increasing civic capacity, there is no question at all that the next two years will see society get smaller. In the face of the scale and rapidity of the reduction in funding, Councils are finding that scrapping third sector grants is a much cheaper and easier way of make immediate savings that making staff redundant. It is statutory services by professionals that will be preserved while preventative, community based provision withers away.”

So my warning was right but, given that it arrived a few days before the double whammy of Liverpool’s withdrawal from the Big Society pilots and the comments of Dame Elisabeth Hoodless on volunteering, my words were about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

This, in summary, is what the Coalition should have been saying these past few months (actually this is in summary what they should have said if – like me – they had four minutes to write it before catching a train to give a talk on the future of higher education in New Malden [n.b. it’s the talk that is in New Malden, not the future of HE].

” We are trying to create a new model of the state and a new way of thinking about society. It will take several years for that model to fully emerge but when it does it will be more dynamic, more effective and more responsive. But between now and the Big Society emerging, the main thing you will see is the old system changing and that will involve a lot of pain. As anyone in any large organisation will tell you it is impossible to achieve major change – especially when operating in a tough environment – without going through a very difficult time. We will do all we can to soften the blow but, in the end, it is will be up to local people, local councils and other agencies to try to find the best way through this period of transition. ”

But, partly because they were continuing with the cross-party fib in the last election that cuts could be made without harming anyone other than ‘faceless bureaucrats’ (boo hiss), the Coalition didn’t say this. And that’s why, though the Big Society is still an idea with much to commend it and still a debate we hope the RSA can shape, as a political narrative it is, at best, in intensive care.

David Cameron will not take all of this lying down and we will soon find out how he hopes to revive the patient. He has more than 24 hours but time I fear is running out.

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13 Comments on Is time running out for the Big Society?

  1. Catriona Robertson on Tue, 8th Feb 2011 6:32 pm

    2. Yes, & from what I hear, the government is prepared for people not liking the ‘pain’ for a couple of years.

    Francis Maude last night on Newsnight (I’m sure I could see him grinding his teeth ever so slightly) went further – central government will not soften the blow – that would only prolong the painful period of change.

    Big Society, as I understand it, will only really get going when local people hold their councils & local public sector fiercely to account on how they spend (large amounts of) public money – Kids Co could/should get council money if it’s doing a better job than social services. And it’s local people (presumably organised in some way, according to Phillip Blond) who will decide what best meets local needs. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether it will work.

  2. matthew gardiner on Tue, 8th Feb 2011 7:19 pm

    3. I get completely that a measure of Big Society should be “increasing civic capacity” and I get completely that Big Society is in intensive care, though the balance contributed to its parlous state between scrapping third sector grants, inadequate national presentation of a challenging concept and inherent resistance from unresponsive and disrespectful local power-brokers is far from clear to me.

    Getting it out of intensive care? Take it out of the political arena – too easy to dismiss and too hard to defend in that cuts dominated discourse. Feed it evidence of local leaders working across organisations who understand the scale and importance of this change, the difference between managing for cost and managing for value and who are therefore prepared to take some risks in risk averse times.

  3. Nick Denys on Tue, 8th Feb 2011 8:16 pm

    4. The Coalition Government (and Conservative opposition before then) have talked about 2011 being a tough year, that there will be tough times before things start improving. They may have not done it brilliantly but it is instinctively hard for politicians to tell potential voters about hardships. Most of the public conceptually understood that once we started shrinking the deficit things would be become tough but this is very different from feeling the impact of cuts.

    To take your doctor analysis a little bit further, people trust doctors. If a doctor proscribes a certain course of treatment they will inform you of the side effects, which you will listen to but you only really understand these side effects once you start experiencing them. It doesn’t matter that these side effects are bad because you trust your doctor when says this is temporary but you will get better in the future.

    One of the problems that politicians have to deal with is that most people do not trust Governments in the same way that they trust doctors. Perversely, this could be used as an argument for Big Society – the devolution of power from the centre.

  4. mike ashwell on Tue, 8th Feb 2011 9:22 pm

    5. I feel very lucky: Shropshire Council have provided my organisation with ‘the missing 20%’ of our income for the last 10 years. Despite facing big cuts they have not ripped the rug away; we face a cut in our Service Level Agreement not only this year but in future years too. I’m optimistic that we can fill the decreasing gap in our income but I’m not optimistic that David Cameron, Nick Clegg or even Vince Cable really understand what they have unleashed on Society; it is Big but not in ways they imagined. We deliver essential support to businesses and individuals in the rural extremity of SW Shropshire, we make partnerships and we make things happen that would not if we didn’t get involved, get dirty and don’t mind who takes the credit as long as good stuff happens.

    To only parts of the coalition this seems like their new idea but it’s been happening for years. To the other parts the challenge is to see who can cut hardest, deepest and with the unlikelyhood of a remorseful backward glance.

  5. Jo on Tue, 8th Feb 2011 11:29 pm

    6. Well, quite! now what does this remind me of? Decimating entire mining communities BEFORE any ideas of diversifivation and re-traning were mentioned. Horse, stables and utterley lax(ative) measures to ensure some social stability spring to mind. Big Society I like, in theory, in practice…….well the foundations of any great stable (building, society or otherwise) relies heavily as always on the willingness to do better than the efforts gone before. I recall the many shouts of “we can do it better, let us take it over, if it were down to us we’d do a better job & the best of the lot…… they couldn’t organise a p*** up in a brewery!”
    It is almost evil that at a time when capacity is at an all time low that David Cameron is appealing to us all to pull together, what war-time era is he living in? 1940’s values with jack all to fight for and what rosy apocalyptic horizon is he gazing at?

  6. Anthony Zacharzewski on Wed, 9th Feb 2011 10:57 am

    7. Worth bringing in here the argument (made by Andy Martin here: http://dmsc.me/g8WHHe) that the Big Society is like Cool Britannia – a slogan that’s doomed to be a political joke, even as its underlying idea is proved correct.

  7. Nick Flittner on Wed, 9th Feb 2011 12:32 pm

    8. I’ve been living in Australia for a number of years, and we have been through a number of ‘community engagement’ and ‘community empowerment’ initiatives that sound very similar to the Big Society idea. The main difference is that these were done when A LOT of funding was made available through the sale of our telecommunications monopoly, Telstra, which brought in buckets of money, much of which was channelled to communities to provide services and infrastructure for themselves and through this, ‘empower’ the communities to take more control of themselves. Result? Lots of individuals in communities empowered themselves, took up leadership positions, grabbed lots of funding, but then moved on when their interest (and energies) waned over the long years serving on committees and developing plans. People don’t mind if their energies are used for ‘extras’, like social events, sports facilities, community gatherings, but they do mind if they are expected to provide basic services usually delivered by government. In today’s world where most people are already stretched with work and family responsibilities, it is hard getting them to commit lots of hours to worthy causes. Just ask any volunteer organisation. Big Society is, I’m afraid, doomed to wither on the vine. There will be a burst of enthusiasm, then the reality will set in, some things will fail, people will get tired, and within a few years it will all be a bad memory.

  8. Carl Allen on Wed, 9th Feb 2011 12:40 pm

    9. Far from being in intensive care, government’s Big Society appears to be generally rude health despite the heavy dust cloud now surrounding it.

    But it is civil society, not owned by government, that is in a very slow motion crash.

    What will emerge from the clash/crash of civil society and Big Society is clear in some aspects and not clear in other aspects.

  9. Matthew Kalman on Wed, 9th Feb 2011 1:21 pm

    10. Once we get through the tough times to this – hopefully – new “more dynamic, more effective and more responsive” model of society, I’m fairly sure we will need access to ‘Living Community Maps’ of real-time data of our experiences in our communities (that I’ve been advocating).

    Once we can all see the health of communities in real-time, we can all respond – perhaps using social media to find others nearby who want to pitch in with us.

    The geographers seem to be saying that this is where things are going! ;-)

    In the November 2010, ‘Geospatial World’ Editor Bhanu Rekha wrote: “real-time data and the need for it is hot on everyone’s lips”, and “concepts like local data access and volunteered geographic information are gaining momentum”.

    If the ‘Big Society’ needs a kind of radar that than can scan for changes in the health of our communities, this may well be it.

    Sounds like I might be needing to drop the ‘Big Society’ label though…?

    I made a Google Doc about this ‘Living Community Map’ idea here:
    http://bit.ly/gSugd0

    (I update this page with interesting new links and other stuff every now and then; for some reason Google Docs don’t seem to open for everyone. Perhaps they dislike some types of web browser?).

    Matthew Kalman

    PS The geographers have only GIS-mapped the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it…! ;-)

  10. lily on Wed, 9th Feb 2011 2:58 pm

    11. Sadly I actually think you may be right and your PR/spin piece would have maintained the Big Society with some kind of momentum. The inevitable though is unavoidable however good your sales pitch.

    I believe Phil Redmond when discussing why Liverpool withdrew its support said something like

    ‘It’s all about ‘we want to change the world’, not ‘how do you want us to change the world?’. They turn up wanting to have a big conversation but it turns into a big lecture – telling us this is what you do and this is how you do it. We don’t need that.”

    Once again poor engagement, poor buy-in and no delivery. Sound familar?

  11. Louis Coiffait on Wed, 9th Feb 2011 11:45 pm

    12. Matthew – I didn’t know you had an interest in HE? What was the talk please? I have a proposition for you…

  12. Big Society debate continues… « Benlowndes on Sat, 12th Feb 2011 11:25 pm

    13. [...] other blogs I have seen, Julian Dobson’s and Matthew Taylor’s also caught the [...]

  13. Robert Burns on Sun, 13th Feb 2011 5:32 pm

    14. Well, at last!

    BS is slated for the knackers yard – can I load the humane killer please?

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