The explanation that the Big Society was an altruistic exercise to help the disadvantaged was clearly a non-starter from the beginning.
There has historically been a lack of clear account of where the Big Society in the UK came from. Notwithstanding its precise source, it was undoubtedly a massive political mistake to attempt to launch it on numerous occasions in a background of austerity and cuts and increasing unemployment. This was bound to lead to stories in the popular press about how people had lost their job, but were being invited to apply ‘for their own job’ as an unpaid volunteer. When you consider the Coalition’s attempt to introduce workfare, you can see how the policy mix became explosive.
This Coalition doesn’t do ‘organic’. For example, in the non-top reorganisation that constitutes the NHS Act, stakeholders were not consulted leading to the majority of the Royal Colleges, including the GPs shared by Clare Gerada, to oppose this key piece of legislation. We were introduced to the notion of the NHS Commissioning Board, and asked to learn to love the idea. In the same way, the Big Society is not about community investment where the ordinary public decides what programmes to flourish.
I believe a big mistake was for Lord Wei and his colleagues to mix and match social enterprises and venture philanthropy, and to repackage seductively as ‘The Big Society’, hoping nobody would smell a rat. The fact that this Coalition doesn’t do organic is manifest openly in the fact that the Big Society Bank will decide where to invest its money (rather, in part, our money as it comes from unclaimed account in the UK). It then decides where it wants to invest the money, and decide which metrics it wants to pursue to decide what a good outcome is. The investors will want something back for their money – doh.
It is particularly not clear where the architects of the Big Society got “their big idea” from. In the US, there has been a history of philanthropy, and indeed organisations in the US are successful are providing such services. Maybe Lord Wei got their inspiration from abroad. Housing cooperatives are well-known about, and serve as a a legal mechanism for ownership of housing where residents either own shares (or share capital co-op) reflecting their equity in the cooperative’s real estate, or have membership and occupancy rights in a not-for-profit cooperative (non-share capital co-op), and they underwrite their housing through paying subscriptions or rent.
However, looking at the small print of how or why we differed from the U.S. has been difficult, as we have never been given adequate explanation of how or if recipients of awards would repay their money, over what time scale, and with what rate of interest. The New York Co-operative does provide ‘some flesh on the bones’ where we are able to make some conclusions about how a co-op award may compared to a mortgage (see for example this well known article in the New York Times), but we need some detail on the operation of the Big Bank here to ensure that vulnerable people are not subject to a problem they cannot easily get out of. It is also interesting to note that further criticisms from the housing sector have already begun to emerge here in the UK. According to the Financial Times today, “Phil Shanks, director of SAF Housing, a fund for the provision of housing for those in need of extra care, said the Big Society Capital concept is flawed because it does not overcome the main concern that many institutional backers of social enterprises have: the security of funding for public services”.
The implementation of the Big Society has been a huge mess thus far, but like all its non-organic projects, unless there is better detail and more substantial support from those who do give up a lot of their time in the third sector currently, the Coalition will find a substantial failure on its hands. Hopefully, their other non-organic project, the NHS restructuring, will go better.
(c) Legal Aware 2012
