Article: Letting the Big Society Flourish

Written as part of the Free Market Forum pamphlet, 30 Ideas for 30:

The Big Society was a great idea mired by its association with austerity. But we shouldn’t give up on it. It is a concept which Conservatives should embrace and attach rocket boosters to.

During the pandemic, time and again, civil society stepped up to help those most in need in our communities.

That response highlighted a few crucial things - the importance of local knowledge, and of flexibility. Local teams threw their time and goodwill into hyper-local, tailored support that often differed street-by-street, person-to-person. We have a deep bench of people who simply want to help.

We see this outside of the pandemic, too.

I have an amazing community interest company in Barrow, The Well Communities, who help those suffering from addiction. “We love people until they learn to love themselves,” their founder Dave Higham told me once. Their results speak for themselves. Where other services fail, they reap dividends for the people they support, and for the statutory bodies whose loads they lighten.

But they are constantly under the cosh. The nature of their funding means that they cannot guarantee consistency - existing hand-to-mouth between applications. Planning becomes impossible, and it ultimately hurts the people they were set up to help.

We should be doing everything we can to put power to their elbow. Instead of permitting a system that seems designed to choke them off at every turn, we must gear it to help them.

The first challenge is helping these organisations better measure their impact and demonstrate it to funders. I propose setting up a Civil Society Empowerment Agency (CSEA) to do just this.

The CSEA will create an index of third sector and civil society organisations, creating a bank of good practice so that they can learn from each other, and helping them measure their impact.

Enabling this will be two crucial commitments from Government. First, to open up the commissioning of public services, meaning that local organisations are able to bid to run services which are currently delivered by the public sector. Second, it will share more of the data it holds to assist measurement and help them prove themselves.

These measures would give community-led bodies the power to define their own solutions to problems, rather than operating on an unreliable shoestring around the fringes of statutory services.

The Big Society has helped us all through the pandemic - it’s time to grease the wheels and help it flourish.