What’s next? When political changes hit the community sector

Waiting for the Pro Bono Economics ‘Labour and Civil Society Summit’ to start. An interesting moment that has me thinking about seeing cycles of this process happen over the last 25 years. 14 years ago, I was a commissioner attending a conference on sex and relationships education where a Conservative shadow minister talked about their plans. They didn’t have any. He seemed weirdly angry at everybody there but also barely interested… But we knew then that teenage pregnancy, sexual health, and a whole range of childhood public health issues, were about to disappear from the agenda.

Soon after, with a new coalition Government, I was in a multi-purpose community organisation. I was at a conference talking about the start of the Big Society bonanza where the Work Programme was now the only show in town. Every charity was desperate to reorient itself to a brave new world of competition with big-society-big-corporates. Mostly they just went bankrupt from impossible contracts that even cherry-picking of easy clients couldn’t make work. Many charities also followed. Payment by results meant no results, and nobody left to deliver it. Big Society used community and charity as a rebrand for decimating social provision.

And so we may soon have a chance to begin again. I hope Labour can take a less combative tone today than it has recently (I’m looking at you, Wes Streeting) - it would be helpful for Labour to recognise where it can find natural allies.

My main interest - and slight concern - before today begins is that all of the themes on the agenda are purely about areas that are essentially the traditional province of public services. Much as the VCS has a vast contribution to make to those. A real change in attitude to the VCS would be to stop seeing it solely as a bargain basement public sector/ private provider. And to think about the massive changes to the culture and climate that its community building could make (as well as the valuable efforts made by health condition charities, the employability, the knife crime, etc). Community charities contribute to those efforts more broadly by helping to reverse the decline that past and present economic and social policy have inflicted on the very fabric of communities themselves.

And saying that, I’m now I’m taken back to my very first VCS job 25 years ago, in the midst of the New Deal for Communities and the like. The value of grassroots community charities was one thing the Blair moment really got. We parted company on many issues - but that one was fundmental to my understanding of ‘civil society’ - and society itself - as a whole.