Big Society - the right concept at the wrong time?
Yet another survey has been released today bashing the government's Big Society initiative. This time consultancy firm nfpSynergy found that 59% of people expect the policy to fail, with just 20% having a clear understanding of what it actually means and 39% suggesting that the Coalition drop the policy altogether.
I tend to take these surveys with a large pinch of salt, especially as we've had a few recently giving out conflicting views on volunteering with one suggesting there was 15m Brits ready and waiting to give their time to save public services and another citing that the majority of Brits had never volunteered and have no interest in helping charity. With these sort of results who is one to believe?
But in terms of the Big Society policy I see a strong level of increasing cynicism growing daily and so the results of this latest survey do not surprise me one bit and I am inclined to ttake them at face value.
It's a shame though. I for one really love the Big Society concept - a national drive that encourages local citizens to get more involved in community projects, empowering them to run services where they want to and overall increasing the motivation to volunteer and connect with their neighbourhoods is a great initiative, no question.
And regardless of what you might think, the brand profile for Big Society is also pretty impressive. Yes the nfp Synergy survey found that few people actually understood what it was, but it also found that nearly 70% thought it was to do with volunteering - so some messages are clearly getting through. To have gained this level of awareness is an achievement of sorts and for this the Prime Minister can take the credit having personally driven the initiative so far - without his backing this would have ended up like so many other governement funded community awareness projects, nice to see but hardly ground breaking and unlikely to touch the lives of many - with the possible exception of www.do-it.org.uk of course!
But like all new brands and product launches timing is everything and in this case the timing could not have been worse. There are daily reports of voluntary and community sector job losses and with this a growing sense of doom as so many valued community and public services go to the wall. Of course some will be saved by the good will and time of volunteers - assuming their local authorities will let them - and hopefully by, the rather late, intervention of the Communities and Local Government Secretary of State. But overall the climate could not be much worse to be asking people to step in run local services on a voluntary basis.
I said a while back that Big Society needed passion not politics to succeed, that people would only volunteer for something they really connected with not to help the government save money. I still believe that, though I also now believe that it can really thrive if it receives the heavy brand exposure such as that which the PM himself can only give. But doing this at a time when community services are being closed at a staggering rate due to government funding cuts is just not going to wash with the majority of the population.
Perhaps for now the PM should just step away from the Big Society mantra and leave us to get on with picking up the pieces from the fallout. Maybe when the dust has settled the nation will be more open to hearing what is in fact a great message albeit so far delivered at the wrong time.
I agree with you Jamie that the policy is a really good one. The issue is not one of selling it, it is one of the government acting like it means it. Why did they write a policy like that when they clearly went into government with the intention of dismantling the welfare state through cuts and privatisation and the cut back to the voluntary sector of historic proportions? What we are not seeing is the sector that can deliver the policy being resourced to do it. The BS Bank is offering loans as commercial rates with money that does not belong to the government. The Community Organisers are community development workers who will have to raise their own salaries. We know that volunteering opportunities are dependent upon voluntary organisations being resourced to manage the volunteers. It's a great policy but cynicism is the inevitable result of the outcome of the governments performance.
What is striking to me about nfpSynergy's findings is that most people identify Big Society with volunteering. This, it is claimed, gives government some comfort because it shows the message is (kind of) getting through to the public.
Except...government are quite clear that Big Society is not all about volunteering. They were particularly vocal about this after Hoodless-gate and Nat Wei's embarrassing volte face about his voluntary commitment to the concept.
I wonder how much of the government's motivation really is about saving money and how much is genuine worry about the extent to which people are becoming incapable of coping on their own? From the perspective of a charity which provides local services, we are being asked to solve problems that people would previously have dealt with themselves or with the help of friends/family. It would take a lot of the pressure off if more people had social contacts whom they could ask for lifts etc.
At the moment it probably WOULD be possible for government to raise taxes to grow community services, but there must potentially come a time when it all becomes top-heavy and falls apart.
What happens to the vulnerable then?
The other side of the coin of local services being provided by volunteers is the benefit to those volunteers in terms of useful experience in decision-making, working as a team, organising rotas etc.
I think what I am trying to say is that the local branch library may not itself be terribly important in the scheme of things, but that it might be enormously beneficial for a group of locals to get the experience of running it themselves even if there were some aspects (such as internet facilities) that they couldn't manage.
One of the most dispiriting things about the response to Big Society has been the attitude that volunteers can't possibly be capable of doing things without someone to tell them what to do.