The Big Society - the evidence base
Background
The programme Building the Big Society was the first major policy announcement of the new coalition government on 18 May 2010. Since then, there has been much speculation as to what the Big Society actually means, as the increasing number of articles and blog-posts testifies.
Building on David Kane’s blog-post on the numbers behind the Big Society, the NCVO research team is keen to explore in greater depth the evidence behind this important policy agenda which emphasises the need to transform the relationship between citizens and the state.
Aims and objectives
These webpages aim to bring together some of the key evidence sources on the Big Society we have identified, in order to inform the debate and contribute to current thinking about how the different dimensions of the agenda might be taken forward.
We realise that the Big Society agenda potentially covers a very broad range of topics, and that our evidence review is unlikely to be comprehensive (particularly as we wanted to publish a review relatively quickly). To make it more manageable we have, at this stage, decided to focus on the five themes in the document Building the Big Society. This document provides a brief outline of the policies on which the government have agreed:
- Give communities more powers
- Encourage people to take an active role in their communities
- Transfer power from central to local government
- Support co-ops, mutuals, charities and social enterprises
- Publish government data
We need your help
We see these pages very much as a ‘living document’ which will be constantly updated with additional sources and analysis. We would like these pages to be as collaborative as possible, so please feel free to comment on what we’ve done and provide links to additional sources of evidence that we should include.
In addition to the content here, we have published the review as a PDF document for distribution. Our intention is to revise this at regular intervals as collaborators add content or suggest revisions. Any subsequent versions of the document will acknowledge these contributions. Here is version one of the PDF.
You can also see the tables behind all the evidence in these pages in this google spreadsheet.
Comments
Voluntary Action Case Study from Cornwall
Volunteer Cornwall works from the perspective of the whole individual and their multilayered life with multitude of needs and aspirations. This is undertaken in the context of the wider community in which they live as a complex web of social and physical interactions. We do not focus on functions or narrow issues. We support over 1,500 organisations that support individuals and communities. We promote voluntary action supporting people to become active in their communities, supporting themselves by supporting others. We assist the public sector and community groups understand how to engage local people in the co-production of services and their future. We work with young people, elders, vulnerable adults, men, women, BME, etc. We support activities that help people with health problems, assist people back to work, access services through voluntary transport schemes enable people to become involved in service delivery in schools, in the environment etc. We consider everyone to be a potential volunteer.
The volunteer infrastructure (Volunteer Centres) based across the county have never been adequately funded. Income has been derived from surpluses made from other projects such as New Deal, helping people back to work (this surplus has now gone as government issued new contracts to big providers, we are sub-contractor and do not get any surplus) and via Local Area Agreement reward funding. Both of these funding streams will cease in 2011. This year we have managed to keep activity going by staff becoming involved in training volunteers through ESF funding and also re-designing how they respond to inquiries. If local people know what they want to do and are capable of engaging with the host organisation directly we will signpost them direct instead of giving a more personal service. This has freed up staff time to concentrate on people who are under-represented in volunteering in our area, including people with disabilities, BME, men and young people. Staff are also concentrating on assisting people to become more active in the development and delivery of public services.
One successful initiative, ViVA, shows how a public service can be delivered in a more engaging manner; this work is with Adult Care and Support. Instead of treating people as problems or passive recipients we have a person in post who enables vulnerable adults to volunteer and become engaged within their community. Our manger has over 300 clients he is supporting (the Council has three people doing similar work who have less clients between the three of them). The Council will be seconding these three staff to us so they can work in a more creative and innovative way thus enabling more vulnerable people to contribute to their communities and build up strong social support networks.
We need government to understand that individuals and local grass roots activities need to be supported at the local level or else the engagement diminishes and can fizzle out. I recently wrote to Eric Pickles showing them that our Volunteer Centre work in 2001/10 had over a 1,000% return on investment through the work of new volunteers, let alone those we support who are currently volunteering. If Big Society is to really work it has to be supported, people want to get involved but need assistance to understand what they can do and then to keep them engaged.
We need public sector departments to step outside their silos and support activities that generate multiple outcomes. Generally central or local government departments are only interested in achieving their own functional outputs but do not really appreciate the additional outcomes when working with individuals and communities. We have to get local and central government to invest in local community infrastructure which works from the perspective and the multivalence of individual lives and the communities innate social capital. Many public bodies want to control what is happening and thus not support innovative practice.
Developing Big Society is about people and communities taking on greater responsibility for their own needs and their future. However Big Society does have a cost and great savings can be achieved but investment at the right level has to be made to ensure lasting change.