SE and the Big Society – policy development (2006-present)

The Big Society policy agenda represented the central feature of the Conservatives’ 2010 election campaign (Kisby, 2010) pledges on welfare reform, “based on the chimera of paying for improved services through the holy

grail of efficiency savings” (Smith, 2010: 828).

Such ‘efficiency savings’ were largely premised upon “[t]he hope that charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations c[ould] step in to replace a reduced public welfare provision, hard hit by the austerity needed to rebalance the public finances” (Alcock, 2010: 384), whilst attempting to counter the, not unreasonable, belief that:

“charities [and SEs] are drafted in to provide services 'on the cheap'” (RBWM, 2011: 1).

The Conservatives’ relationship with SE had been evident during the years of Labour’s governmental tenure, when it operated as the main opposition party, and a close look at some of the shadow cabinet’s speeches during that time reveals rhetoric similar in tone to that of the Labour ministers, whereby the SE sector was ‘wooed’ by the Conservatives and prepared for its possible role as a collaborator in the delivery of a new Conservative government policy agenda. Leader of the Conservatives, David Cameron MP, made a speech to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) in December 2006, in which he spoke of his desire to see SEs helping to “transform […] the communities we live in”, describing his vision of a new ‘breed’ of SE – “‘social enterprise 2.0’ [which] means social action that is more innovative, dynamic, flexible and responsive” (Cameron, 2006b).

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Like the Labour government, the Conservatives put forward a construction of SE as first and foremost businesses: “social enterprises – businesses, running on business principles, but with a social purpose” (ibid.), led by so-called “systems entrepreneurs”, who were described as “people with experience of running effective modern organisations, able to work creatively with donors and government as well as with clients” (ibid.)

In describing his apparent passion for SE, Cameron declared that “[o]ur aim should be to make social enterprise as attractive and exciting a career prospect for young graduates as business or the professions is now” (ibid.), clearly demonstrating his conception of SEurs as educated, middle class individuals. Indeed his rhetoric around SE was equally as enthusiastic as the Labour government’s at the same time; thus while Prime Minister, Tony Blair MP, was waxing lyrical about the:

“social enterprises [that] have pioneered new ways of delivery, helping local authorities improve the quality of the services they provide to the public. By empowering staff, users and other stakeholders, they can do the real joining up on the ground that public bodies often struggle with” (Blair, 2006),

and the Labour Minister for the Third Sector, Ed Miliband MP, was describing Britain’s “fantastic social entrepreneurs [working] at the cutting edge of doing businesses, involving a more diverse workforce […] contributing billions to GDP” (Miliband, 2006), David Cameron was describing the UK’s “new passion for social enterprise” (Cameron, 2007b), and the anticipated “fantastic flowering of social enterprise, the like of which we cannot even imagine today” (Cameron, 2006).

However, on closer inspection, Conservative rhetoric around the proposed policy agendas relating to SE appeared to show conceptual inconsistencies. For example, whilst David Cameron spoke of the empowerment function of:

“the Conservative mission: to roll forward the frontiers of society […through] more civic responsibility, empowering local government, community organisations and social enterprise” (Cameron, 2006),

which sought to see poor people recast “as the agents of their own escape from poverty”, he also described the work of the Big Issue - a SE that provides

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homeless individuals with “a hand up, not a hand out” (Big Issue, 2014) by providing them with a weekly magazine to sell, allowing them to keep the profits of all sales - as an organisation that “rescues so many people from homelessness” (Cameron, 2006b emphasis added).

Similarly, he described people in the “poorest postcodes” as “simply need[ing] the opportunities, and the encouragement, and the confidence to live up to the potential inside them” (Cameron, 2006), whilst elsewhere declaring that “social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make” (Cameron, 2008), thus revealing the Victorian-esque demarcation between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor that underpinned contemporary Conservative understanding of poverty and its causes.

The moralistic and paternalistic underpinning of Conservative policy thinking, coupled with its apparent ‘heroic’, chivalric construction of middle class values was noted by Smith (2010: 830):

“[t]he Big Society speaks to a Tory tradition of public duty and the social responsibility of the well off to the disadvantaged. It sits within the idea of welfare being provided by an organic civil society rather than the state, and the role of the Woman’s Institute, the Roundtable and other voluntary organisations that ‘do good’”.

However, whilst Smith (2010) speculated on the centrality of women (‘the role of the Women’s Institute’) to the Big Society agenda, such a conceptual link was not expressly made either in the political speeches of the time, nor in published policy documentation. Instead, the Big Society was presented in ostensibly gender-neutral terms, focussed largely on “the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general well-being” (Cameron, 2009).

Rebranding SE as “capitalism with a conscience” (Cameron, 2009b), in the run- up to the 2010 general election, the Conservative rhetoric on SE became better defined within the Big Society agenda, with reference made to the creation of Social Enterprise Zones which, similar to Thatcher’s (mainstream) Enterprise Zones of the 1980s (Sivaev, 2013), would provide environments within which “social enterprises c[ould] be properly enabled and all unnecessary obstacles to

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their effectiveness removed” (Conservatives, 2007: 29). The establishment of a Social Investment Bank (Cameron, 2009) was also proposed as a means by which to “wholesale [patient] capital to a variety of community development financial Institutions” (Conservatives, 2008: 45) in support of the scaling-up of SEs (Conservatives, 2010a), as based upon the findings of the 2007 Commission on Unclaimed Assets’ report (Cohen, 2007).

However, with public understanding of the concept of the Big Society reported to be poor (Kisby, 2010), “its profile within the [Conservative] party’s electioneering was reduced over the course of the campaign” (Alcock, 2010: 380). Nevertheless, having managed in May 2010 to create a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats (LibDem), the Conservatives re- launched the Big Society policy agenda (Conservatives, 2010c) alongside a policy document entitled ‘Big Society not Big Government’ (Conservatives, 2010b) outlining their priorities based on three key policy areas, which encompassed six individual policies:

“Key policies – summary

We will strengthen and support social enterprises to help deliver our public service reforms:

 We will create an independent Big Society Bank, funded from unclaimed bank assets, which will leverage private sector investment to provide hundreds of millions of pounds of new finance for neighbourhood groups, charities, social enterprises and other non-governmental bodies

 One of the purposes of the Big Society Bank will be to provide funds to intermediary bodies with a track record of supporting and growing social enterprises

We will stimulate the creation and development of neighbourhood groups in every area:

 We will establish National Centres for Community Organising  Providing neighbourhood grants for the UK’s poorest areas

We will encourage mass engagement in neighbourhood groups and social action projects by:

 Transforming the civil service into a ‘civic service’ by making regular community service a key element in staff appraisals

 Launching an annual national ‘Big Society Day’ to celebrate the work of neighbourhood groups and encourage more people to take part in social action projects” (Conservatives, 2010b: 2).

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The re-launch also coincided with the re-branding of the Labour-named Office of the Third Sector as the new Office for Civil Society (Alcock, 2010), alongside the appointments of both a Minister for Civil Society - Nick Hurd, MP (Cabinet Office, 2010), a government advisor for the Big Society - Nat Wei, a British-born SEeur of Hong Kong Chinese ancestry (Cabinet Office, 2010b), and the designation of four ‘vanguard community projects’ in Liverpool, Eden Valley in Cumbria, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and the London borough of Sutton (BBC, 2010).

These vanguard communities were to be provided with expert support, which would help facilitate the provision of “a range of activities, including a community buy-out of a pub, increasing volunteering at museums to keep them open and developing youth projects” (Kisby, 2010: 484), all financially supported by a grant to each community of up to £100,000 (Wiggins, 2011). A raft of policy and supporting documents quickly followed including an updated Compact, which sought “to ensure that the Government and civil society organisations work effectively in partnership to achieve common goals and outcomes for the benefit of communities and citizens in England” (HM Government, 2010: 6), an open letter from Francis Maud (Minister for the Cabinet Office) and Nick Hurd (Minister for Civil Society) to the VCSE reaffirming the government’s commitment to work alongside the sector (Cabinet Office, 2010c), a document providing information for government departments and Local Authorities (LAs) on managing the proposed spending cuts to the VCSE (OCS, 2010), and a similar one directed at the VCSE itself (OCS, 2010b).

Other documents to emerge at the same time included a policy document outlining the anticipated role of the VCSE in the Big Society agenda entitled ‘Building a stronger civil society: a strategy for voluntary and community groups, charities and social enterprises’ (HM Government, 2010b), and a Private Member’s Bill tabled by Chris White, Conservative MP for Warwick and Leamington, entitled the ‘Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill’, which called upon the government to “publish a document setting out a

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strategy for the promotion by government departments of engagement in social enterprise in England (the ‘national social enterprise strategy’)” (HoC, 2010: 1). In spite of the initial flurry of activity, the Big Society agenda soon began to fall apart, as in February 2011 Nat Wei reduced the number of days that he committed to his unpaid governmental advisory role from three days per week to two, citing his inability to undertake paid work, and to spend time with his young family as pivotal factors (Cohen, 2011). In the same month, the City of Liverpool, one of the four ‘vanguard community projects’ withdrew from the scheme claiming that government spending cuts had made it impossible to meaningfully continue (Mason, 2011), and in May 2011, less than a year after his appointment (and associated peerage bestowal), Nat Wei completely resigned from his Big Society advisory role (Curtis, 2011).

Finally, by the time the ‘Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill’ was enacted as the ‘Public Services (Social Value) Act’, all reference to SE had been removed, and the SE strategy that had formed such an integral part of its content disappeared (Upton, 2012):

“[w]hile the initial proponents of the Bill may have sought to legislate for a big society, the outcome of the parliamentary debate was a government-led compromise which appeased almost all those favouring a market liberal approach to public service delivery” (Teasdale et al, 2012: 207).

In a small reprise, the Conservatives’ long-awaiting Big Society Bank (now re- named Big Society Capital) was launched in July 2011:

“Big Society Capital will be a financial institution that aims to increase investment in society. It will do this by supporting organisations that invest in the sector, helping them:

 Provide a greater range of financial services to social sector organisations;  Raise more money for onward investment into the sector; and

 Become more sustainable and resilient themselves

Big Society Capital will also be a champion for social investment with policy makers, investors, stakeholders in the sector and the public at large” (Cabinet Office, 2011b).

However, the relevance and appropriateness to SEs of the product offerings of Big Society Capital was questionable, especially considering Prime Minister

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David Cameron’s own assertion that “not every charity, social enterprise or voluntary association is able or willing to go to scale […] Many – perhaps most – are effective precisely because they are small and local, and understand intimately the community they work in” (Cameron, 2006b).

The contention of SEs’ value being linked to small, embedded, and locally- based service delivery was echoed in the academic literature. Roy et al (2013: 64) discussing the impacts of healthcare SEs in delivering social justice in the context of healthcare, suggested that:

“the solutions are likely to be found at the micro rather than the macro level and rather than immediately leaping to scaling up activities, it might be more useful to think about the conditions in which small-scale social enterprises can thrive and proliferate, capitalising upon the personal relationships that are so vital to healthy communities”.

Indeed, the government-commissioned BoE (2003: 18) report on financing for SEs noted that the “demand for external finance was more prevalent among social enterprises with a larger employee base (over 20 employees) and those with a higher trading income (above £1 million)”, which bearing in mind the general small size of SEs (Cornelius et al, 2008; DTI, 2002), the documented fact that many SEs struggle simply to survive (let alone make significant profits) as a result of the demands of the double bottom line that they work to (Ko, 2012), and the problems associated with attempting to trade in economically deprived areas (Scott and Teasdale, 2012), it is unsurprising that the types of patient capital funding that might be attractive to small SEs often “yield[s] zero per cent or very low rates [of return], and at high risk of non-repayment” (Joy et

al, 2011: 11).

Although the Big Society (by now often mockingly referred to as the ‘BS’) had not been officially scrapped, by 2012 it had effectively been “deemphasised” (le Marquand, 2011), and in spite of the protestation to the contrary by the Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd (Hurd, 2014), its utter lack of efficacy in terms of the involvement of the VCSE sector was revealed in the damning indictments made in the 2013 Big Society Audit: