Social action
The Government believes that the innovation and enthusiasm of civil society is essential in tackling the social, economic and political challenges that the UK faces today. We will take action to support and encourage social responsibility, volunteering and philanthropy, and make it easier for people to come together to improve their communities and help one another.
- We will support the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charities and social enterprises, and enable these groups to have much greater involvement in the running of public services.
- We will give public sector workers a new right to form employee-owned co-operatives and bid to take over the services they deliver. This will empower millions of public sector workers to become their own boss and help them to deliver better services.
- We will train a new generation of community organisers and support the creation of neighbourhood groups across the UK, especially in the most deprived areas.
- We will take a range of measures to encourage charitable giving and philanthropy.
- We will introduce National Citizen Service. The initial flagship project will provide a programme for 16 year olds to give them a chance to develop the skills needed to be active and responsible citizens, mix with people from different backgrounds, and start getting involved in their communities.
- We will use funds from dormant bank accounts to establish a ‘Big Society Bank’, which will provide new finance for neighbourhood groups, charities, social enterprises and other non-governmental bodies.
- We will take a range of measures to encourage volunteering and involvement in social action, including launching a national day to celebrate and encourage social action, and make regular community service an element of civil service staff appraisals.
Very happy with the proposlas, however we have not been given the start up risk pot funding where you can allow BAME women to carry out their SE ideas.
Whilst there is great potential in co-operative ownership of services formerly delivered by the state, and in greater social enterprise, it would be good to see a stronger evidence base for the demand for such reforms from public sector workers – beyond a small number of exemplar cases.
If resources are to be investing in enabling these changes, then a strong evidence base and shared learning from successes and failures in mutualisation of co-operative take-overs of public services are going to be needed.
the national citizen service is a good idea but, how do you propose getting disaffcted youths into the scheme? i think that middle class children will join as they already do with similar schemes but the ones that society desperately needs to join will not,unless you are brave enough to make it compulsary. i think you would win mass support on that and even then it might take more than one generation to change them.
All this ‘helping people back to work’ is idle fantasy. Because there is no work.
According to the governments own figures, there are 8 million who could work but dont, but only half a million vacancies in the economy. Simply put, 1 vacancy per 16 potential workers; or more pragmatically, if 16 people apply for 1 job, then 15 have to fail, don’t they ?
Of those 8 million, some 2.5 are claiming benefits, so even if we forget those other 5.5 million who are living on savings, or too intimidated to claim, or being supported by families or partners and all the rest of it, the ratio of applicants to vacancies is still 5 to 1. So if 5 people apply for 1 job, then 4 have to fail, dont they ?
It is also worth noting that most of those 500,000 vacancies are not universally available because they have rigid selection criteria, typically specific qualifications and a minimum of two years recent experience in an identical situation. Go to any job site or newspaper and see for yourself.
Low budget ‘welfare to work’ contractors handing out photocopies of McDayjob minimum wage vacancies does nothing to address this, except keep a handful of WTW contractors out of the job centre themselves. At yet more enormous cost to the public purse.
The essential first step that must be made before this huge problem can be dealt with is the recognition that jobs are a scarce economic resource that need sensitive intelligent long-term strategic management and policy developed accordingly.
The idea of universally available employment, that “there are loadsajobs in the paper but people don’t want to work blah blah…” is about as realistic as trying to have sex with the fairies who live at the bottom of the garden.
Will public sector workers taking over services include services that are responsible for the investigation and prosecution of offences? Would this really be in the public interest, if this is the case it will be like the car clampers using intervention measures to increase income over and above true intervention for the right reasons. It is more than likely that Serco, Capita etc will move in reducing the income levels of existing staff rather than individuals setting up as an alternative and reducing costs/improving services. Individuals will not be able to compete against such companies.