At a time when organisations and individuals are encouraged to have greater involvement in the running of public services as part of the Government’s ‘Big Society’ initiative, there are concerns that many organisations are experiencing or facing funding cuts including in rural England.
To help us advise Government on ways of fully embracing the contribution and needs of rural communities in the Big Society, we would like to hear your views and experiences.
Our call for evidence sets out what we are looking for and the proposed timescales. Thank you in anticipation for your help with this important piece of work.
Download Contributing to the ‘Big Society’ – call for evidence
We currently work with a number of rural communities through the Greening Campaign, a project aiming to improve communities contact with their natural environmental and reduce wider emissions targets.
Would some input from both our County Council and perhaps from our commmunities or the Greening Campaign be of some value?
Many rural credit unions will really struggle, including ours, and face a huge challenge to maintain services as existing funding runs out and is not replaced. Real support from Government and local authorities e.g. continuation of DWP growth funding, paying for our services, will be essential.
We did the Greening Campaign in our market town of Wallingford in Oxfordshire.
It was brilliant! Using their methods we got 24% of ouir community taking action to reduce their Co2 and now we are looking at installation and retrofit across the community. All led by volunteers. I think there are about 180 communities doing the Greening Campaign across the country so far. If that isn’t the Big Society then I’m not sure what is. The CRC should certainly use this as an example.
Public vs. Private? A Lib Dem Dilemma…
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As a local authority, we are invloved in a number of ways with rural communities – West Sussex is a very rural county.
Within Community Safety we look to support communites where Crime and Disorder is a problem.
We deliver services in partnership, so already strive to work as efficiently as possible.
Cuts to frontline services could see a realisation of increases in crime, disorder, anti-social behaviour and the fear of crime.
Where the Big Society could help is by providing skills, information and funding to support and enhance the work community groups already do to prevent crime.
Where some groups already operate, these could be built on to include the Community Safety agenda.
Thank you very much for your messages providing good examples of how the rural communities are already contributing to the Big Society or sharing with us your concerns about how funding cuts might affect your activities. We are interested in receiving experience and evidence from all kinds of communities and organisations, from upper tiers of local government, to informal very small community groups – in this way we will be able to understand, share and represent the diversity of rural society in our reports.
With the support of Birkbeck’s Rural Evidence Research Centre, the Big Lottery, the CRC, Action for Market Towns, Professor Ray Pahl and many other individuals, the Small Towns for Tomorrow Group, recently “launched” by Sir Peter Hall in July, is getting ready to contribute to – and inform – the Big Society via a programme of independent objective research. More anon!
A wealth of research projects confirm that people who live in larger settlements have greater access to the services they need and use public transport more, thus generating less CO2. The NTS hints that people who live in villages travel less frequently. Whilst they may travel by car more, there is limited evidence to suggest the small % more car trips generate more CO2 thus sustainable development could include expansion of smaller settlements
At it’s most fundamental, ‘Big Society’ is, potentially at least, a reasonable concept and one with budding community cohesion merits: even if to date ‘government’ has yet to define who or what character and disposition of person is destined to be trained as ‘community organisers’ to lead ‘communities’. Skeptics and realists alike may duly be tempted to think such people will not be drawn from the lines of those wishing to affect genuine social change – for example those confronting embedded institutionalised discrimination towards, and obvious social injustice metered out to, ethnic minority groups such as Gypsies, the Roma and Travellers in such areas as local planning applications for sites to live on. More likely to be greeted as ‘local activists’ by local government are the traditional ‘good and great’ citizens, as judged by the self-same administrations. ‘Big Society’ we are led to believe has five focal points: encouraging people to take an active role in their communities, giving communities more powers, publishing government data for communities to use, supporting co-operatives, charities and social enterprises and transferring power from central to local government with the local authorities largely involved as commissioning agencies for localized services rather than supplying those services.
We are told (17.08.10) by Nick Hurd MP- Minister for Civil Society and Mark Prisk MP – Minister for Business and Enterprise that Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, leading the latest cutting red-tape taskforce, will ‘flush out burdens on the voluntary sector’ by freeing up time and resources for Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations to make a difference in their communities and not be burdened by red-tape bureaucracy. According to Prisk, this will encourage an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ in empowering local people and communities, and building a ‘Big Society’ that takes power away from politicians and gives it to people; not least those in the VCS. Clearly the hope is to achieve a greater sense of community spirit and togetherness. One is however surely reliant on the other? Certainly there will be no cohesion without establishing community. Eric Pickles MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government expects the planned Localism Bill to be instrumental, in part at least, by devolving more powers to councils and neighbourhoods and giving local communities control over their own housing and planning decisions.
In this context it is important to clarify exactly what government means when it uses the words volunteering and volunteer in explaining ‘Big Society’ to us. It is essential we are all aware volunteering may be nuanced as an expression of British citizenship: an evermore-essential characteristic in Britain’s official understanding and outworking of its social action and community policies. Local authorities have been encouraging citizenship and volunteering over recent years, so how or why is ‘Big Society’ different? Without a unified framework in which local authorities, the VCS and local social activists and enterprises are cohesively structured, it remains ambiguous how the chasm between ‘Big Society’: the notion and ‘Big Society’: the tangible action will in point of fact be bridged.
So let’s be clear. A volunteer gives his or her time and energy for the benefit of wider society: frequently his or her own community. Volunteering takes many guises but importantly it is undertaken freely, without payment and certainly without financial gain, (expenses can be paid). The ‘Volunteering Compact Code of Good Practice’; the agreement between the government and the VCS defines volunteering as “an activity that involves spending time, unpaid, doing something that aims to benefit the environment or individuals or groups other than (or in addition to) close relatives”.
In 2006 the Department for Communities & Local Government’s (DCLG) Citizenship Survey differentiated formal and informal volunteering while credibly preserving their social action relationship integrity. Formal volunteers were defined as people working in, for and through “groups, organisations or clubs” and informal volunteers were described as people undertaking “activities that take place independently of such structures, as an individual”. The June 2010 National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) ‘Briefing on the ‘Big Society’ recognized both formal and informal volunteers as necessary to achieve the “broad culture of social action…of the ‘Big Society”. Importantly the Council made clear volunteers, and the principle that is volunteering, remained the “lifeblood” of the VCS. Such a dignified social and community contribution should not be “put aside in any plan to promote engagement”. In short, neither the volunteering principle nor the actions and activities of volunteers should ever be reduced to being meagre surrogates for previously paid employment roles; a caution that ‘Big Society’ must not be permitted to be a Trojan horse for job cuts with unpaid volunteers or activists brought in to fill the gaps left behind. The government’s commitment to fund the training of 5,000 “community organisers” in the persons of voluntary activists should never be considered as replacing professional Community Development Workers.
The Prime Ministers promise to create a ‘Big Society Bank’ “using every penny of dormant bank and building society account money allocated to England’ to finance social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups must be promptly discharged therefore. This will ensure the freely undertaken concept of volunteering is not broadly and indiscriminately translated across the entire VCS to mean all the work, facilitating and community contribution the sector is increasingly responsible for is necessarily always ‘free of charge’. Nor should it ever imply local campaigns and campaigners are forever politically unproblematic in their communities to the administrations because their funding originates from such a source. Regrettably I suspect ‘Big Society’ is a Trojan horse and I am one of the many cynics………….
One of the pioneering policies of the Coalition Government has been The Big Society. This initiative has been based upon the principles of empowering communities, redistributing power and fostering a culture of volunteerism. We at http://www.the-big-society.co.uk are fully behind this initiative, and share the government’s vision of a society where volunteering and community spirit become second nature.
We feel certain that Members of Parliament will be leading by example with regard to this progressive, innovative strategy. Consequently, we have written to every MP on the government benches to ask them to detail all the voluntary work they have undertaken during the summer recess of Parliament.
The results, which have been published at http://www.the-big-society.co.uk, have so far been slightly underwhelming. At the time of launching the website approximately 6% of government MPs have declared their voluntary contributions to The Big Society. There have been some notable efforts from the likes of Harriet Baldwin, Damian Collins, Penny Mordaunt and Amber Rudd, but the information to date suggests that the vast majority of Coalition MPs have yet to fully buy into The Big Society project. However, we are regularly contacting MPs for updates, and anticipate a far greater uptake from our representatives as the Big Society becomes established.
The full data can be accessed by a site-wide search facility, browsed alphabetically by MP’s surname and by political party, and we have also provided a list of “Top Volunteers” to indicate which MPs have been doing the most to forge The Big Society.
Remember, we are all in this together!
I have been a Parish Councillor for the past 6 years but have not been elected. I was co-opted to fill a vacancy. Another vacancy has existed unfilled for a similar period of time. Our parish has great challenges with one of the highest percentage of second and holiday homes in the country, rampant development, no up to date Local Development Framework and a change to a Unitary Authority 2 years ago.
Most if not all of the other members say they would be happy to resign their role and recognise that a lack of time means they are unable to undertake training or attend the wide range of network meetings needed to keep up to date with national and regional developments. However they fear that nobody would come forward to replace them.
I have just resigned as a councillor as I recognise I have no more additional time to take on the work needed to be the only other representative body under the Unitary Authority and to undertake the additional responsibilities, such as running playgrounds, bus shelters and allotments, that have now been delegated to us.
I don’t want to resign but if I stay I feel I am condoning the system. We have advertised, cajolled and encouraged others to volunteer for the PC but to no avail.
As a manager of a voluntary agency I know that people volunteer for a reason, for a ‘virtual paypacket’ that includes giving something back, keeping their brain active, helping others, etc. The Big Society is alive and well in most rural villages and parishes already,including mine (in the past 4 years raising £69k for a new playground, developing a Parish Plan, lobbying for and getting 2 x affordable housing developments) but, importantly, strictly on the terms of the volunteers involved. I have yet to see what the proposed ‘virtual paypacket’ will be for community organisers, unless they are ’single issue’ activists who want to design the agenda to their priorities. I hope it works but fear it may be just another way to cut costs.