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Welfare: Churches and Faith Communities

My Lords, I very much welcome this debate and should perhaps declare an interest as a lay canon at Winchester Cathedral. I very much agree with the emphasis on the role of the voluntary sector, churches and faith communities in the diversity of civil society and its crucial role in the culture of a free society. I also welcome the involvement of the voluntary sector and the churches in service delivery, although with the obvious caveats that my noble friend Lord Judd has just mentioned. They bring to it a degree of independence, which perhaps allows them to have a greater capacity for innovation than many state or local government bureaucratic forms of delivery. They perhaps have fewer vested interests at stake and therefore can be more flexible in how they deliver services. Because they are not perceived to be agents of government, many of them also have access to groups and individuals with whom more official government and local government-based services might find it very difficult to interact. They have a strong ethos, which again provides a good framework within which their work can be based, and of course, as was mentioned by the right reverend Prelate, they are also local and have a great deal of local knowledge, which may often escape the more standard bureaucratic forms of delivery. However, in this new world in which these partnerships will develop between central or local government and the voluntary sector, including faith groups, we must avoid using the terminology used a year or two ago by the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, in his Goodman lecture—that is, we should avoid the nationalisation of the voluntary sector. Yet, there are pressures in the whole relationship about which we have to be very careful. I think that those pressures would be there whichever Government were in power and going through the process of commissioning voluntary agencies and so forth. First, it seems to me that there will be greater emphasis on the professionalisation of the services offered by the voluntary sector. Certainly, in some voluntary organisations in which I have worked that has been absolutely evident. The danger is that professionalisation, which is a good thing in itself, can create more vested interests, which is precisely what the voluntary sector is supposed to be good at not doing. However, more importantly, it can displace volunteering, which is the rather important aspect of the civil society argument for voluntary sector bodies. So we do not want to displace volunteering with greater professionalisation. Equally, those bodies are handling public money. There will be great pressure for public-sector management techniques to ensure that people use public money responsibly—things like benchmarking, targets, and so on—which pose great dangers for the diversity and independence of the voluntary sector. My noble friend Lord Judd, mentioned, very eloquently, the important subjects of campaigning and the critical role. Another very complicated issue is the role of the Human Rights Act. Although the Judicial Committee of your Lordships' House has found that charities offering service delivery are not public authorities, nevertheless they are being paid for by Government. The Law Lords have emphasised the importance of the contract in relation to securing HRA rights, and commissioning bodies may want far more recognition of the human rights implications of service delivery in their contracts. We have to be careful about the panoply of relationships which the receipt of state money may well impose on the voluntary sector.