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Assistance to Communities

It is a particular pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Illsley. You and I shared a fairly chaotic room with another half dozen MPs when we first entered Parliament, although things have become more orderly as the years have passed. Those others included Rhodri Morgan, the former First Minister of the National Assembly for Wales. It is a pleasure to speak in a debate initiated by my right hon. Friend the Minister. She comes from the voluntary sector, and she worked with me on voluntary sector matters in opposition. She has a good sense of the contribution that the sector makes, and also of its potential. I commend her on the efforts that she has made since taking over her current role to encourage greater participation and engagement by those in business and elsewhere in support of the third sector. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) is sitting next to me, although he will not be with us in the House for much longer, given his decision to stand down after the election—at his young age, that is a total disgrace. It is appropriate to pay tribute to the leadership that he has provided as chair of the all-party group on the community and voluntary sector. His time as chair has been excellent, and the group has looked much more widely at the sector. I have a feeling that those who intend to continue as Members after the general election will hear from him in a variety of ways as he pursues other activities, although I am sure that those activities will not be far from the heart of the voluntary sector. I want to say two things about the mutual and co-operative model and its potential, to which the Minister has already alluded; as a Labour and Co-operative party MP, it would be surprising if I did not do so. The financial sector has come through a climate in which the mutual banks and building societies have survived, while other models were damaged. Although support for the co-operative sector is very strong among Labour Members, an appreciation of the model has spread throughout the House. It is always welcome to see an idea that might have appeared radical in the past becoming mainstream and embedded. Not surprisingly, I think that the co-operative movement will always stay closest to the Labour movement, which understands it well, but cross-party agreement on the value of the sector is not to be despised. I hope that we will hear positive messages from the hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) when he makes his speech. In the run-up to the last comprehensive spending review, I carried out a study for the Treasury and Cabinet Office that demonstrated the enormous potential of co-operative models. I hope that that is not gathering too much dust and that it is still checked regularly by the Cabinet Office to determine whether that potential is being fully utilised. In recent years, we have heard suggestions about how things that are important to many people can benefit from the experience of co-operative governance—if I may put it in those terms. Supporter ownership of football clubs has particular salience when we see some of the stories going around. Until now, second-rank clubs might have been taking that route, but it would not be surprising if we saw some of the most high-profile clubs going down that avenue in future. The Minister referred to the strength of credit unions. As small community-based unions—they are sometimes a little fragile—become bigger and turn into organisations with a greater capacity to offer loans and reasonable financial arrangements to some of the poorer people in society, as well as people in general, such as employees of local authorities and others, they have tremendous potential. When we were carrying out the study to which I referred, we went with Treasury officials to look at the situation in Plymouth. The advantages of a critical mass of organisations working on a co-operative and community model were striking, because of the way in which they reinforced and supported each other. In that sense, it is important for the Government, and the Minister and her team, to nurture the development of co-operative and community-based models in an area, because people can start to learn from each other and develop greater professionalism. Innovative voluntary sector models can sometimes be a little fragile. It can be a lonely life for those "charismatic nuts", as they used to be called, who start to develop new models to respond to community needs. Some of the lessons to be learned by the public sector from the co-operative and governance models of the past are striking. I refer particularly to our visit to Homerton hospital in Hackney, which is right at the heart of one of the most deprived communities in the country. I was particularly struck by the way in which the chief executive, the director of nursing and the clinical director talked about how much closer they felt to the community that they served as a result of a wide range of members of the local community engaging in the foundation trust. We should be innovative so that we are open to the public sector learning lessons from community-based and co-operative models. Another particularly attractive model is community ownership of wind energy. I have made the point to Ministers with responsibility for energy that if the implementation of wind energy is done to a community from outside, because there are often objections and people say, "Not in my backyard." However, the model changes if the community owns the model. In Awel Amman Tawe, we saw members of a group promoting community energy sitting outside their local authority's planning offices with placards that said not, "Go away wind energy", but, "Give us our wind turbines". In fact, they failed with the local authority, but won their case on appeal, such was the strength of local support. There is a different situation when a community feels that it is in charge and able to take things forward, rather than that people from outside it are doing things to them. Another model that has enormous potential, and that could also receive great cross-party support, relates to the future of British Waterways. I was a waterways Minister, so I am conscious of the financial investment necessary to deal with the backlog of repairs. There has been significant investment over the past 10 years, and the UK now has a less fragile and vulnerable waterways system. Significant developments to the waterways have included an extension of the network and interesting investments from the Heritage Lottery Fund and elsewhere, which have been productive. People love water and the waterways, but the importance of the canal system goes beyond that. It has social and economic benefits, through the tourism and leisure industry, and environmental benefits as a green link into the centres of our greatest cities as a result of our industrial heritage. Many people are very passionate about the waterways sector and want it to thrive. The chair of the all-party group on waterways, my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Laxton), has said that he intends to spend more time with his canal boat after he leaves this place, in which he has been a passionate advocate for the waterways. We have an opportunity, as highlighted by British Waterways in "Setting a new course", which was published in November 2009, to take the waterways into a third-sector model. I describe that as a sort of National Trust for the waterways that would preserve the benefit of the waterways, just as the benefit of our national parks and areas of outstanding beauty is preserved. The model could continue to do what British Waterways has done well over recent years—exploiting the land associated with the canals for economic development or, in some cases, housing—and it could certainly realise benefits for the finances of British Waterways. A third-sector model would give people an opportunity to engage with the waterways in the way in which volunteers engage with the National Trust. In a sense, the waterways belong to the British public because they are publically owned, but, with a third-sector organisation like the National Trust, there would be a greater sense that the ownership was personal, so people would be more engaged and able to work more productively as volunteers. It would be possible to develop a form of accountability to the wider public, which would be beneficial to the community and to the waterways in particular. I hope—and I think that this is suggested by exchanges in the Chamber, and questions that Labour and Opposition Members have put to Ministers— that that is an idea whose time has come. I commend it to the Minister as an opportunity that, without partisanship but with positive engagement from Ministers in different Departments, could be carried forward and become productive. I want to comment on the way in which we provide information to our citizens. I was very pleased to hear what the Minister said about the work of Citizens Advice. I have been involved with it for many years and am honorary president of my local citizens advice bureau in Cardiff. I am also pleased that the service is increasingly working with others, such as the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, to avoid duplicating activities, and to use expertise so as best to target the people who need help. Most recently there has been work with StartHere, which is an innovative approach to make it easier for people who need information to get it, including those without the technical expertise to search for it on the internet. I encourage Ministers to think further about how StartHere can be used to enhance the public service. I am pleased to say that recent meetings with Ministers in several Departments have encouraged me to think—some five years after some of us sat around in the imaginatively named PSX(E) Cabinet Sub-Committee, which looked at the use of IT within Government, and Ministers started to get excited about the fact that the model makes it easier for people to get information—that several Departments are seeing the benefits of such an approach. Indeed, I have a meeting this afternoon with the Department of Health to talk about that, and I had a meeting with Work and Pensions Minister a few days ago. In particular, my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who has responsibility for carrying forward broadband Britain policies, has placed a great deal of value on the ease with which people can use StartHere to get information that they need. An evaluation project early last year that looked at the use of StartHere in association with a number of citizens advice bureaux, as well as a couple of prisons in London, demonstrated enormous value in opening up access in such a way. At a time when those who are digitally literate can gain much information from the internet, we need to be careful that those who lack such expertise can get access. An example from the project was the fact that prisoners who were given the opportunity to go online, or to use a kiosk with StartHere loaded, went to StartHere, because of its simplicity. It is highly complementary to directgov, and co-ordination among Ministers is needed to build on what has happened already. For instance, the Ministry of Defence, through the Royal British Legion, is making use of StartHere in relation to the families of service personnel. I have already referred to Citizens Advice and to the use of the system in prisons. The idea needs to be seized for the benefit of the public whom we serve. I want to underline the contribution made through volunteering. I have chaired a group on employee volunteering for Volunteering England over the past couple of years. The extent to which employer-assisted volunteering has started to develop is striking. As I was coming back to the issue after a 10-year gap, I was impressed by the way in which personnel departments and people involved with corporate social responsibility in some of our largest companies had seized on the importance of volunteering. There was a time when employer-assisted volunteering meant identifying a community centre and going to paint the same room again, as an exercise for a team from the company. Companies have now gone well past that rather naive approach to volunteering towards a sophisticated approach in which they understand that giving people the opportunity to volunteer enhances their skills and abilities, and what they bring into the company. That is therefore a win-win situation for the company, the community and the individual. I pay tribute to the Government for their work on encouraging such activity, including the relevant commission work that has been done in the past couple of years, and to Volunteering England and the Wales Council for Voluntary Action, which give leadership on volunteering, for the fact that volunteering is not standing still. In the 21st century, volunteering is as modern and important as ever. It is also an activity and contribution to society that is being positively and imaginatively developed in the 21st century. The Government have a part to play in providing active support, and it is particularly important to start with young people. Organisations such as the Prince's Trust do a tremendous job of engaging young people, as do many youth organisations such as the Scouts. They do a terrific job by encouraging responsibility and contributions by young people. However, we can never do too much to promote the appreciation of volunteering by Government and society, and to encourage the development of models for the future. Finally, I encourage the Minister and the Government to take forward—and indeed accelerate—the work of the Compact. That concept was suggested by the commission on the future of the voluntary sector in England, which was chaired by Professor Nicholas Deakin in the late 1990s. It was also a recommendation in "Building the Future Together", a document for which I had responsibility for the Labour party, and that the Minister had a significant role in writing. The concept is that there is no equality of arms, so to speak, between Government and its institutions, and the voluntary sector, so there is a need for the relationship to be mediated and overseen in some way. There have been positive developments over the past 10 years since the Compact was brought in, such as the appointment of a commissioner for the Compact. However, more needs to be done to bed that in effectively and to develop a methodology that ensures that consideration of the voluntary sector is balanced properly with the pressures for value for money that the Office of Government Commerce and the Treasury promote for every Department and agency.