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Assistance to Communities

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Illsley, and to speak yet again alongside my old friend the Minister. We joined the all-party group on the voluntary sector in 1997, and we both became Home Office Parliamentary Private Secretaries at the same time. Whereas she has gone on to stellar things since then, I am fulfilling the role of sweeper. Nevertheless, it is a great pleasure to have this opportunity to contribute to the debate and to speak after my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Alun Michael), who came to my constituency in 1994—even before I first came to this place—to work with me on voluntary sector organisations. One of the cheap tricks that we have in the House is to stand up in such a debate and reel off a list of worthy organisations in our constituency. I will not sink to those levels, mainly because I did so the last time that we debated this issue, so it is all on the record anyway. The other thing that we do is to pop into Westminster Hall, make an intervention and disappear again. We have already seen an example of that this afternoon. I will not give the hon. Gentleman the pleasure of naming him for the record. One gets an idea of the importance of this sector from the fact that there are roughly 250 registered charities in every constituency in the country. On average, almost 100 social enterprises operate in every constituency, and I wonder how many there would have been 10 years ago. About three quarters of our constituents take part in voluntary activity at some time or other every year. The third sector potentially includes everyone and can benefit everyone. Those benefits come from not just the outcomes but the act of being involved in the inputs as well. Taking part in a voluntary activity in a third sector organisation is very much part of what being a member of society is all about, and it is what makes communities work. When we talk about the third sector, we are talking about not just individual volunteers, voluntary organisations, community groups, co-ops—as my right hon. Friend mentioned—social enterprises or any of the not-for-profit sector, but the whole range of things together. Given the values that they espouse and the benefits that they bring, all of that is part of a concerted movement of communities to engage in democracy. It is the way in which people can change things and the way in which communities can influence the services, environment and atmosphere of the very places in which they live. As I said in the debate on the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Bill, this is about acknowledging that democracy is something that is 24/7—it does not happen only at election time—and that we should therefore hold it dear, not just in the party political way but in how communities work. So much has changed over the past 10 years. My right hon. Friend talked about the funding. Some £11 billion has gone from the Government into the sector in one form or another, but that money is not going into a black hole. It is creating opportunities, procuring services and delivering socially beneficial outcomes. The money that the Government give, added to the support given to charities through the taxation system, is still only a part of how those organisations are funded. The very act of giving—the volunteering of one's wealth, as well as one's time—is part of the whole process of engagement about which we are talking. Qualitative changes have also taken place within the wider sector, however. Not only is there more money than previously, but some third sector organisations operate far more professionally and the forms that they take and the activities in which they engage are more varied. That professionalism is no bad thing, and the creation of some larger, super third sector organisations would have been no bad thing either, because they would not block the emergence of small community organisations, which are being generated all the time. How many community organisations form as a result of local residents' campaigns and then become formal organisations, lobbying politicians and even, after a time, delivering the very services for which the residents campaigned? There is room for both the large and the small in the third sector. I think that we have seen this new relationship, which has generated so much of the funding, because the third sector's benefits have been recognised through the commissioning of services. When we set up the Compact in, I think, 1999—I was there at the launch—we set out a memorandum of understanding between the public sector generally and the third sector and voluntary sector organisations. Given the growth in commissioning over the years, that understanding has changed and professionalism has come in, and it has therefore been necessary to refresh the Compact. I very much welcome the refreshed Compact. Indeed, the whole third sector has welcomed it. It was produced in December 2009 and has aspects relating to formal partnerships and the commissioning of relationships between public sector and third sector bodies. Why might a public sector body want to take on a third sector organisation as a partner? In this age, when we look for quality services, a third sector organisation can provide local knowledge and information, and respond to local needs. For example, it can provide time, which public sector organisations often find themselves stretched to provide, to personalise services in social care. Of course, although I would never, and we should never, regard the third sector as the cheap option, it cannot be denied that there is cost-effectiveness—ways of spending money better but not necessarily spending less—in using third sector partners and delivering on a common cause. That has been recognised by local and central Government, as evidenced by the refreshed Compact. There have been challenges along the way, however, regarding the capacity of the third sector to engage not only in delivering a service, but in the bidding process in response to a tender to provide a service. Full cost recovery was an early issue, and it has perhaps still not been wholly addressed; nevertheless, we have come a long way. I remember that when my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) was the Home Office Minister with responsibility for the third sector many years ago, she said something very memorable: third sector organisations have to learn to say no. They have to be able to recognise when they are being asked to do something impossible, and then say no and not take on the commission or deliver the service. Otherwise, the possibility of full cost recovery is jeopardised, advantage is unfairly taken of the good will of the third sector organisation and the volunteers concerned, and the organisation's mission is endangered. Protecting an organisation against mission creep, while maintaining its financial viability and core activities, is the responsibility of trustees—as my right hon. Friend the Minister mentioned—but all those elements are fundamental to the identity and sanctity of the third sector organisation. Commissioning must therefore never be an excuse for exploiting third sector organisations. Although we acknowledge that the changes taking place have led to attempts to address each of those issues, we recognise that there have been other changes in service delivery. Local authorities, for example, have increasingly looked to private sector organisations to commission services. The Department for Work and Pensions looks for both private and third sector organisations to deliver support for long-term jobseekers on a payments-by-results basis. One trick that we seem to have been missing is that private sector organisations have as much reason as the local authority or central Government to seek cost-effectiveness, personalisation and the local appropriateness of services. There is absolutely no reason why private sector organisations that deliver services either on behalf of or in parallel with local authorities and central Government should not also look for third sector partners, to provide those nuances. There will be problems, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth touched on some of these aspects. Although there is little formal commissioning of services from the third sector by the private sector, there are huge opportunities for more of that to take place, to the mutual advantage of both partners. Particularly interesting is the way in which some private sector organisations engage with charities such as Pilotlight and even VSO, and provide opportunities for managers in business to get some life experience by working with third sector organisations. They see those organisations as a resource and pay on a commercial basis to get training, experience and enlightenment. If, however, we are going to make the most out of the relationship between the private sector and the third sector, a number of problems need to be tackled. They include the same attitudinal problems that there were at the beginning of public sector commissioning: the possible mistrust and misunderstanding of what the other partner is about; the private sector perhaps having rather more demanding expectations regarding capacity than the public sector; and scepticism about whether so-called amateurs could ever deliver a professional service, which we know they of course can. I see other opportunities for third sector organisations, given some of the changes that the Government have brought about in recent years. We have seen a bit of hesitation, but the way in which health services are scrutinised has changed over the years. We have set up local involvement networks. LINks bring local authorities' scrutiny procedures and appropriate third sector bodies into the health service to scrutinise, advise and assist in the improvement of services. That would not have been possible a few years ago, but the local authority scrutiny process has matured over the years and is now capable of providing that service. The third sector bodies that were involved in the community health councils—some of which were better than others, which is why changes had to be made—are now engaging in the LINks process. Why, therefore, can we not consider using that process in other public services that are not delivered directly by local government? An obvious example is policing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) wrote a document for the Home Secretary—I was pleased to be involved in the research and writing—advocating the involvement of the third sector locally to scrutinise the policing of communities at a grass-roots level. I am much more interested in a LINk-type process of community engagement through voluntary sector organisations and community groups than I am in the development of a police authority scrutiny procedure. However, I welcome the fact that many chief constables now come before local authority scrutiny committees in a way that perhaps they never did before. My right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth mentioned volunteering. I do not think that it is possible to talk about volunteering these days without talking about V, a brilliant organisation set up by the Government to foster and promote volunteering among young people. It currently works with about 500 volunteer and community partners throughout the country, opening up 900,000 opportunities for young people to volunteer. V has funded more than 1,300 projects since 2006, and through its support, more than 500 people have set up their own social action projects to meet needs that they have identified in their communities. Every month, young people looking for volunteering opportunities on the V website run 72,000 searches, and online applications to volunteer have increased 200 per cent. in the past year alone. One thing that V does effectively is to bring in funding from other sources, including £42 million from the private sector. Match funding from more than 120 corporate partners in the past year alone has produced an extra £84 million for youth volunteering. In my constituency, 200 young people have been involved in the V Inspired project. Last week, I was delighted to attend with my right hon. Friend the Minister a celebration of youngsters in Derbyshire—well, it was actually country-wide—who had received V talent certificates for intensive volunteering. One constituent of mine, Rosie, spent 30 hours a week for 45 weeks working under the oversight of Connexions with the police, local authorities, the youth service and others to ensure that young people in her community were not left to drift but were provided with something to do. I remember the Prime Minister saying that the voluntary sector provided a voice for the voiceless. Many national campaigns have their roots in the voluntary sector and the third sector generally. We should admire the tenacity, effectiveness and professionalism with which such groups mount their campaigns. People are encouraged, perhaps more so than before, to campaign locally, whether by lobbying their council, signing online petitions or through other measures. It is important that campaigning remains a key activity for the sector. That, of course, is the point at which we remember that political parties are third sector organisations in terms of how they are set up. We do not receive gift aid, but perhaps that time will come. Nevertheless, campaigning is central to the work of the sector. I urge the hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) to come on board and say that campaigning is not only a legitimate but an essential activity for third sector organisations, and that we should never return to the situation in the early 1990s, when organisations such as Citizens Advice were told that if they did not stop lobbying for the law on various issues to be changed, they risked losing their grants from central Government. In another example, which I have given before, Save the Children was delivering services in Iraq as part of the rebuilding work after the 2003 war. The charity was critical of the conduct of both the American and British Governments in their military activity there, and as a result, it lost its funding from the American Government. However, it continued to receive funding from the British Government on the grounds that it was doing what it was asked to do and fulfilling the terms of its contract. In general terms, we welcomed rather than criticised the fact that Save the Children had used its position to campaign.