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Assistance to Communities

I am still reeling from the shock, as I think I have just listened to a predictably excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) that contained no mention of the European Court of Human Rights. I suspect that he will correct that. It was an excellent and passionate speech that reinforced the point made by all speakers in different ways, which is that in this place we do not talk enough about the value of independent civil society to our sense of national wellbeing. The hon. Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) was entirely right—Members of Parliament are uniquely placed to articulate that point, because we know from our day-to-day work that what we call the third sector is often the glue that holds our communities together. If I think about what would happen if volunteers did not turn up to the Ruislip scouts group, the churches, the Northwood police station or the Michael Sobell hospice, I get a sense of what we would lose, and it something vital. I am also conscious that I represent a relatively lucky community where that glue is strong. As most of us know, there are too many parts of the country where that glue is weak and needs strengthening. We must think collectively about how to tackle the stubborn social problems that carry such a big financial and, more importantly, human cost. Whether we like the broken society narrative or not, we are all aware that the problems out there are stubborn and expensive. Most of us recognise from our day-to-day work that if we are looking for solutions, the first place to start is often the voluntary sector and what are frequently small organisations that are that much closer to the people whom we are trying to help, and which enjoy a different relationship of trust and therefore a greater capacity to make an impact. I am sure that we all have our favourite organisations. I am continually inspired by a social enterprise on the edge of my constituency called Blue Sky, which is the only company in the country where someone has to have a criminal record to work there. It does extraordinary work in helping prisoners to work, under contract to Hillingdon council, so that they can prove to a future employer that they can be trusted. It is a critical stepping stone on the journey off the reoffending cycle. That solution works and could be replicated elsewhere if other local authorities contracted on the same model. At the moment, an important political consensus is being developed that we need to try to create more space to allow those kinds of organisations to do their magic. Political consensus is important, too, in the role that the Government have to play in helping to support the sector and unlock its potential—again, an expression used by the hon. Member for West Bromwich, West—to help more people and to improve more lives. I suggest that that is why we are here. In their role of supporting the sector, we believe that the Government should focus on three questions. The first is about what we are doing to make it easier to run a charity, a social enterprise or a voluntary organisation. The hon. Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed) was entirely right. We believe that, over time, we have allowed an increasingly dense thicket of regulation, bureaucracy and hidden costs to grow for those organisations. The risk is that that will stifle much of the innovation and creativity that we want; it will turn off exactly the sort of people we want to turn on. It is complicated, because a lot of that stuff is there for understandably good reasons, but we have lost sight of the cumulative effect on the sector. We are determined to thin that thicket. The hon. Member for South-East Cornwall was right, too, to highlight Gift Aid as a place to start. It is undeniably an excessively bureaucratic process. The burden of that administration falls on charities, with a disproportionate part falling on smaller charities, which are struggling. The second question for the Government is what we are doing to get more resources, both time and money, into the sector. The time bit is crucial. The right hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Alun Michael) and the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) were eloquent on that question. I totally agree with the right hon. Gentleman's analysis when he spoke of the potential for more employee-led volunteering, and the need to engage more businesses by structuring their role and inspiring their people to give more time. What excites me in talking to that community is that more and more businesses see that it is not about public relations or ticking a box on corporate social responsibility. They are doing it because they can see that it is absolutely in their commercial interests to do so; it is about developing their most important assets, which are human. Barclays, KPMG and the people leading on this see that clearly. The challenge is to inspire other business leaders. I shall return to the issue of money later. The third question, on which I shall focus, is what are we and the Government doing to make it easier for the organisations in that sector to do business with the state? I have been shadow spokesman for just over a year, and everything that I have heard suggests that too often it is a bureaucratic nightmare. To give a specific example, the excellent report by the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, which we were encouraged to read for the debate and which the Minister mentioned, is deals with the Supporting People programme. The report brings to light a substantial problem—how difficult it is to get the relationship right consistently across the country. The programme is aimed at vulnerable people, and, as the report makes clear, the third sector has a central role in delivery. However, the report shows how difficult it is get it right and make the relationship work. What comes through—this is the main point that I wish to make—is how complex we have made that environment. The report gives a picture of different practices in different local authorities and Departments, of programmes that one minute are ring-fenced and the next not ring-fenced, of new initiatives that have to be pieced in and made coherent, of new apparatus for decision making, of new local area agreements, local strategic partnerships and regional layers, and of changes being made to the assessment regime. We may convince ourselves that things are moving things in the right direction, devolving power and everything else that we sign up to on a cross-party basis, but I wonder whether we have thought enough about what it means to the environment in which people have to work.