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Big Society Agenda

Community groups must prove that they can do so, and the local commissioning services, including the local council, will then have to adjudicate on that. Some £1 billion of grants to local services are being de-ring-fenced so that that can happen. Given the fact that we are saying that local authorities will have to publish online every item of expenditure over £500, it will be up to local people to come together to show that they can do it more cost effectively and better. It is up to local authorities and those commissioning agents to respond, and I am sure that in time they will do so. The first wave of these new mutuals is in the process of being launched. It includes Anglian Community Enterprise, which spun out from a primary care trust and is a provider of more than 40 community health services and a range of learning disability, GP and dental services for the population of north and north-east Essex. A second is SEQOL, a spin-off from the NHS Swindon and Swindon borough council, which provides community-based health and social care services. You will not be surprised to learn, Dr McCrea, that Northern Ireland is leading the way. The hon. Members from Northern Ireland know the excellent work that Bryson carries out. Bryson is a registered charity and has been helping people one way or another since 1906. This year alone, it will help more than 400,000 people in Northern Ireland to enjoy a better quality of life. It has programmes for children and youths and services for the elderly. It is also serious about protecting the environment and has created a number of projects and services including a leading-edge recycling service, which I visited on 21 February with its chairman, Sir Nigel Hamilton. Bryson also runs an energy efficiency advice centre and responds to thousands of inquiries each year. It offers a range of education programmes to help young people understand their relationship to the environment. We need a Bryson in every county. We also need more places like the Arc Healthy Living Centre in Irvinestown, which is funded through the New Opportunities Fund and which I have visited twice. Arc aims to improve the well-being of local people by bringing together a partnership of community health activities and services. It is not often that Fermanagh gets a visit from a Prime Minister, yet when my right hon. Friend was last in Northern Ireland in June, he made sure that Arc in Irvinestown was on the programme, and he came away very impressed. Irvinestown also boasts possibly the longest continuing big society project in Northern Ireland: the Irvinestown Fairs and Markets Trustees, which I also visited. Established by deed poll in 1908 by the right hon. John Ross, a land judge of the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice in Ireland, the trustees act for and on behalf of the people of Irvinestown. Banding together, the trustees built one of the first electrification schemes in Northern Ireland in the 1920s, provided low-cost housing for residents in the 1930s, purchased and renovated the town hall in the 1980s, organised the annual interdenominational Christmas carol service, and, most important of all, maintained the town clock in working order. Last year, I visited the excellent charity MindWise New Vision in Belfast, which does extremely important work in helping people with mental illness live more independently. There are some things that Government do well, but there are things that they do not, and I congratulate the Department of Justice on asking MindWise to deliver the appropriate adult scheme across Northern Ireland. That scheme exists to protect and safeguard the rights of young people and mentally vulnerable adults who are detained by the police, and the presence of MindWise ensures that the interests of the vulnerable are looked after. As the examples demonstrate, this is an area where Northern Ireland can reap the benefits. Thinking creatively about how public services can be as good and as efficient as possible, and being open to expertise from outside the public sector, provides an opportunity open to all those who design, deliver or provide public services. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members from Northern Ireland will tell us about the great examples in their own constituencies should they catch your eye, Dr McCrea. Some people—I suspect some are in the Committee today—say that the policy reforms are just trying to do things on the cheap, but that is simply not the case. Cuts are what we have to do; the big society is what we would like to do. Opening up public service delivery to new providers will allow those with visionary ideas on how to do things better to come forward and improve the service for local people while delivering best value for public money. In fact, some organisations have told me that as the public sector contracts—as it must, as we all play our part in paying off the national debt—there is a tendency for Government Departments to withdraw funding for services that the third sector provides. While this is obviously a matter for devolved Ministers, we must be careful to ensure that the excellence provided by the third sector is maintained, despite the temptation by their sponsors in the public sector to cut off the low-hanging fruit that provides their financial assistance. The third strand of the big society is encouraging social action. We were all horrified to see the recent riots across England, and the riots in Belfast over the summer. If ever there was a time to give teenagers a sense of belonging and purpose, it is surely now. National citizen service will give the chance to 30,000 young people next year to learn new skills and get involved in their community. I am in discussions with ministerial colleagues for a Northern Ireland version tailored to the needs of the Province that will help reinforce in our young people a sense of purpose and belonging. I shall return to that subject later. More broadly, we are funding the training of 5,000 community organisers across England who will have strong understanding of local needs and will catalyse social action by neighbourhood groups. Community organisers will be well-trained and committed individuals who will play a major role in delivering the big society. They will work closely with communities to identify the local leaders, projects and opportunities to empower the local community to improve its local area. The work of the organisers is broad based and community led. Most importantly, the local people set the priorities, not the organiser. The organiser merely enables them to take action on the things that matter most to them. We remain committed to encouraging volunteering. The Giving White Paper, published in May 2011, outlined a number of measures on volunteering: more than £40 million of Government funding over the next two years to support volunteering and the volunteering infrastructure with a social action fund, challenge prizes and a local infrastructure fund; £1 million to support Youthnet, which runs the volunteering website www.do-it.org.uk, and which will share its data more freely with organisations; and £400,000 support from the Government and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to trial Spice in England, which gives volunteers ““thank you”” vouchers or discounts with local businesses when they do good things for the community. That is a new type of initiative, originating in Wales, and I encourage hon. Members to look at it as a model that can be adapted and applied throughout the UK. In addition, in February 2011, the Government publicly announced that as part of the civic service initiative, each civil servant will be encouraged to do at least one day of volunteering each year using special leave. Additionally, we announced that the civil service will aim to give 30,000 volunteering days per year. We have to practise what we preach, so all Ministers in the coalition Government have pledged to give up a day to volunteer in the community. I shall be leading a team of volunteers from my Department between now and Christmas, and we are in the process of identifying a project with which we can become involved. I hope that I am in order when I say that I am very much open to suggestions from the hon. Members present, if they come up with ideas in their own areas, and you of course are more than welcome to join us, Dr McCrea. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland made a contribution by raising more than £68,000 this summer by spending his holidays riding across the Mongolian steppe in a 1,000-km race that benefited the Royal Irish Regiment benevolent fund, his constituency NHS hospital trust charity and Mercy Corps Mongolia. My right hon. Friend has asked me to say that it is still not too late to donate. With your permission, Dr McCrea, I am happy to pass around the hat before the Adjournment debate, or donations can be made online through his web page at www.charitygiving.co.uk. Turning to the way in which we are helping to provide financial support to deliver the big society agenda, I can report on developments to establish a big society bank to catalyse the social investment market and provide a financial boost to civil society as it deals with pressing social issues. In July, the Big Society Capital group was launched to operate as a big society bank. I realise that the names have caused some confusion, so let me make it clear that ““big society bank”” refers to the policy of a social investment wholesaler to support front-line voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations, while Big Society Capital is the organisation positioning itself as the vehicle to achieve that. The Big Society Capital group will be a financial institution capable of receiving funds as well as disbursing them. While the Big Society Capital group will share some of the functions of a bank, it will not share them all—for example, it will not take deposits in the way that a retail bank does—hence it does not have ““bank”” in the operational name. Big Society Capital will invest in social investment intermediary organisations throughout the UK. Intermediaries in the social investment market include funds, financial institutions and other organisations that arrange financing for end-user social organisations. Nick O’Donohoe and Alastair Ballyntyne, advisers to the Big Society Capital group, spoke about the project at the seminar I hosted on 27 June to launch the big society in Northern Ireland. Other intermediaries are already in operation, such as Charity Bank and Triodos, which both operate throughout the UK. I hope that new ones will emerge in Northern Ireland. Big Society Capital will help them to provide a greater range of financial services to social sector organisations, to raise more money for onward investment into the sector and to become more sustainable and resilient themselves. The Big Society Capital group will not make grants. It will invest in equity, co-invest with other investors and occasionally protect investors against the risk of loss. It will support research and build networks. It will act independently of Government, transparently, and will aim to become self-sustaining. The Government are working closely with Big Society Capital to establish an institution that can use up to £200 million from the four main UK high street banks, and the English portion of money released from dormant bank accounts.