How Fair is the Big Society?

Posted by Ben Lee, NANM director

The idea of the Big Society is gaining momentum and truly it is appealing. But what worries us is can we use it to help citizens realise their fullest human potential, or will it mean those with fewer qualifications, less income, and lacking influential social networks, lose out? i.e. is it fair?

Increasingly we hear “fairness” dismissed as whinging, what petulant teenagers demand when they don’t get their way. Nothing upsets people more than feeling ‘Government’ or ‘the State’ is clumsily trying to legislate fairness on issues too complex for anyone, let alone public officials, to understand or influence. And when public agencies with their other hand stifle social capital through risk aversion or apparent jobsworthiness it’s even worse; with energy-sapping hoop-jumps for community action, from street parties, to informal childcare, weekend language schools, local clean-ups and litter picks and so on.

What I’m trying to say is, packaged up with the empowerment message, is a colder one which plays to gut frustrations with a State reaching too far into our lives. So part of it comes from what we don’t want not what we do want. Negative not positive.

But this can be a platform for positives. And what neighbourhood organisations do want is more community action and more volunteering. They also want (and have been battling for) a culture in public agencies which sees social capital as an asset, sees citizens as experts in their own needs, and which welcomes public involvement in service delivery. That’s not just because the public sector cannot afford to do as much, but because real partnership between citizens and public officials is the only way to achieve the effective modern services we crave, or even attempt to narrow expanding social inequalities.

The true intent behind the Big Society rhetoric will crystallise in the coming weeks; we cannot quite see it yet, but these are the questions we’ll be asking:

• How much support will there be, to play a full part in the Big Society, for the citizens and communities who despite decades of investment and swathes of policy still don’t achieve their potential because inequality is actually growing. We don’t just mean low income households, but carers, people with mental illness, disability, those who grew up in council care, and many many others.

• With public services under greater financial pressure than ever before what is the strategy behind Big society for steering councils and others away from tighter, smaller silos which ignore users’ needs. What is the strategy to support them instead to undertake radical change, to turn themselves inside out, empower frontline staff, and base staff in the communities they serve, not remote civic centres.

• How will this agenda be supported nationally as a positive movement about fair chances, not a negative agenda to ‘get the State off our back’ - which would help very few and achieve no more of our human potential.