By Diane Beddoes, OPM senior fellow.
The role played by social media in the recent riots will be much discussed over the coming days, weeks and months. In the immediate aftermath, some positions are being worked out. Continue reading
Tag Archives: David Cameron
Building the Big Society: can ambiguity lead to innovation?
It’s been a bumpy few days for the Big Society agenda.
Following David Cameron’s speech on Monday and the launch of the ‘Giving’ White Paper, Lord Wei announced that he was stepping down as the Government’s Advisor on the Big Society. The timing could not be worse. Critics have argued that the whole agenda is deeply troubled and the Shadow Cabinet claimed it is “descending into farce”.
But should we be so negative? After all, Cameron’s speech referred to a number of exciting plans designed to push the Big Society agenda forward, such as the Community First scheme and revisions to the government’s Green Book to make politicians consider the social impact of key policy decisions.
It seems easy to criticise but isn’t it possible that the Big Society’s seemingly greatest weakness – its ambiguity – could also be its greatest strength? After all, as many others have pointed out, the agenda isn’t necessarily anything new! The levels of community involvement and types of local activities that the government is seeking to encourage have been happening all over the UK for many years. As Cameron said in his speech:
“I didn’t invent the idea… It’s just how I describe all the many brilliant things that people are doing to help each other in our communities and it’s how I show my determination that we as a government should get behind people and encourage more of their commitment in every way that we can.”
I was lucky enough to work on a project several months ago for the Community Development Foundation (CDF), which really made me aware of the incredibly innovative and diverse ways in which people are being empowered to participate in community activities. And this work is nothing new either; it has been going on for years.
We evaluated a strand of the Take Part Programme, a two year initiative that aimed to help people build the skills, capacity and confidence to get involved in their communities and contribute to public services. The strand we evaluated was a Regional Champions programme, which designated individuals and organisations to distribute Take Part grant money to local communities, and offer ongoing support to help those communities make their work sustainable.
We spoke to the grant recipients as well as the Champions to understand the breadth of activities that people were involved in. Some areas had chosen to focus on specific groups, such as young people, resident’s groups or BME communities and others commissioned a range of activities including training around the electoral system and local democratic processes to the production of DVDs about local issues.
The enthusiasm and commitment of the Champions at driving these areas of work forward was very inspiring, and the findings from the evaluation were overwhelmingly positive; the Champions played a crucial role in raising the profile of Take Part and supporting community empowerment work within their regions by bringing together their local community contacts and working strategically with small grants.
I think the key message to take from this is two-fold: firstly, the ambiguity of the Big Society agenda could actually be a way of allowing different communities to make their own interpretations and to continue to undertake exciting and innovative projects, and secondly having a regional champion is an excellent way of raising the profile of the work and providing support for people at a local level.
Learning from Take Part suggests that there are two crucial ingredients for the success of the Big Society work: support from the government in terms of funding, and enthusiasm from local people. Plans for funding seem to have come some way through the launch of the Big Society Bank and initiatives like Community First, but securing the ‘buy-in’ from the wider public is still a big challenge.
Regional level mediation, like the Take Part Champions, could be a way of achieving this local buy-in. The government’s community organising scheme has the potential to fulfil this role providing the organisers are local, experienced and well connected.
You can read our full CDF Regional Take Part Champion evaluation report here.
By Kate Allman, OPM researcher
Citizens for a Big Society
‘… too many teenagers appear lost and feel their lives lack shape and direction … National Citizen Service will help change that … it’s going to mix young people from different backgrounds in a way that doesn’t happen right now. It’s going to teach them what it means to be socially responsible. Above all it’s going to inspire a generation of young people to appreciate what they can achieve and how they can be part of the Big Society.’ David Cameron
In July 2010, the Coalition Government announced plans to establish National Citizen Service (NCS), an initiative that will provide 16-year-olds across England with the opportunity to develop the skills and attitudes to engage more with their communities and become active and responsible citizens.
NCS will be a summer programme, bringing together young people from diverse backgrounds to take part in team-based challenges and social action projects in local communities. It is being piloted this summer and is being delivered by independent charities, social enterprises and businesses, all of whom had to compete through an open competition to run the programme.
OPM, as part of a consortium including the National Centre for Social Research, Frontier Economics and New Philanthropy Capital, have been commissioned by central government to evaluate the NCS pilots. Over the next two years we will explore how this programme is achieving its aims and provide strategic advice for improving its impact for young people and communities. OPM will lead on much of the face-to-face research with young people. This will help young people to say in their own words how the programme has affected their lives, families and communities.
We believe this evaluation will provide important insights to government, youth services and community organisations. It will explore how we can build a more integrated society – where people of different backgrounds work together towards a shared goal. It will provide evidence on how social action can be fostered in communities as part of the Big Society and on how young people can make a bigger contribution to their communities.
NCS and the Big Society
NCS is part of the wider Big Society programme, which sets out a new vision for the role of the state and citizen. The agenda has three key parts:
- Community empowerment: giving local councils and neighbourhoods more power to take decisions and shape their area
- Opening up public services: public service reforms will enable charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-owned co-operatives to compete to offer people high quality services
- Social action: encouraging and enabling people to play a more active part in society
By Ewan King, OPM director and Rachel Salter, OPM deputy head of analytical studies
The Big Society needs a watchdog – but it also needs a guide dog
In this guest post, Julian Dobson offers a different approach to the Big Society.
One year after David Cameron unveiled his vision for a Big Society, five kinds of response to the prime minister’s ‘passion’ have emerged.
The first group, far smaller than was imagined, are the enthusiasts – those who have bought into the vision in nearly every respect, including the politics. For them the logic of shrinking the state to empower society is obvious.
Second, and much more numerous, are the opponents. These may grudgingly acknowledge some merits in the concept, but believe the effects of the spending cuts outweigh any possible benefits. As the scale of the cuts to voluntary and community projects in particular starts to be felt, this group is understandably becoming more hostile and vociferous.
Third, are those who see both opportunities and threats, and are seeking to reconstruct the Big Society ideas in ways that reflect the activities and values of those who are already active in their communities. We’ll come back to them.
There is a fourth group of Big Society observers – those not directly engaged in social action or policy making but who have followed the ebb and flow of policy of debate and reported and interpreted it.
The fifth group, by far the largest, is those who have stopped caring or never did. ‘Big Society’ may have been the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of 2010, but the overwhelming public reaction is to dismiss it with a snort, a smirk or a shrug as yet more government spin.
Some already practice Big Society ideas
Over the last year I’ve come across all five groups. I’d place myself, and my colleagues, who are developing the Our Society forum, on a bridge between groups three and four. We’ve been observing, commenting and blogging, but we’ve also tried to link those who want to engage in action on the ground and learn from each other in very hard circumstances. All this has been done – Big Society style – by volunteers.
We know there is no shortage of passion for empowering communities – we know many who have given the best part of their lives to it. What is baffling is the naivety and apparent arrogance of an approach by government that appears to take what communities have already achieved, repackage it, and then sell it back to them as a shiny new deal.
A Big Society watchdog
So we think the Big Society needs a watchdog: people who will scrutinise and report on what’s happening from an independent viewpoint, supporting the government where it is merited and testing its ideas against the values and experience of those already involved in grassroots action. On 31 March we held a ‘Big Society reality check’ in London where speakers set out five tests the Big Society will need to pass in its second year – you can read them here.
… and a guide dog
But the Big Society now needs a guide dog as well as a watchdog. It has been framed in divisive language that pits civil society against the state, where local government and public service providers are seen as problems rather than partners, and public servants derided as bureaucrats rather than praised for contributing to the common good.
I believe the central message needs to change. Instead of arguing that shrinking the state is the way to empower people, I would suggest we need to empower people to get the best from the state. The objective should not be smaller government or even a Big Society, but a resilient society that can survive and thrive in the face of global challenges.
By Julian Dobson, a co-founder of Our Society
David Cameron’s Munich speech: what was new, what does it tell us?
Last weekend saw the Prime Minister David Cameron deliver a speech to the Munich Security Conference that further hinted at the Coalition Government’s likely approach to counter-terrorism and community integration. Amidst all of the controversy caused by the timing and content of the speech, it’s worth conducting a more sober analysis of the policy content. Was there anything new we haven’t heard from ministers before? Is there a risk of the Government repeating some of the mistakes of the past?
What’s new?
At this early stage in policy development, with the Prevent agenda still currently under review, the speech offered little in the way of anything beyond what we already know from previous statements issued by ministers. As far back as before the 2010 general election, certain Conservatives were making clear their opposition to what has been called ‘state sponsored multi-culturalism’.
The Prime Minister mentioned banning Islamist extremist preachers from entering the UK and proscribing certain extremist organisations, but both of these policies were practised by the last government. There was also a brief nod to the National Citizens Service and extending local democracy as ways of developing integrated communities, but both have been trailed extensively by the Government.
That said, there were several passages in the speech which struck me as either implicitly or explicitly proposing something new from a policy perspective.
Key points
David Cameron said:
So we should properly judge these organisations: do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separation? These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations – so, no public money, no sharing of platforms with ministers at home’.
According to the Guardian newspaper, the government is already becoming more stringent in the criteria it uses to determine which organisations should be funded to help tackle Islamist extremism. On the one hand, this improved scrutiny should be welcomed – under the Prevent agenda, there is some evidence that public funding was provided to organisations without a sufficient understanding or knowledge of their values base and membership. On the other hand, the PM’s opaque reference to some Muslim organisations being ‘showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism’ may risk alienating those organisations that are working more effectively to tackle extremism.
There has often been a tacit understanding that the last government’s ‘Prevent’ agenda, when operationalised, encompassed both violent and non-violent Islamist extremism, but the speech makes this thinking more explicit: ‘governments must also be shrewder in dealing with those that, while not violent, are in some cases part of the problem’.
The risk of repeating the mistakes of Prevent
The central contention of the speech is that poorly integrated communities have provided a fertile social context for an Islamist extremist ideology to gain support. Whilst few would want to disagree with the argument that social integration (or the lack thereof) is a contributing factor to all forms of extremism, there are good reasons to separate the two both in terms of policy and delivery.
Closely associating poor integration with terrorist activity risks the conflation of community cohesion and counter-terrorism that has previously plagued the Prevent agenda. Some of the cohesion work that was Prevent funded came to be seen by the very target audiences they were trying to engage as attempts at ‘spying’ or intelligence gathering. If the Munich speech was an exercise in foreshadowing the government’s new approach, greater heed needs to be paid to this past mistake.
Whilst the speech acknowledges that extremism ‘cannot be limited to any one race or religion’, there was no mention of efforts to tackle far-right extremism in the UK, or the threat it poses. Again, this reluctance to engage with all forms of extremism was a powerful criticism leveled at the Prevent agenda, and must be dealt with in whatever new approach the government pursues.
Cause for optimism
The speech is far more encouraging where it attempts to draw a clear distinction between religion and ideology, and the Prime Minister is right to claim that the two are all too often conflated.
The PM’s reluctance to concede anything to what he characterises as the ‘hard-right’ view – that is, seeing Islam and liberal democracy as irreconcilable – should also be welcomed. It is clear from the speech that the government is concerned with a worrying and emergent trend of segregation talking place between communities in UK towns and cities, and what the best response might be.
Mr Cameron’s speech should be welcomed as one of the first contributions to the debate about counter-terrorism and integration on the part of this still relatively new coalition government, and I hope there will be many more attempts to address these issues – in this still relatively early stage of policy development, there is time to try and ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.
By Chris Reed, OPM research assistant.
Learn more
For more detail please see our paper, Resilience and integration: a way forward.
If you would like to take part in a lively debate about these issues, come to our public interest seminar on 16 February.
Making English teaching more available
David Cameron’s speech at the Munich Security Conference has caused quite a reaction. And rightly so: it was the first major speech addressing the issue of multi-culturalism, extremism and integration since the Coalition Government was established. Many of the issues raised in his speech are covered in our recent paper, Resilience and integration: a way forward [PDF download], including some ideas on how the Big Society initiative could help reduce extremism.
So to promote a more integrated society, how do we help more people speak and communicate in English? Cameron said in his speech:
‘There are practical things that we can do as well [to help communities integrate and to counter extremism]. That includes making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum.’
This is an important aim. Not being able to speak the common language of this country can be a major inhibitor to integration, and a barrier for many who want to find employment, gain skills or reach out to others in the community.
The trouble is that accessing English classes is not as easy as it should be. Cuts to funding received by further education colleges have already led to reductions in provision of ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) in some parts of the country. Many courses that were previously free are now charged for. This is a worry, as many of those who most need to learn English are low paid or unemployed and may not be able to afford English classes. Is this something that the government needs to look at – could funding for ESOL be protected or increased?
Volunteering for integration
Meanwhile, there are smaller, more practical steps that organisations or communities can take to help plug the gaps left by funding cuts to ESOL.
Since 2009 OPM members have supported local civil society organisation, Somers Town Community Association, in Camden by helping them run ESOL classes for students from a diverse range of backgrounds including those from the Bangladeshi, Ukrainian and Albanian communities.
The classes are led by an accredited ESOL teacher, but volunteers from OPM are able to come in to help with exercises and conversations. Volunteers don’t need to have experience in teaching, so there are low barriers to getting involved. The support from volunteers enables the community association to involve more pupils and increase teaching quality. Both the teacher and the students recognise the value of having additional native speakers in the room to offer one-to-one support.
Promoting cultural understanding
Because the classes are often based on everyday conversation topics, they support both students and volunteers to understand the everyday realities for people from communities and backgrounds different to their own.
There are a huge range of community organisations that need this kind of help. Across the country, there are children’s centres, schools, libraries, charities and local community groups who want to help people learn English. Many of them will struggle to maintain existing services as the cuts begin to bite, and therefore, more volunteers will be needed to step in and help.
The benefits for the community are obvious, but volunteer staff also receive many benefits, as these comments show:
‘This is a very direct way of helping. The enthusiasm of the students to better their English is infectious.’
‘I am absolutely loving the ESOL volunteering at Somers Town Community Centre. It is one of the highlights of my week.’
Helping communities integrate will take time, but small contributions through active volunteering can make a difference.
By Ewan King, OPM director
Looking for clarity on the Big Society
Last Thursday’s Big Society in the North West meeting, hosted by Stockport College and the Big Society Network was a good opportunity to gauge opinions about the potential of the Big Society.
It was an ‘open-facilitation’ event, meaning that attendees were able to set the agenda and lead on the conversations that they wanted. People asked questions such as ‘What will be the impact of the Big Society on social equality?’, ‘How can we encourage the participation of disengaged young people in building the Big Society?’, ‘How can we ensure older people are given a more significant and visible role in their communities?’
Trying to get clarity on the Big Society
However, other people were far less ready to discuss possible opportunities and challenges of the agenda and focused instead on the lack of clarity surrounding the Big Society. There was an expectation in the room that this event could provide more concrete answers to the question, ‘What exactly will the Big Society mean in practice?’
But such answers were not forthcoming from the Big Society Network, nor does it seem that they will be from any central organisation. Those driving the agenda from central government are increasingly keen to emphasise that what the Big Society will look like will only emerge at a local level.
Nat Wei’s recent blog post underlined the complex nature of the Big Society:
‘As I have said before, it can be hard to get your head around at first, largely because it is organic and evolutionary in its nature, and because it maps in my view more closely to real life – infinitely varied and often surprising. It is more substantial than the tedious ‘do a press launch, announce a target, bring out the champagne’ approach of the previous government – which too often did not ultimately seem to really affect people’s lives on the ground.’
Since David Cameron’s first pre-general election mention of the notion of the Big Society, the broad vision of what it means has been gradually demystified and more clearly articulated. What was initially derided as a mad-cap idea to put citizens in charge of all of the public services that we couldn’t afford to run anymore, is now more widely understood as a drive to enable communities to do more for themselves and rely less on ‘officialdom’ to solve their concerns.
No set plan
The Big Society is not a policy agenda that comes with a five step plan, or a national model for implementation. Far from it. Each locality has a different starting point in terms of resources already available to them, such as community appetite for participation, history of partnership working and track record for innovation. It follows that the approaches in each locality will need to differ.
In this context, calls for more clarity on what the agenda means in practice are now a stark reminder of how significant a change the Big Society is going to demand of communities and public services. In much the same way as public services will ask citizens to take more responsibility for helping themselves, central government is asking us to take more responsibility for putting local, practical detail on to their vision for the Big Society.
By Sarah Holloway, OPM senior researcher
