The Big Society and the struggle for the soul of the voluntary sector

If anyone is wondering how the "Big Society" is playing out in practice at local level, here is an unsolicited report from a voluntary action organiser in South-East England. 

 We feel it here. Our purses are being regularly raided for contributions to the parting presents for local public sector colleagues. And there is an emotional weariness abroad, a resigned pessimism in the public sector, exhaustion in the NHS, low morale in the local voluntary sector.

The pup we are being sold grows daily more malevolent: public sector contracts which used to contribute to the mercurial jigsaw of viable core incomes for the voluntary sector will have dried up by the autumn. The local NHS have pulled out; the GP's consortia aren't talking about resourcing; the local authorities are retrenching and trying to protect their own staffing. There's a new Community Development and Big Society Unit round here, whose representative recently spoke at my Local Strategic Partnership. It was clear he knew little about community development, but all about the Government’s real agenda.  Long-serving social and community planning staff with whom we have worked for years sat listening, silent, attending the meeting whilst working out their redundancy notice - an experience I found very moving, both illustrative of what is taking place, and symbolic of its first consequences (let alone those to follow).

Perhaps most wearying of all is the fund raising double-bind which has emerged around volunteering and sustainability. You have to lie continually, promise the earth, in order to get anywhere - and everyone including the funders knows it. That's why they request increasingly pseudo-sophisticated measures of performance, of course, so that the struggle to measure the often incommensurable (hence, truly the preserve of informed judgement) veils the otherwise obvious hypocrisy. Everything has to be miraculously "sustainable" by using volunteers, or being a "social enterprise".

But this isn't rocket science, is it? In fact, we have been there for years, and know that this reserve army of skilled and dependable volunteers simply does not exist in sufficient numbers to promise any reliable quality of service for people in real need.

The author didn’t want to be named because – like so many – he feels he has too much to lose by speaking out publicly.  His optimistic strategy, he says, is "trying to build a quiet alliance to subvert the worst consequences,  between local public sector staff, elected members committed to quality public services locally,  trades unions and the voluntary sector."

He wonders how many will be prepared to stand up and speak when the ‘Big Society’ fails to deliver.  There’s a "struggle for the soul of voluntary action", with battle lines drawn between co-operation and mutual aid on one side, and competition and philanthropy on the other.

For more on the Big Society and how it fits in with the austerity agenda, read Anna's report Cutting it: The "Big Society" and the new austerity.