The Wardman Wire

This post is part of a series hosted by Liberal Conspiracy on the recent White Paper Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power. This was published back in July by the Department for Communities and Local Government, and was (sort of) the subject of Hazel Blears much-reported speech last week.

I offered to tackle the chapter on volunteering….

Chapter 2: Active citizens and the value of volunteering
The government wants to “make it easier to be involved in voluntary and community activity” and proposes:

Volunteering
- Community Allowance pilots - paying people to do community work without losing benefits.
- Job Centres to help people do volunteer work.
- £2m more to support people with disabilities.

Mentoring
- Developing a strategy for extending mentoring

Citizenship
- A review of citizenship education in schools.
- a ‘Take Part local pathfinder programme’, offering information and training on being an active citizen for adults.

Community Leadership & Development
- A new Empowerment Fund to support community development and local leadership.
- Publish practical guidance on community development (but it wasn’t clear who for!)
- Make training available to public officials (e.g. planning officers, service providers) on community development/empowerment.

Community Groups
- A £70m Communitybuilders fund, to support community groups - e.g in providing meeting space and helping groups bid for and run local services.
- £80m of small grants available (the Grassroots Grants fund) to 2011, plus £50m available for matched funding.

Faith Groups & Charity Sector
- Work with faith groups to ‘remove barriers to commissioning services from faith based groups.’
- A survey of the Third Sector, to understand what affects the ‘wellbeing of the sector’
- A new strategy on dialogue and collaboration between faith groups, with a several £m of funding.

Climate Change/Community Events
- A ‘Chain Reaction’ global social forum, to enable activists to connect with each other.
- A possible summer event to promote social action in 2009.

Summary: no radical changes here, more of the same, within the same framework, with a bit more money and a few small reforms. There were several consultations also underway, a brief review of what’s already happening, and some examples of local charities at work.

Comments
Some good ideas here, for example the support for volunteering, and the benefits proposal.

I have a couple of concerns over philosophy, and a several over practicalities:

Philosophy
1. The government wants to outsource local services to community groups, charities and faith groups, which reduces state activity whilst extending state control. At the same time they want to help local people ’set and meet their own priorities’ (Gordon Browns Foreword to the paper). At what stage will the Governments instinct for micromanagement (the paper mentions 198 local authority targets) give way to local preferences?

2. The paper gives us minor structural change with zero cultural change. Volunteering and community work is viewed as a personal choice which has a payoff. The approach of the whole paper is to stimulate involvement by making it more rewarding, producing more tangible results. Yet the title page to chapter 2 quotes: “People choose to be willing citizens not because they are forced from without, but because they are compelled from within.” Unfortunately, the paper never really explores what motivates people. We’ve just marked Remembrance Day, and some of us vote, and take part, because we feel a sense of duty not to waste the sacrifice of others. Some of us are motivated by faith and life philosophy, civic duty, and compassion.

CiC notes that party membership is down - this is part of a general trend towards association rather than membership, reflected in union and church membership too. We define ourselves less by our social roles and groups, instead identity is more of a personal choice. Ironically it is this very promotion of individual choice - unchallenged by the white paper - which has made us less socially active and eroded our sense of citizenship. We will not have someone telling us what it means to be a citizen, nor do we accept given social roles and group identities. As a result we opt in to community and citizenship, rather than seeing these as core to who we are.

There is a massive challenge here:

in an individualistic, consumer society, things like citizenship, volunteering, caring for others, have to have a payoff. Yet people will only be good citizens etc. if there is more than individual self-interest at work, but I don’t see any alternative philosophy on offer here. Communities in Control accepts the primacy of individual choice over duty, faith, belonging and citizenship, the very philosophy which has corroded these values over recent generations. Corporate bodies are being given a ‘duty to involve’, but where is the duty of the individual citizen? To paraphrase a recent Church of England report, this is ‘Compass, but no Morals’

Practicalities
1. One barrier to community and individual involvement is the plethora of agencies, partnerships and para-governmental structures at local and national level. No doubt the proposed survey of the 3rd Sector will highlight this, but all I can see here is yet more agencies and grant-making bodies. This will make it harder, not easier, for us to get involved.

2. Faith groups - the language all sounds very positive, and the paper recognizes some of the concerns raised in ‘Moral But No Compass’, that the government doesn’t understand enough about the church and its activities. However, the focus here is confined to 2 areas of government policy: contracting out services to local groups, and social cohesion (i.e. integrating Muslims to mainstream society). I am still to be convinced that the government recognizes the church’s activity as innately valuable, or that it trusts faith groups to articulate local priorities. (The ‘tens of thousands of people’ it cites as involved in faith-based community work is a massive underestimate: the Anglican church alone has hundreds of thousands.) There is a sense of ‘when I want your priorities I’ll give them to you’.

It is, however, encouraging to see that the Faithworks charter, developed by Faithworks, a Christian social charity in London, is being seen as the basis for future work here. This is a great example of a local Christian group getting stuck in to the system and working with it, without compromising its values.

3. I’ve not read every word of the paper, but scanning it I couldn’t identify a single power that was going to be relinquished by central government, a regulation that was to be scrapped, a system of control that was earmarked for the recycling centre. How much power is actually being given away here?

4. Do activists really need a government-sponsored forum? I was under the impression that global campaigns (Drop the Debt, Stop the Traffik) were doing okay already. We don’t need more forums, we need the government to listen to what we’re already lobbying about.

5. There’s a danger of over-consultation. Only a handful of people have the time and energy to get involved in shaping public services, engaging with the council etc. Out of 150,000 people in South Somerset, there were around 200 responses to a recent council consultation on the future of the District in the next 20 years. Half of these were businesses and agencies with a vested interest, and about half of the private citizens who responded only did so because of a campaign through local churches by yours truly. Increasing the numbers of consultations and things for local people to get involved with will simply dilute the small pool of local activists even further.

Now I’m off to run a stall at the opening of our newly refurbished community centre….