The Big Society and our 13 year old alternative

By Kieran Roberts

Already, we can glean two conclusions from the Big Society. The first is that a demand exists for a different approach to politics rooted more in community. The second conclusion we can draw is that Cameron’s approach, so far, isn’t prevailing. As the electorate remain unconvinced, where does Labour start with an alternative?

First, we need to realise what Labour started in government. The New Deal for Communities, set up in 1998, intended to transform 39 deprived neighborhoods over 10 years. It was to do this by placing the community at the centre of the project, allowing residents to set up and manage certain services in their areas. Sound familiar? Last year the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research evaluated the success of the scheme and it came to a number of conclusions.

It found that overall – but particularly in the areas of health, housing and the environment – the New Deals delivered a significant, positive change. With residents setting up local schemes such as those to tackle childhood obesity, provide support for victims of drug abuse, modernise social housing and improve responsiveness to environmental degradation, there were an array of problems that local people solved more effectively than government. Looking more widely, residents felt better and safer in their areas and they transformed isolated communities to ones which were friendlier and more engaging.

What the New Deal for Communities shows us however is not entirely that simple. The areas in which there was less success were education and employment. Despite the investment of £1.71bn, the community approach couldn’t address these problems – in the 39 areas, joblessness and academic achievement didn’t improve. This pinpoints why the Big Society won’t work. The ways and means of empowering individuals and communities are incompatible with the ideologies of the Conservatives. The New Deal scheme was a success because it had substantial investment, it provided the framework to organise with a number of bodies such as Primary Care Trusts, local schools and the police and there was a limit to what services were to be run by local people.

Taking these points in turn, the £1.71bn allocated for 39 communities is matched, nationally, by £500 million in the Big Society Bank. Donna Henry, Chair of the Clapham Park New Deal for Communities says with more authority than I can:

“It needs big backing by government. The project had enough money for the resident-dominated board to buy in professional staff to run the programs they wanted. We could have done nothing without that.”

The money that’s required for these schemes to work is not provided through the Big Society. Nor is the need to work in coalition with local bodies such as Primary Care Trusts, schools and the police – all face massive cuts from the government and as a result, the opportunity for residents to work with them will be less available.

The final distinction between what Labour began and what the Big Society aims to do is the difference in genuinely empowering people and landing the responsibility of public services on their doorsteps. People don’t want to be volunteers responsible for running the local school, cleaning the streets and fighting crime. They, like Nat Wei, don’t have the time. Taking power from the state and giving it to local people to tackle local issues is the right approach but the Conservatives don’t appear to have grasped that not all problems can be solved by the community alone.

The limits of the community approach are countered by increasing state investment in education, creating jobs and decreasing the income gap, all of which are essential in bringing about the personal freedoms and personal contentment that the Big Society hopes to achieve. The solution isn’t solely small state as the Tories think and that’s why we shouldn’t waste time trying to create our version of the Big Society. Community empowerment twinned with state action in the right areas is simply a rethinking and renewing of the People’s Party – that should be our alternative. With the Movement for Change and the High Pay Commission, it’s something that we’re already making good progress in. Rather than jostling around to the Conservatives’ way of thinking, our alternative stems from being pragmatically, modernly Labour. People realise that the Big Society is BS. So should we.