Posts Tagged: big society

Should we be putting financial value on volunteering?

On Monday, the front page of the Guardian carried a story about a scheme being proposed in Windsor & Maidenhead where new volunteers get Nectar Points in exchange for carrying out good works: hold a tea party for pensioners, get money off at Argos. There seems some potential problems with this idea. First of all,… Read more »

Trick or treat in the big society

Like many people, I imagine, I spent lot of yesterday evening answering the door to children in a variety of hideous costumes squealing ‘”trick or treat?” Unlike in previous years, I had anticipated it and spent a fiver at the local shops on an assortment of tooth-rotting gunge to hand out as insurance against getting… Read more »

Nice transition fund – what about the rest?

There are a couple of striking things about the new hundred-million-pound Transition Fund for the voluntary sector, announced in the yesterday comprehensive spending review yesterday. The first is that it happened at all, given the overall 19 per cent cut in public spending over the next four years. The civil society minister, Nick Hurd, has… Read more »

Cameron needs to start getting the party’s rank and file excited about the big society

The big society was the big theme of the fringe events at the Conservative Party conference this year.  All kinds of groups managed to shoehorn the phrase into their events: health charities, think tanks, social enterprise groups, local government bodies, housing firms and welfare-to-work providers all used the magic words. So did Starbucks, by hosting… Read more »

Ed: isn’t he our man?

Many people in the voluntary sector will feel a small glow of satisfaction at the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader, no matter what they think of his politics, the mode of his election or the fraternal ‘psychodrama’. His first job in government was at the then Office of the Third Sector, a new… Read more »

Big society means big change ahead

Lord Wei, the government’s big society guru, weighed in recently with a warning that some charities and social enterprises had become too bureaucratic because they received most of their funding from the state. “They have ended up becoming big charity, not big society,” he said. This chimes with Conservative arguments in recent years about the… Read more »

Big society: is the anti-red tape message getting through?

Is the government’s much-vaunted anti-red tape, common-sense message starting to filter through to the world of local authorities? At a big society-themed fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat party conference this weekend, an employee of Wirral Borough Council cited an interesting example of the message reaching the grass roots.  She said a local community group… Read more »

Not so looney: Lambeth Council’s bid to become a co-operative could be taken up elsewhere

Last night I went to Lambeth town hall in London for the first of a series of public meetings by the council to discuss its plans to become a co-operative. In practice, the plan means the council will launch a series of pilot projects in which local residents run public services, and will look favourably… Read more »

David Cameron may support local action but what about local government?

I woke this morning to hear charities leading the news. It did not turn out to be quite as interesting as it first seemed. Previews of David Cameron’s comments about the big society contained mainly re-heated announcements, such as setting up a big society bank. But there was some interesting new information, such as the… Read more »

I’m willing to bet Nick Hurd a tenner the big society bank won’t open on time

The Cabinet Office recently laid out clear goals in its structural reform plan for what it will achieve, and when. The plan is a set of apparently cast-iron policy guarantees that the third sector can rely on. It includes 14 measures to bring about the prophesied big society, which if they are kept will have… Read more »