As reports emerge of a crisis meeting between big society architects Steve Hilton and Philip Blond, there is still notable uncertainty as to how their big idea may be operationalised at grass roots level. Paul Rainford and Jane Tinkler explore some of the available options and find that the creation of new ‘big society’ providers could offer definite benefits to local service provision in being more responsive to public needs and simplifying the institutional landscape for service users. However, big society providers cannot be seen as neat substitutes for the state and they will struggle to gain any sort of traction if funding and central support is absent or insufficient. There are also grave concerns surrounding commissioning, accountability and redress mechanisms for which the government seems to lack coherent solutions

Rainford, Paul

Tinkler, Jane

English

LSE Research Online

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2011/01/27/new-%e2%80%98big-society%e2%80%99-providers-could-deliver-better-local-services-but-there-are-grave-concerns-surrounding-funding-accountability-and-citizen-redress/?pfstyle=wpJanuary 28, 2011New ‘big society’ providers could deliver betterlocal services, but there are grave concernssurrounding funding, accountability and citizenredressAs reports emerge of a crisis meeting between big society architects SteveHilton and Philip Blond, there is still notable uncertainty as to how their bigidea may be operationalised at grass roots level. Paul Rainford and JaneTinkler explore some of the available options and ﬁnd that the creation ofnew ‘big society’ providers could oﬀer deﬁnite beneﬁts to local serviceprovision in being more responsive to public needs and simplifying theinstitutional landscape for service users. However, big society providers cannot be seenas neat substitutes for the state and they will struggle to gain any sort of traction iffunding and central support is absent or insuﬃcient. There are also grave concernssurrounding  commissioning, accountability and redress mechanisms for which thegovernment seems to lack coherent solutions.Soon after taking power in May 2010, the coalition government announced that it wasputting ‘big society’ provision at the heart of public sector reform. The big societyprogramme is built around ﬁve policies that include giving communities more powers,and encouraging local people to take more active roles in local service. The CabinetOﬃce’s ‘Building the Big Society’ paper states:We will support the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charitiesand social enterprises, and support these groups to have much greaterinvolvement in the running of public services.We will give public sector workers a new right to form employee-ownedcooperatives and bid to take over the services they deliver. This will empowermillions of public sector workers to become their own boss and help them todeliver better services.We will use funds from dormant bank accounts to establish a Big Society Bank,which will provide new ﬁnance for neighbourhood groups, charities, socialenterprises and other non-governmental bodies.At present though, despite intense media coverage, the details of these policies are stillsketchy. Even Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Oﬃce, admitted: ‘The big societyis a big idea, not a big plan’.Many critics, including the Labour Party, have alleged that the idea of big society isdeliberately vague as it is essentially a cloak to disguise government disengagementfrom previous levels of intervention, whether assisting in local economic developmentor in providing social welfare. In this view, the rhetoric and practices of local socialismare being co-opted and then distorted for a more traditionally conservative state-shrinking agenda. Trade unions such as Unite believe that the big society is a smoke-screen to hand the provision of public services over to the market.Debate on these points will continue, but it is reasonable to suggest that supportersand critics alike need to start engaging with discussions about how the big society, as itis currently being articulated, may be operationalised. Put simply, how might big societypublic services be designed? Is the big society even supposed to be designed, or is thegovernment looking for something more organic or even anarchic?What is immediately apparent when looking at the way deﬁnitions of organisations suchas social enterprises, co-operatives and mutuals are banded about both in oﬃcialdiscourse and the media, is that there is very little understanding of how they areconstituted and what they do. A recent paper published by the LSE Public Policy Groupattempts to demystify some of these terms and emphasises that in fact these types oforganisation share many similar characteristics. Organisations can be mutual co-operatives, employee-owned co-operatives and for-proﬁt social enterprises. Sometypes of organisations are still theoretical as they have only been proposed and not sofar been constituted. A quick UK press search reveals that the provider type mostcommonly referred to is social enterprise (see Figure 1 below), which seems to almosthave become a ‘catch-all’ term for voluntary sector organisations.Potential strengths of big society service provisionOne key issue is whether the general set-up and capacity of these organisations is suchthat they will be able to provide better and/or cheaper public services in this era ofausterity and beyond. It seems possible that by opening up public service delivery tonew ideas and energies, local authorities could be able to share costs, diversify risks,prevent duplication and encourage collaboration with (and thereby learn from) thewider business and voluntary sectors who are engaged in ﬁelds of shared interest. Co-production with smaller and more ﬂexible provider types would allow for particular usergroups to receive localised and targeted services.Moreover, by encouraging a ‘customer focussed radical disintermediation’ in publicservices – that is the stripping out of intermediaries in the delivery chain and thesimpliﬁcation of the institutional landscape – and by seeking to curtail top-downimposed changes, there could be greater needs-based provision that is able to adapt inreal time to problems, thus driving up quality and performance. People who are deniedservices but may be able to aﬀord to fund them themselves would be able to replacepublic service provision with mutual service provision – as in the case of MutualRetirement Housing – but this would be to the exclusion of those who could not aﬀordto self-fund similar services.Credit: International Co-operative AllianceThe quintessential ethos and the principles and values of co-operative enterprises in particular resonate with the big societyrhetoric and the prospect of service providers and users workingtogether for mutually beneﬁcial outcomes is naturally appealing.However, David Rogers, the Executive Director of CDS Co-operatives has argued that it would be a fallacy to suggest thatbetter outcomes could be provided at lower costs – rather betterservices may be designed in collaboration with big society type providers, but for thesame costs.Potential weaknesses of big society service provisionCo-operatives, social enterprises and mutuals are not neat substitutes for governmentand cannot be expected to ﬁll the breach if funding and central support is absent orinsuﬃcient. There are real capacity-building issues that need to be addressed as thegovernment’s cuts threaten to strip out any capability the state may have to supportthe big society – not only in terms of funding but also in the provision of skilled inputfrom lawyers, research organisations, public policy experts etc. Commercial workshopshave been established and there are great promises of a Big Society Bank, but whetherthis is to be a ﬁrst port of call or a last resort, and how much money it will have todistribute, is still unknown.Big society providers thus cannot be seen as a way to cheaply devolve services thatthe government or local authorities consider no longer aﬀordable. They will need to beeconomically viable with sound business models. There is real concern that thegovernment’s austerity programme of cuts is too fast and too deep to be eitherrealisable or to stop the economy from lurching into permanent slow growth or evendeﬂation.There are additional concerns about the creeping privatisation of the public sphere. Thepart-employee-owned company Circle that won a contract to run Cambridgeshire’sHinchingbrooke hospital in November 2010 is half owned by venture capitalists. Thismay provide the necessary liquidity to operate as a business but it raises questionsabout public tolerance of private capital in public services, and whether privateinvestors will seek to siphon oﬀ the most proﬁtable parts of public enterprises whileleaving the rest the fall by the wayside.There needs to be serious discussion as to whether public assets are to be locked in ifservices are transferred to non-state providers and what the appropriate responsewould be to drastic diﬀerences in local provision (early indications suggest that fear ofpostcode lotteries cuts less ice with coalition ministers than it did with their Labourpredecessors). It is uncertain as to whether local authority staﬀ will be transferred overto new providers – with the attendant TUPE implications – and whether their newemployers will share the public service values and commitment to comprehensivenessand universality upon which many users depend.Credit: The conservative co-operativemovementIndeed local councillors are elected on the verybasis of upholding such values and theycannot simply abdicate the responsibility totheir communities that is a condition of theirdemocratic mandate. Big society providers willbe delivering services for which they are notclearly accountable – indeed there is nothingintrinsic to civil society/employee-ownedorganisations that makes them democratic,even to their own members – and there aregrave sensitivity issues surrounding provisions that relate to social care or protectionservices.Redress system weaknesses also show up strongly in the case of outsourced services,where citizens and customers are often being left to shuttle to and fro between thefunding/contracting council denying responsibility for the operational delivery ofservices, and the service provider disinclined to meet public sector standards ofresponsiveness. Indeed, what happens when citizen redress is ignored by the new bigsociety providers is currently left unexplained by the coalition government. As SirAndrew Foster noted; ‘the public want choice but with appropriate support andsafeguards. Local control of services is popular but only within the context of properequality and accountability frameworks’.Decentralisation and cooperation vs. competition and economies of scaleThere is a tension at the very heart of the government’s strategy between promotingcooperative enterprise and voluntarism on one hand, and the wider thrust towardsincreasing competitiveness in virtually every sphere – perhaps most prominently in thefurther development of markets in education and health care – on the other. Existingarrangements around commissioning restrain the capacity of many public sectororganisations to transition and ﬂourish in cooperative ownership. How cancommissioners commission services from new providers who lack a strong record thatwould allow them to competitively and eﬀectively tender with large scale privatecompanies?The drive to decentralise and promote small, cooperative style big society serviceprovision is thus at odds with the necessary economies of scale that the neworganisations would need to compete in a bitterly diﬃcult economic environment. Thegovernment may decide to consider well-being impacts or quota systems whentendering out services in the hope that this would accommodate new big societyproviders, but they would have to ensure that any action in this area did notcontravene EU procurement rules.Digital era big societyEmployee owned organisations are membership- and place-based, and need a greatdeal of organising. In this sense they are somewhat restrictive, if generally resilient.While proximity and face-to-face contact remain key human drivers in mobilising anincreasingly time poor and commitment phobic populace, a digital era big society couldprovide a new strand for development. Digital big society organisations could createopen source public services and develop new types of interactive organisations online.Such a model would only be applicable to certain services but public libraries could, forexample, develop a national e-book database that could be maintained and updated bygroups of individuals working separately in time and space.Mind the grassrootsWhatever eventual form big society providers take, the fundamental principle should bethat the motivation for adopting a new form of ownership develops organically fromgenuine grass roots pressure for co-production. To superimpose organisational changeon services would continue the dictatorship of Whitehall over the localities and areluctant big society will neither encourage  better local provision nor improve nationalprosperity.

New ‘big society’ providers could deliver better local services, but there are grave concerns surrounding funding, accountability and citizen redress

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