Sustainability must define the Big Society

All leaders need a vision, an inspirational goal to glue together the usually uncharismatic things that need to be done to get there. David Cameron is no exception.His vision is for a ‘Big Society’.

According to Ipsos Mori, however, more than half the citizens of the UK – the foot soldiers of the Prime Minister’s vision – have not heard of the Big Society.Of those who have, very few understand what it means.

Understanding just what the new government means by a Big Society will, of course, influence how it plans to get there. And there are two rather different interpretations.

But first, here is how David Cameron describes it:

“The Big Society is about a huge culture change, where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace, don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face, but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities. …we’ve got to get rid of the centralised bureaucracy that wastes money and undermines morale. And in its place we’ve got to give professionals much more freedom, and open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need.”

One interpretation of what is going on is that this is just a mask for achieving a long-held Tory dream of rolling the state right back and removing all impediments to the ‘right of the individual to cater for his own preferences in the market’; a quote taken from the home page of the Selsdon Group (Hon Patron Rt Hon Lord Tebbitt of Chingford).

The view that the Big Society is just a Trojan Horse for implementing extreme free market policies, was given a boost by a supporter of the Selsdon Group, cabinet office minister the Rt Hon Francis Maude, who admitted at a Tory Conference fringe that he expected the transition to be ‘chaotic and disorderly’. He said: “No one can ordain what happens in a capitalist economy. The same should happen in the Big Society. … If I had a plan, it would be the wrong plan.”

The notion of chaos to come was underlined by Ben Page, of Ipsos Mori, who said that people think building the ‘Big Society’ will be ‘challenging’ and that ‘nobody should assume that the ‘Big Society’ will automatically rise up once the state withdraws’. A totally free market, as we know from communities in places like Haiti, Nigeria or early post-Soviet Russia, can be a very ugly place.

But there is another interpretation. David Cameron frequently says he is a pragmatist. And surrounded by so many intractable problems with rising costs in the public sector and humungous fiscal deficits, his options are not great.In his conference speech, he pointed out that ‘citizenship is not a transaction in which you put your taxes in and get your services out.It is a relationship – you are part of something bigger than you’. Whatever sort of society we want, how prosperous we want to be after the public finances are restored, is down to us.

In many ways, this is a message close to green campaigners’ hearts.It fits with lots of the slogans we’ve peddled for years, for example: act local, think global; and subsidiarity (meaning you get better decisions if those who live the consequences of a decision also make the decision and pay for it). And it is consonant with the intellectual framework for measuring the success of an economy according to the level of family wellbeing now and the potential for it to increase in the future, put forward by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Commission.

The best indication of how the Big Society vision will be implemented is in the words in bold in David Cameron’s quote.Yet so much remains vague – what is a social enterprise, for example? And how sure can we be that any of the proposed citizen-led initiatives, however organised, will deliver sustainability outcomes – the sort that benefit not only people but the environment too.

The environment gets barely a mention in any of the Big Society speeches, and it is well known that it doesn’t vote or turn up at meetings. So how will its needs be assured? When the Sector Skills umbrella body devolved responsibility for delivering sustainability outcomes to its many constituent bodies, it disappeared in most of them.

There is a great deal to be played for in interpreting the Big Society idea and in working out how the right outcomes are designed, pursued, delivered and appraised.In hisspeech David Cameron spoke of the ‘spirit we need, the big society spirit’, while his cabinet colleague Francis Maude has said he hopes ‘the spirit of Selsdon Man will guide and watch over us all’.

If they are not talking about the same thing, then we are OK. If they are, then it is only by giving the Big Society a meaning informed by sustainability that we will save ourselves from genuinely broken communities.