The Archbishop of Canterbury and his predecessor, Lord Carey, have both expressed misgivings about the Government’s Big Society programme, which lays out a larger place for voluntary groups in serving their communities (News, 23 July).
Dr Williams gave the idea “two-and-a-half cheers” at a speech to the Charities Parliament at the Oasis Centre in London last week, expressing concern that it could be an “alibi for cost-cutting”, and a government “hand-washing exercise”.
Lord Carey, writing in the News of the World on Sunday, gave the Big Society idea “six out of ten”, and warned that the programme would not work unless “interference from the state”, such as CRB checks on volunteers, was reined in.
In his speech, Dr Williams said that he gave the Big Society one cheer for its recognition that “the face-to-face, the local, is important”; one cheer “for the sense that this somehow has to build around existing, thickly textured communities”; and half a cheer “because we don’t yet know how far this could be a buck-passing exercise”.
He expressed concern that the idea “gets its energy and conviction from being opposed to big government”. While rejecting the Left-wing idea that “government is always the prime provider of social goods,” he warned that regeneration and social action needed investment from government: “otherwise it will be delivered at lower standards, more patchily, and less accountably.”
Dr Williams defined society as a “community of communities”, and Government’s job as being “to adjust, to nourish, to almost fiddle with the works from time to time” to “make some connections and make them work”. For this community to work, and for citizens to be aware of their interdependence, would require the development of certain kinds of people, Dr Williams said.
The Big Society needed to “create the conditions that nourish certain kinds of people” — people who are characterised by “the old-fashioned virtues of courage and moderation and intelligent planning and fairness”, which “remain the kind of qualities, surely, that would make us a workable society”.
“Society will change, not by lots of individuals becoming nicer, but by people recognising more and more deeply how much they depend on one another, and how much they are impoverished by the poverty of their neighbour.”
In his article, Lord Carey wrote that there were “two ingredients missing” from the Prime Minister’s plans for a Big Society: a Minister for the Big Society, “to ensure people who want to make a difference have a voice in government”, and adequate plans to tackle youth unemployment.
He dismissed government proposals for summer holiday camps as falling “woefully short” of what was needed to address youth joblessness, and called for a “bigger vision of national service”.
Lord Carey also argued that “the ‘Big Society’ is already here. Thousands of people already volunteer their time. . .” He said, however, that such volunteers faced “hundreds of obstacles put in front of them by Government”: the state “ties them up in red tape”.
Dr Williams expressed similar concerns, saying that “the need for perfectly proper accountability can sometimes be mistaken for an obsessional, target-setting, box-ticking mindset, which really doesn’t help”. “We need to be pushing a bit about that,” he said.
Writing in last week’s Catholic Herald, the Minister for Decentralisation, Greg Clark MP, appeared to respond to such concerns. “Britain’s faith communities deserve to be valued, but valued in such a way that lets them get on with being who they are rather than tells them into which bureaucratic box they should fit,” he wrote. He emphasised that “churches and other faith communities will be among those who have the most to contribute”.
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