Transcript (extract) of a speech by the Prime Minister on the Big Society, 19 July 2010.
‘… So we need to turn government completely on its head. The rule of this government should be this:
If it unleashes community engagement – we should do it.
If it crushes it – we shouldn’t.
And these are the three big strands of the Big Society agenda:
First, social action:
The success of the Big Society will depend on the daily decisions of millions of people – on them giving their time, effort, even money, to causes around them. So government cannot remain neutral on that – it must foster and support a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy, social action.
Second, public service reform:
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.
And third, community empowerment:
We need to create communities with oomph – neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them.
Methods
If these are the three strands of the Big Society agenda, there are also three techniques we must use to galvanise them.
First, decentralization:
We must push power away from central government to local government – and we shouldn’t stop there. We should drive it down even further…to what Phil Redmond has called the ‘nano’ level… to communities, to neighbourhoods and individuals.
Second, transparency:
It goes without saying, if we want people to play a bigger part in our society, we need to give them the information.
So, for example, by releasing the data about precisely when and where crimes have taken place on the streets… we can give people the power not just to hold the police to account… but to go even further, and take action themselves – for instance, starting a new neighbourhood watch scheme, youth club or an after-school club if they realise that’s when most of the trouble begins.
Third, providing finance:
We believe in paying public service providers by results. It encourages value for money and innovation at the same time. But the potential problem is that you can lock smaller organisations out, because they don’t have access to start-up capital.
So government has a crucial role to play in bridging the gap – and indeed, more widely, in connecting private capital to investment in social projects.
We have already said we will create a Big Society Bank to help finance social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups through intermediaries.
And I can announce today that it will be established using every penny of dormant bank and building society account money allocated to England. These unclaimed assets, alongside the private sector investment that we will leverage, will mean that the Big Society Bank will – over time – make available hundreds of millions of pounds of new finance to some of our most dynamic social organisations…’.
For full text see: No 10 Speeches: LINK
PlanningBlog: LINK
