By David Williams in Liverpool
21 September 2010
Senior Liberal Democrats have said that the Big Society concept is struggling to gain currency among civil servants and even some ministers.
At a fringe meeting of the LibDem party conference in Liverpool this afternoon, children’s minister Sarah Teather and deputy leader Simon Hughes both argued that the term Big Society fitted well with liberal values.
But, Hughes said: ‘I think about half of the LibDem ministers are willing to use the phrase, and the other half have said they will never use it because they don’t know what it is and they think we have perfectly valid alternatives.’
For him, the idea was a chance to reclaim the ‘civic pride’ seen in the municipal authorities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Hughes said the long-awaited general power of competence for local authorities, planned to be brought in through a Localism Bill later this year, would enable councils ‘to do what they want, like in the old days’.
He also revealed there was a battle still going on between the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Treasury over the GPC.
Teather said that it was ‘kind of the point’ that there was still work to do on defining the Big Society and understanding what it would mean in practice.
‘It has to be grown up from the ground, or else it’s a total nonsense,’ she told the session.
‘I did suggest this to my department when they came to me with a big plan about how to implement the Big Society.
‘I told them it was a little bit silly and we need to have something much more vision-led, rather than something with lots of detailed targets and action points, and they haven’t yet quite got the concept.’
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society of the Arts, cautioned that some charities could prove to be an obstacle to putting the Big Society into practice – even though the core of the idea is for local voluntary groups to become more involved in public services.
‘A lot of charities are the problem,’ he said. ‘Housing associations start out as dynamic self-help groups, and a lot of them are now huge, sprawling bureaucracies that are more out of touch than local authorities.’
