An Open Letter to Right Honourable David Cameron mp

Dear Mr Cameron

Please save the big society project by announcing that after nine months of experiment
it is being put onto a different basis:

1. Instead of people taking over public services, announce that it is about people
cooperating actively to help make public services more effective (‘coproduction’).

2. Bring ministers and officials who can link big society with improvements in the
mainstream public services into the Office for Civil Society. Detach big society from its
strong association with local authority cuts.

3. Set up a major fund to support the changes below.

4 Focus new big society policy squarely on community groups whose activities consist
of 50% or more volunteering

5 Support also those organisations which directly support community groups – local
anchor organisations, councils of voluntary service, rural community councils, community
development trusts etc – but link the funding for the support to demonstrable
effectiveness in terms of growth of the groups in point 4.

6. Take support for social enterprises and professionally-led charities out of big
society policy and put them into business policy and departmental delivery policies.

7. Acknowledge that the huge role that was played already by voluntary and community
groups is the bedrock for greater advance

8. Restore funding to community groups that have suffered from cuts, and offer
increases for demonstrable increases in output

9. Acknowledge that community organising is just one variant of the larger field of
community development, and restore, reform and upgrade community development.

10. Stabilise those public services which particularly interact with and support local
community groups: libraries, community centres, neighbourhood police etc

11. Institute clear measures of whether big society is growing, in terms of

volunteering, influence, impact of community groups, people’s participation etc.

12. Instruct OCS to use the biennial survey of the third sector to highlight the role of
community groups instead of hiding them behind professional charities and enterprises

13. Activate vigorously your original plan for all civil servants to experience local
community activity at first hand, not just by volunteering but by having a designed
‘immersion’ experience across a whole neighbourhood, ward or locality

14. Change the label from ‘The Big Society’ to ‘big society’ so that it is seen as a
description of an attribute of society, not a phantom entity.

Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller, PACES Empowerment 07533 958805 / 07984 433473
For full explanation see ‘The Big Society and Public Services: Complementarity or
Erosion’, www.pacesempowerment.co.uk