It’s time to revive David Cameron’s Big Society
4 min read
The best idea of the Coalition government was the Big Society.
If Cameronism had an animating vision for Britain, it was this: beyond the centralised bureaucracy of the state was a far deeper, richer, better resource; namely the institutions of civil society and the latent capacity of communities. Rather than imposing top-down solutions from Whitehall, the job of government was to equip frontline professionals and ordinary citizens, in a multitude of established institutions and pop-up collaborations, with the responsibility and the money to tackle the problems of their neighbourhoods.
The Big Society was a response to the sclerosis of the state after years of tinkering and target-setting by the Blair and Brown governments. It was an alternative both to socialist universalism and to the ersatz privatisation of new public management theory. A bottom-up, trust-the-people approach came naturally to the heirs of Disraeli and Thatcher. It would give individuals purpose and skills, and progressively reduce demand for expensive, remedial state services.
The public sector remains to this day centralised, inefficient and wasteful
Yet for a multitude of reasons the great vision was not fully realised during the Coalition years. Despite the great leadership of Nick Hurd, the minister in charge, and despite genuine transformation in the education and welfare systems led by Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith, the public sector in general remains to this day centralised, inefficient and wasteful. Frontline workers battle heroically to serve their communities despite, not because of, the tiers of management above them; citizens struggle to be served. Budgets are bigger than they have ever been but the front line seems starved of resources.
Meanwhile we have an epidemic of physical and mental ill-health, of loneliness, family breakdown, addiction and economic inactivity. We are unhappy, unwell and unproductive.
Just as the overwhelming imperative for the state at this moment is to strengthen our nation’s defences and boost our economic resilience, the imperative for society is to get fitter, healthier, more purposeful and more capable. And the government has a key role here – not by finger-wagging about obesity or welfare dependency, but by creating the conditions in which individuals can become more resilient and communities more self-governing.
How, then, do we revive the Big Society for the mid 2020s? Many of the ideas hesitantly experimented in 2010 remain the right ones, requiring bold implementation – more neighbourhood planning, more partnerships between public services and civil society, more payment-by-results with working capital provided by social investors and regional banks, more support for the community businesses and social enterprises that strengthen the economies of left-behind neighbourhoods. And since 2010 we have seen an explosion in the opportunities provided by technology for low-cost, versatile, collaborative organisation of people and resources.
The opportunity is now there for a great disintermediation. The government should make its mission to dismantle the great bureaucracies headquartered in the glass and steel towers which dominate the SW1 skyline, and commit the resources they squander directly to the communities they fail to serve.
I set out a bunch of these ideas in my 2020 report Levelling up our communities: proposals for a new social covenant, inspired by the experience of the lockdown which gave a glimpse of what a better social model could look like. During Covid we saw communities spontaneously organise to support the vulnerable; public services suddenly develop the instinct for partnership and innovation; businesses discover their social conscience and their obligations to the places they worked in. People stepped up and did the right thing, all without any orders from above.
Government has a crucial role in ensuring fairness for all, and in holding providers to account for public money. But the modern age, no less than the old days, demands we put our trust in citizens and the institutions they create to provide for themselves and their communities. Our opponents, by contrast, put their trust in civil servants, quangos and committees of the great and good. Here is a worthy dividing line for the election that is coming.
Danny Kruger, Conservative MP for Devizes
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