Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech to the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations

The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 13 June 2002.

I am very grateful to Stephen Bubb and the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations for the invitation to today’s conference.

Members of ACEVO greatly strengthen our society, particularly at the local level, by enabling groups of people with a common vision to come together to work for a common cause.

And because you tackle the causes as well as the consequences of social problems you reach vulnerable people who have often been failed by conventional approaches.

Gathered in this room are a variety of organisations that serve diverse communities of people all over Britain.

Leonard Cheshire supports and enables 19,000 people with disabilities in Britain.

The hospice movement provides 3,215 beds for very sick and terminally-ill people.

Victim Support offers help to over one million people whose lives have been struck by crime.

Prison Fellowship equips and supports 2,000 volunteer visitors throughout Britain’s 136 prisons.

This week is National Carers’ Week. This morning I visited the Princess Royal Trust Carers’ Centre in Hammersmith and Fulham, which provides support for those who care for relatives and friends when they can no longer look after themselves.

Every 5th household in this country includes at least one carer. There are some seven million adults carers in Britain today. I watched my mother care for my dying father and I know the selfless dedication born out of love and obligation that is the cornerstone of so many families in this country.

Informal care is the most effective and least expensive form of care there is. However it places an extraordinary amount of strain on those who give it. The voluntary support carers receive often makes the difference between a heavy burden and an intolerable one. I pay tribute to the work that they do and the support that you give them.

Of course, there is also a need for paid professional help, especially where vulnerable people have no friends or relations to look after them. Here the state can step in with support for people who can’t afford this help themselves. But that doesn’t mean the state has to organise and provide the care itself, or that it does a very good job when it tries to.

Last month a report from the Social Services Inspectorate made clear that many local authorities were failing to provide adequate levels of care to vulnerable people. I was struck by the testimony of one charity worker in the West Midlands:

‘Elderly people with mobility problems cannot get even the most basic help. If they want a grab rail for their toilet or bath, they go to social services for an assessment – which takes months… When we complain, the politicians blame it on the officers and vice versa.’

This is illustrated by the case of a 71-year-old man who has not been able to have a bath or a shower since suffering a stroke in July 1997. He desperately needs a downstairs shower, but the council has said that it may be another three years before one is installed. As he said:

‘It is about my dignity. They don’t understand how traumatic it is to have a stroke, to not be able to go out for a walk. They don’t know how it feels not to be able to bathe. I feel absolutely terrible and I really feel as if I have been let down.’

Some will say that the problem is resources. But it is not about resources alone. There is a huge variation in performance between different councils. As the inspector’s report said:

‘People are fitted to services, rather than services to people.’

I believe that charities and the voluntary sector have so much to teach us about fitting services to people. Of course, many others have come to the same conclusion, which is why the voluntary sector has been called upon to play a bigger role in the public services. But charities must not be used to prop up crumbling state structures. And neither should vulnerable people have to wait and hope for the failing state to find the right partners from the voluntary sector.

Rather, the true duty of the state is to help vulnerable people achieve dignity and this is best done by ensuring that they get help from those that understand their needs best. And very often that will be a charity or a community group or some other non-state body. It is vital that we establish a direct relationship between what people want and the support the voluntary sector gets from the public purse.

People will benefit from more responsive public services, but the voluntary sector will also benefit. They will be held accountable by the people they help instead of by Whitehall. This is public funding with a human face that ensures freedom from political interference and a closer connection with the communities they serve.

That is why an evolving partnership with the voluntary sector will be a high priority for the Conservative party.

It will be vital for effective public service reform. It also lies at the core of the commitment which I set out at the Conservatives’ Harrogate conference to address the needs of vulnerable people within society.

Of course you are used to be courted by politicians. We are meeting at a time when the boundaries between the public, private and voluntary sectors are becoming blurred beyond recognition.

At first glance, this presents charities with unprecedented opportunities. It offers you the chance to expand your work, to gain access to policymaking and to secure new sources of income.

But on deeper examination these opportunities present their own problems. If charities increasingly rely on government for their influence, their authority and their funding, at what point do they cease to act as agents for change and constancy, and start to become just another agency of the state?

To improve the quality and the responsiveness of our public services we have to be more flexible about those organisations we use to deliver them. That is one very obvious lesson I have learned from travelling around Europe and America studying those countries who run better systems of healthcare and education than we do.

But we must never lose sight of the fact that if we want to help the most vulnerable people in our society, then we also have to strengthen society around them and that means supporting institutions and groups whose reach extends beyond the state.

I applaud the new spirit of professionalism in the charitable sector that you embody, but that should never lead to the professionalisation of voluntary impulses.

To do so risks eroding the independence of charities and undermining the virtues of self-help, mutual obligation and social engagement. People must not believe that their obligations to neighbours in need begin and end with the payment of taxes.

People give time and money to volunteering for any number of reasons. They may want others to think well of them, or to contribute to the well-being of those less fortunate than themselves. These sentiments make us who we are.

That is why the expression of compassion through spontaneous co-operation is as old as society itself.

It has survived the 20th century struggles between socialism and capitalism and the battle between the public and private sectors for the control over the economy.

Now it must flourish in the 21st century as we seek to wrestle with the limitations of state power in tackling some of our most intractable social problems.

This, I think, is where the Government and the Opposition part company. Both main parties talk about civil society, the need to replenish social capital and an enhanced role for the voluntary sector.

But for my part we do so from a belief that the voluntary sector should not just be another branch office of central government.

For us the sector is part of new political settlement. One which stresses the local over the central, diversity over uniformity, and innovation over control.

Labour came into power offering the voluntary sector a new partnership. They were promised unprecedented access to Whitehall, a voice in decision-making and access to a panoply of government grants.

But in return they were often required to submit themselves to target-setting, auditing and performance indicators that have become the defining feature of the way this Government runs the public sector.

Too many voluntary groups fear becoming institutionalised. They devote more and more of their time to applying for grants and writing reports and less and less time to finding new ways of helping people.

This Government’s bear-hug is as expensive as it is suffocating. The bureaucracy and the compliance costs risk excluding the smallest charities who are the most local and often the most innovative in meeting the needs of their communities.

As Conservatives, we see things differently. Certainly Government has a duty to account for the way it spends its money and there are certain minimum standards which all organisations must adhere to.

But the potential of the voluntary sector lies in what it alone can achieve.

Voluntary groups can operate on a human scale, they are often run by members of the same communities they serve, they can demand more of the people they are trying to help.

The lives they touch and change are not to be measured by statistics or read in annual reports, instead they are measured by the strength of our communities and they are written in faces of the people and the families they help.

These are the things that give the voluntary sector its power. It is why charities reach the parts of our society that government has never reached in the half century since the universal welfare state was founded.

If we are to tap into that power, we are going to have trust people; trust charities and the voluntary sector to do their job, not emasculate them with a series of contracts and regulations in the name of partnership.

This is not a rallying cry for the voluntary sector to provide public services on the cheap: responsibility must be matched by resources and by results.

All told, the voluntary sector receives a public income of more than £5 billion a year from central and local government, from the European Union and from the lottery.

But currently this money comes at the price of the strings that politicians attach to it.

You only have to look at the problems of residential care homes. Many face closure because of excessive regulation, disrupting the lives of vulnerable people.

The rules governing the European Social Fund are drawn so tightly that voluntary groups are unable to offer assistance to those who fall just outside its rigidly-defined geographical boundaries.

Muslim groups face discrimination if they bid for money as religious rather than cultural organisations. Christian and other faith-based groups sometimes face discrimination simply because of their faith.

We have to find ways of involving the sector in transforming our public services without compromising its independence and integrity.

That is going to mean fundamentally rethinking the way public money reaches the voluntary sector.

Earlier this week, while I was in Washington DC I visited the Unique Learning Center. It looks after 40 children from broken homes whose parents are addicted to drugs or in prison. It coaches them through school, dealing with teachers and providing a place they can go to after school to do homework or play sport.

The Center offers children a haven from disruptive neighbourhoods. It teaches children of the link between work and achievement and steers them away from the culture of instant gratification and criminality.

Currently they receive no money from the central government for fear of interference. But the Bush Administration is backing the CARE Act. This would allow faith-based organisations to bid for Federal funds on a level playing field with non-religious organisations. It would also create a special fund that community-based organisations could bid for.

We need to learn from the American experience. Michael Howard and I are examining carefully how we can reform our tax laws in a way that will help the voluntary sector.

As things stand today, funding passes through the hands of too many people who have done nothing to produce it and who lack the expertise to spend it wisely.

Voluntary groups aspire to serve real people and their real needs.

But the current funding system gets in the way. It encourages mission creep; suffocates innovation; and it produces uniformity.

Centralised and politicised funding systems produce grey uniformity.

Government rarely tolerates alternative opinions. Charities with the temerity to challenge prevailing orthodoxies about drugs or marriage can suffer discrimination. The result is a one-dimensional approach to social problems which can never meet the diverse needs and beliefs of communities throughout Britain.

The public has a right to demand that the money raised in its name goes to ensuring better access to higher quality services. The Government has duty to tell them where their money is going. But ultimately all governments are judged by results. Elaborate audit trails are no substitute for achievement.

And as we know from every other walk of life, from every other country whose standards of public services exceed our own, these achievements are greatest when those closest to the communities they serve are given the power to get on with their jobs.

To do this, we have to address a number of questions.

How can we reform funding so that charities can stay loyal to their fundamental missions?

How do we ensure that higher-risk, but more innovative projects, get funds?

How do we make sure that small neighbourhood-based charities get support alongside larger, nationally based ones?

The answers will come from a mix of innovative approaches. The NCVO’s interest in local charitable endowments is worthy of consideration.

Some of the ideas we will look at would extend existing practice, some would depart from it.

I would be grateful for your views in this search for a more democratic, more diverse and more devolved voluntary sector.

We will have a robust and constructive debate with the Government as it develops its own responses to some of the issues I have discussed today.

If good decisions come out of the voluntary sector reviews being carried out by the Treasury and the Performance and Innovation Unit, we will support them.

But when the Government damages the voluntary sector, as it did by cutting your investment income through the ACT changes or imposing National Insurance increases on a sector which needs to employ more people on tight budgets, we will not hesitate to say they are wrong.

Nor are we concerned to help only the voluntary sector. Families, community networks and places of worship must also play their part.

If our society is serious about tackling some of its most deeply-rooted problems, then we must start by taking society seriously.”

It is often those institutions that lie beyond the reach of the state who have the firmest grasp of what needs to be done. They bring a human touch to the healing of social ills that has eluded both material prosperity and the universal welfare state.

Government has a role in supporting the voluntary sector and it should carry out that role actively, but it should not try to run your sector for you. It must give you the room to breathe and the space to work.

That is the balance the Conservative Party will seek to strike in the years ahead.