This article is part of a special series on Big Society, also including The Young Foundation's Francis Davis, ResPublica's Asheem Singh, Alex Oliver of The Futures Company and The Spectator's Freddy Gray.
Successive Prime Ministers have felt the need to create intellectual landscapes in which to plant their political seeds. For John Major, it was the 'citizen's charter', his "central theme for public life"; for Tony Blair, the 'third way' would seek to bring social justice and liberal capitalism together; and for David Cameron, it is the 'Big Society' that has got everyone talking. The first two concepts are inherently vague and all encompassing, and the same could be said of the Big Society: after all, no one can really oppose it without seeming to stand up for sin and apathy.
On a less cynical note, however, a general consensus seems to have developed that the machinery of the state has placed excessive bureaucratic limits on innovation, social interaction and connectivity, mitigating what we would all accept to mean by the word 'society'. Within the simple proposition that the state should be smaller and society bigger, David Cameron has turned on its head the pyramid model that dictates that manifesto commitments should be passed down to the operational level. This could lead to more nuanced policies than the pyramid model's one-size-fits-all, sludge-coloured approach to multicoloured and multi-dimensional problems.
It would be remiss, however, not to acknowledge that the rapid withdrawal of state funding may leave many communities relying on volunteerism, either provided by their own members or by other sections of society that consider them worthy recipients of unpaid endeavour. That is not necessarily a bad thing: Britain is built on a backbone of volunteering, coming out near the top in Europe in terms of the proportion of our population who give up their time for voluntary work. The problem is that, as a means of providing reliable, dependable public services to everyone, it may leave rather a lot to be desired.
Dr Peter Kyle, the Deputy Chief Executive of Acevo, once pointed out that the only time a government has attempted to implement such funding reductions – in the US in the 1980s – the gap left by the state was not filled by community members cycling across the village green to dispense the warmth of human kindness. Instead, it was substituted, in some cases, by services paid for by those who could afford them, and by nothing at all for those who couldn't. Regardless of whether or not you accept this view, you would have to be particularly short sighted not to see the risks posed by the Big Society agenda.
We need to consider how we could deliver the Big Society model of service in a way that responds to the Prime Minister's vision. First and foremost, any such model should be 'customerised' rather than bureaucratised. In other words, interventions must put the needs of the community at the heart of how they are designed and delivered, that go beyond asking and are fundamentally about involving, in the same way that innovative companies involve customers in the products they design.
The language of the community is respected – however distant it may be from the language of bureaucracy – and used as a basis for understanding the problems that need addressing. This leads to services that are unique and bespoke, as opposed to being the result, as many fear, of a 'postcode lottery'. Such a vision challenges service providers to radically rethink their roles. Delivered the right way, 'customerised' services may represent a practical version of the Big Society.
This 'ideal' for the Big Society may be seen as both radical and threatening, but it could be assumed that the Prime Minister, in making these statements, is looking to provoke something more innovative than a steady but stale rewording of his predecessors' ideas. Despite its initial vagueness, the Big Society does hide within it some big ideas. They are not necessarily new, however: my organisation, Turning Point, has been working on a 'customerised' model of public services for several years. Through our Connected Care model, we can now lay claim to having produced services that have touched the lives of 130,000 people and trained over 160 community researchers. So we know that the Big Society is possible, but we also know the barriers that may prevent it from becoming a reality.
