The parties and voluntary sector engagement

Last week Gordon Brown suggested that life after politics will not see him slide into a high-profile job at the World Bank or the IMF, but a turn to 'charity or voluntary work'. My fear is that the current policy outlook jeopardises the existence of this charitable future, or at best transforms it beyond recognition.

On the face of it, the political consensus forming around the need to ‘strengthen the voluntary sector’ bodes well for charities and community groups. All of the main parties have put forward measures which affirm their commitment to the sector, from Labour’s Social Impact Bonds, through the Lib Dems’ increase on gift-aid payouts to the Conservatives’ Big Society Bank. The charity sector already receives one third of its income from the state, and this looks set to rise under any future government.

So why the concern? The cynic within me sees this newfound enthusiasm for voluntary sector engagement as a neat way of divorcing a future government from the looming problem of public service spending cuts, while reaping the anticipated rewards of a ‘change’ agenda which 'returns power' to the hands of communities.

The idea is that money can be saved through outsourcing to charities and communities, under the guise of ‘inclusive’ government. This is already underway: public service contracts currently make up around 65% of the voluntary sector’s statutory income.

Yet by asking charities to compete for public sector contracts which they lack the infrastructure to deliver, policy falls short of the substantive support that the voluntary sector will need if it is to play the starring role that the three major parties have assigned to it. In the context of a battle for the future of affordable public services, the current measures seem analogous to handing David a slingshot and sending him forth to meet Goliath.

As highlighted by recent ippr work on 'Capable Communities', charities add value where other service delivery mechanisms cannot, owing to their niche, local expertise and their independence from top-down targets and constraints. To couple simple, finance-based policy to an expectation that charities will transform into slick, area-wide providers of target-hitting public services is to inhabit the grey area between naїvety and negligence.

The new government will need to sit up and do some serious thinking about the scale, process and viability of this proposed transformation or risk selling an expectant and dependent public woefully short.

Leo Ringer

Target financial advice where it’s most urgent: the City

Yesterday the Commons public accounts committee delivered a devastating indictment of the Government’s ‘complete failure’ to tackle high levels of consumer debt. The Committee found no one holding the reigns on the Government’s money guidance service, which aims to educate people to avoid debt problems. While advice is available at crisis point in the UK (the CAB soldiers on!), there is virtually no independent financial advice.

Given the public purse is cash-strapped it makes sense to target financial education to those who need it most.

Statistics show that debt problems are most common in low income households. But dig deeper and you find few examples of risk-taking behaviour. The number one cause of over-indebtedness is not ‘bad’ behaviour but job loss. The explosion of personal debt was driven in the main by the over-mortgaged middle classes who gambled on the buy-to-let bubble.

Looking further afield it becomes clear where money mismanagement is most problematic. A friend once met a City trader at a party. Politely making conversation, he said it must be a difficult job, derivatives sound so very complicated. ‘It’s easy really’, the trader replied, ‘you don’t have to understand them to sell them.’ Feckless bankers and overpaid traders repackaged, relabelled, and sold on shed loads of debt – and the entire country now faces a decade of high unemployment and savage cuts to public services as a result.

To be really effective money guidance initiatives could target the City regulators, MPs, and the bright young things in the Treasury. It’s a shame they weren’t implemented earlier. A cross-party class to advise Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown may have covered the perils of a cavalier attitude to regulation. The late Eddie George would have benefitted from homework on the importance of capital ratios in the banking system. Surely report cards for the Woolworth’s management – who wiped out 25,000 jobs in one swoop – would have read ‘could do better’.

The City offers one clear lesson: advisers on commission tend to give bad advice. Former RBS chief Fred Goodwin and his contemporary Victor Blank at Lloyds TSB were both ‘advised’ and ‘guided’ by advisers who made vast profits on the toxic takeovers of ABN-AMRO and HBOS. Better money management won’t help ordinary households to avoid spiralling debt. Sir Fred and his pals, however, should surely be first on the list for independent money guidance.

See our blog post on basic bank accounts Read our report Strength Against Shocks

Tess Lanning

Settle down

Anyone watching Newsnight this Wednesday would be forgiven for thinking that the entire debate about immigration comes down to numbers. Whatever people’s concerns about migration – be it the impact on the economy, public services or community cohesion – the answer from politicians is always the same: adjust the number of immigrants coming to the UK. Schools can’t cope with all the Polish kids? Stop letting so many Poles in. Pakistani immigrants aren’t integrating? Let fewer in to the country. The economy needs more skilled workers? Adjust the points system to let them in.

There is a danger with this approach that it assumes the only thing immigration policy can do is alter the number of migrants entering the country. But a lot happens once a migrant has crossed the border, too. Greater state support for settlement can improve integration and help tackle many of the problems people are concerned about. Schools can’t cope with all the Polish kids? Provide the schools with teaching assistants to help them cope. Pakistani immigrants aren’t integrating? Fund and support outreach workers to help them learn English and establish roots in the community.

I’m slightly bemused that while politicians are keen to point to Canada’s immigration system as a model way to control the number of immigrants arriving, they neglect to mention the fact that Canada also invests a great deal in supporting immigrants to settle in, and that their government endorses an official model of multiculturalism. Dedicated translation services, English language tuition, education programmes, information diffusion, citizenship instruction, employment programmes and social welfare policies are all part of the tool kit used. The evidence is that if you invest early in helping migrants to settle in to their new country, then you stave off many of the problems and tensions faced further down the line. It might just be more important to solving these problems than limiting the numbers you let cross the border in the first place.

Jonathan Clifton

Only connect?

Do your friends make you fat? Apparently so. In their new book Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler argue that human behaviours are contagious and spread like viruses through the social networks in which we are located. So, if your friends put on weight, then the chances are that you will too.

The findings come from the records of the Framingham Heart Study, a 50-year research project into the health of 15,000 people in the Massachusetts town, and they are startling: when a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese too. The effect even skipped links: so if a friend of a friend became obese, a resident was 20 per cent more likely to become obese. There were similar results for smoking, heavy drinking, voter participation and the likelihood of becoming depressed.

These findings are being absorbed by the political parties in the run-up to the election. The fiscal crisis has put a premium on finding ways to deliver change that do not require extra resource: a better understanding of people’s social networks could help government get more ‘bang for its buck’. So, if you want to encourage school children to do their homework, rather than focusing on each individual you go to the most connected child in the school. If they start doing their homework properly, others will follow their example. We know this from ippr’s work on climate change: by encouraging enough neighbours to behave positively towards the environment, a new social norm is set and other neighbours feel the need to follow.

Of course, there are justice considerations here: there are some services that everyone should receive individually on the basis of their needs, rather than because of how ‘connected’ they are. And we should not allow this new fascination with social networks to lead to more lonely or isolated citizens being even more marginalised.

Nevertheless these findings should be taken seriously as we think of ways to improve services in the absence of new money. Whoever wins the election should increasingly ask public services to understand the connections between the people they work with – and think of their users as members of social networks, rather than just as individual consumers of services.

Rick Muir, senior research fellow, ippr