Is the Big Society message reaching the public?

I went for a chat with a senior government progress-chaser on “Big Society” last week. He was exasperated that the Big Society’s “third strand” – voluntary work – was getting far too much attention (and he won’t like headlines this morning one bit).

By far the most important strands of “Big Society,” he explained to me, were public sector reform (NHS, schools reform etc) and the “transparency agenda.” I left the chat with two thoughts. The Big Society has become such a big umbrella term it’s now rather like Herbert Morrison’s definition of socialism (“it’s what a Labour government does”) – Big Society is whatever a Cameron-led government does. The second thought that went through my mind was, here was a head honcho close to David Cameron still having to explain to me, someone who who is paid to keep across this stuff, what this amorphous term actually means, eight months into Government…

And he was acknowledging that most of the country thought it meant something else. There must come a time, you might think, when a brand label is seen to have failed and should be dropped?

All of which ties in with another point that is surfacing in the papers today – James Kirkup in the Daily Telegraph expresses an argument you hear widely in Whitehall. The allegation is that No. 10 lacks the firepower and David Cameron the intellectual curiosity to get stuck into detailed policy work. I’ve mentioned before how one source of mine who has been in and out of Downing Street a lot was shocked at how little detailed interest No. 10 took in the NHS reforms White Paper. No. 10, it seems, it waking up to all this and trying to beef up its intellectual firepower.

The appointment of Craig Oliver is seen as part of this process. I am told by senior government figures that his appointment is less about getting insights into tv (though those are wanted) and more about getting someone who can run a big team and think strategically about how you trouble spot policy and, when you’ve set out a course, make sure you’ve got a plan for selling it.