Is the Big Society a small idea?

Listen very carefully I will say this only…three or four times.

The Big Society is being relaunched, again, with David Cameron fighting off the suggestion it is a vague and meaningless PR campaign to disguise the cuts by announcing some “transitional” money to help charities who are losing money because of the cuts while they bid to run public services.

What is the Big Society? Didn’t you listen the last time? It is three things, says the PM: devolving power, getting charities and professionals to run public services and encouraging more people to volunteer to do things in the community. And part of the problem is all these things have been done in Britain to greater or lesser degrees for decades. The Big Society might be a small idea.

No mainstream political parties disagree with David Cameron’s three defined parts of the Big Society. All speak the language of giving power to the people, and the last government took substantial steps on devolution.

Charities and private organisations have long provided public services – whether Great Ormond Street hospital or social care for the elderly. And volunteers have always formed a vital part of the small infrastructure that stitches Britain together, whether looking after the environment or looking after children.

By rolling all these things into one political concept and calling it the Big Society the Conservatives tried to give the impression this was something new. That, arguably, is what confused people, who heard the speeches and thought “well I thought we’d been doing all this stuff for years”.

David Cameron now seems to admit that there is nothing new in the actual components of the Big Society – what he believes is new is the potential scale of it. He wants much more. You might say we already have quite a big society, and all Mr Cameron wants is a bigger society.

So what does the Big Society mean for you?

Labour claims that when libraries and local services are being closed down because of cuts being forced through by local authorities it is hard to encourage more volunteers. And when charities are losing funding and having to make people redundant it is hard to say they should be expanding into new areas of public service delivery. And it is all very well to say you believe in devolving power to local communities but if you deny councils the ability to raise local taxes by capping the amount they can charge how much power have you devolved?

But David Cameron also believes we have a Broken Society, in which crime and violence are deep problems together with fear and disconnection. Although he hasn’t quite explained the linkages David Cameron essentially blames the Broken Society on the state being too big and too powerful and not handing enough power to the people. So in order to fix the Broken Society we need a Big Society.

This appears then to be a zero sum game : take away from the state and make the voluntary and charitable sector bigger and you will make a Repaired Society.

Except this has never been a zero sum game. To date the big state has gone hand in hand with a big voluntary and charitable sector because that is how they get much of their funding. And therefore a smaller state might lead to a smaller voluntary and charitable sector, unless they are handed lots of government contracts to do public services currently being delivered by local authorities, the NHS and other state organisations. However it is not absolutely clear why they will deliver things better.

There is some evidence according to Big Society pioneer Phillip Blond that the best charities deliver services better than the best public bodies, but even he admits there are lots of badly run charities too.

Are we any clearer? When will the Broken Society be fixed? When will the Big Society be big enough? And was it a mistake to call it a Big Society because it sounded like a Big Idea, when in fact it was a quite complex series of things that are already being done but perhaps need to be improved?

It might depend on whether the sceptical Tory backbenchers, who think it is an idea that has bombed decide to get on board David Cameron’s Big Society Bus.