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Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent): The hon. Gentleman might like to reflect on the fact that the voluntary services unit--the co-ordinating group in central Government--was at its most effective when it was linked to a Cabinet Minister with a budget of his own, and that a Labour Government determined that it should be transferred and downgraded to the Home Office.
Mr. Michael: I am surprised by the hon. Gentleman's contribution. I have practical experience of the work of the VSU on the ground. I worked in the youth service, with probation officers and with others. I remember the unit's effectiveness under the last Labour Government. The hon. Gentleman must have been visiting a different planet between 1974 and 1979. Many good initiatives were taken during that time.
It is a pity that this has not been followed by a burst of consultation and discussion by the Secretary of State and that she has not seen fit to take part in today's debate or even to listen to it. It is an omission on her part, and it is extremely disappointing. [Interruption.] The mumbling and groaning from the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) is irrelevant to that point.
The Government's approach stands in stark contrast to Labour's approach. We have examined the relationship between the Government and the voluntary sector. We are delighted that the sector--through the Deakin commission, which was established by the National Council of Voluntary Organisations--is independent of the Government. The independent commissions and working parties in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have been undertaking a basic review of the sector's future. The sector is reviewing its own future, which is an extremely positive development.
This work helps to set the agenda for partnership in Government, to use the title of our own consultative document. I pay tribute to the skill of Professor Nicholas Deakin in chairing the commission and in steering through a significant review of the work of the voluntary sector in England. It has helped and contributed to the thinking that has gone on in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I compliment the NCVO on its selection of Professor Deakin as chairman of the commission.
I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson) hopes to refer to the useful and constructive manifesto that was drawn up by the Wales Council for Voluntary Action. I have had the opportunity to discuss the manifesto with the council. In September, I will join my hon. Friend the Member for Dumbarton (Mr. McFall) to have further discussions with the voluntary sector in Scotland. In both cases, there are overriding considerations, such as how a partnership approach is adopted by Government as a whole. However, there are specific concerns, not least the different legal issues that arise in Scotland, such as the inappropriate application of the English case law definition of a charity by the Inland Revenue. We need to be sensitive to those differences.
More generally, there is the question of how Government Departments can act consistently and together, rather than expect the voluntary sector to fit in with the rigid requirements of departmental structures. We are looking at this across Labour team boundaries. For example, I shall be meeting children's charities with my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), who deals with children's issues in the health team, and
with my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle), the shadow Minister for youth in the education team, to discuss how the Government and the voluntary sector can co-operate much more effectively on issues affecting children and young people, including how we deal with offending by young people. We are doing this across the boundaries of the teams. In the future, we should encourage Departments to work across boundaries--there should be a greater flexibility which respects the nature of the voluntary sector and the issues with which it is trying to deal.
A number of other issues are being dealt with by my colleagues. For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) has given a commitment to easing the barriers to volunteering on those who are unemployed or on benefit. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn has outlined a local partnership approach to reducing crime and to tackling its causes, particularly in relation to youth crime, an area in which I have a great personal interest. The voluntary sector, local community groups, local government and the police should all have the opportunity to be involved.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) has been undertaking a major review of the lottery, including its impact on the voluntary sector and the way in which funds that are raised are distributed. That work will make a significant contribution to developing coherent thought on the positive outcomes of the lottery. My hon. Friend the Member for Walton, the shadow Minister for youth, has stressed the central role of the voluntary youth service and of voluntary youth organisations generally in the future of the youth service. This is extremely important, especially in view of the way that the youth service has been under attack and diminished by the Government in recent years.
I have referred to the initiative taken by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair), my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott) and a number of my hon. Friends on attacking and tackling the needs of the 18-to-25 age group. In each of these, as in the general thrust of policy, we come back to the matter of partnership.
"Partnership" is an easy word to use. Who is against co-operation and partnership? However, it is not that easy. Any partnership is tough, whether between individuals or between organisations. The nurturing of a partnership involves a long-term commitment on the part of the Government. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield has said that we should "say what we mean and mean what we say". We need to work out what "partnership" means and what mechanisms are needed to make it happen. That was firmly in mind when the Labour party, in clause IV, made the unique commitment to co-operation and partnership with the voluntary sector.
The approach of the Government to building partnership needs to be positive. However, it was not a Labour party member or someone from the voluntary sector who made this point most strongly, but a business man who was appointed to a quango by the Government. He said to me:
This is a real worry, as I have seen a letter from a district auditor telling a local authority that all its relationships with the voluntary sector--including the giving of small grants--should be imbued with the contract culture. That attitude could undermine the relationship between the voluntary sector and local government, which is of crucial importance to local communities. In recent years, we have understood the tremendous pressures that there have been on local government--with the cuts in the finances available to local government, there has been pressure on the way in which they have reached partnership agreements and supplied grants to local voluntary organisations. That is bound to lead to pressure and to misunderstandings.
During the course of our regional meetings last September and October, I was reassured to find that, to a great extent, the voluntary sector and local government regarded each other as partners in adversity under the Government. It is an area of difficulty, but at least in some areas there have been real efforts to change it back to a positive relationship. I know that there were difficulties in the Manchester area. Manchester city council members specifically appointed a working party, chaired by the chair of social services, to look at how to create a new partnership with the voluntary sector in that city. I believe that positive changes have been made.
There have been various initiatives on the part of a variety of Labour authorities--from Islwyn to North Tyneside--in finding new ways of doing things positively in partnership with local authorities. Other authorities, including some in London and Nottinghamshire, for instance, have opened the books to the voluntary sector to try to share the problems faced by local government to see how to overcome problems and how best to work together.
Those proposals are very positive, but we need to ensure that the Government do not force people in local government or agencies to spend time chasing money. It is possible for a huge amount of paperwork to be generated which takes the key staff of small organisations away from the task of running the organisations--from working with the local community and people who need their services and concentrating on quality of service--and involves them in the continual paper chase to try to ensure that money is there for the following year.
Like many of my hon. Friends, I have had experience of that difficulty and it often undermines the quality of work. That problem is also caused by the move from core funding to a purely project-based approach. We need a strategic approach which recognises that voluntary organisations have to be healthy if they are to be able to respond to the challenges of changing society and to act as partners with government in meeting those challenges.
Certainly there has been a positive response to the statements of principle in our consultative document, published by the Labour party earlier this year, and a series of detailed and positive contributions have been received from a whole range of organisations. We are now digesting those contributions. We will consider the mechanisms of government and how to turn principle into
practice. We need to find a way to define the relationship between Government and the voluntary sector, including agencies of Government and local government, to carry our principles through in practice to develop the partnership approach that I have mentioned.
One way to do that--to use language that is becoming common in Government--is to establish a compact between Government and the voluntary sector and to seek to replicate that in relevant detail within Government Departments and other agencies. The Deakin commission has also stressed the positive value of such an approach and mentioned the need for a compact in its recommendations.
I have had an opportunity to consider the compact in the strategic document drawn up by voluntary organisations and the Northern Ireland Office, to which I referred earlier. Of course, Northern Ireland has a different history and faces different challenges, but we should learn from that experience in, for instance, setting out how community care issues should be dealt with and the way in which the sector and Government should treat each other. There has been too ready an expectation by the Government that volunteers, carers in the family and in the community and the voluntary sector generally will pick up the pieces and fill the gaps. Often they do so, but they do so with resentment, because the Government have not worked with them as a partner to identify and then meet public need.
I commend the way that the three local government associations in England and Wales have worked with the voluntary sector to draw up guidelines on, for instance, ensuring that charitable money is not used to subsidise the public purse when a local authority seeks to deliver services through voluntary organisations. It is to be hoped that the new single local government association will build on those foundations. Central Government should adopt a similar approach, encourage their agencies to do so and reflect what has been done by the local government associations. I note that the latest Association of Metropolitan Authorities publication contains further discussion about quality and how to introduce quality into partnerships. It is promising that such issues are being pursued by local government.
As I hope I am making clear, partnership is not an excuse for inefficiency. As the business man I mentioned said, we need to work together. When the voluntary sector uses public money, we should seek ways to measure performance--together. We will encourage the Audit Commission to consider the ways in which partners in the voluntary sector and in government, locally and nationally, can set targets, minimise bureaucracy and find performance indicators that reflect their joint performance in meeting the real needs of the community.
The need for accountability and effectiveness is accepted by the voluntary organisations, which have often been pioneers in effective management, as they have in so many areas. Examples of good practice need to be shared, as with the Central Council for Jewish Community Services, whose imaginative appointment of Dr. Eric Livingstone--who is qualified in medicine and in the law--as an ombudsman has allowed independent resolution of complaints about and between different organisations.
In a meeting yesterday, the voluntary sector representative, from a group concerned with mental health, said that we need to challenge the voluntary sector.
It is the greatest challenge of all to be taken seriously, and we will look for value for money and for accountability to those who are served--when service to a group or community is the issue--but we will seek ways to undertake the evaluation together and to share both the purposes and the means of improving performance. The way in which the Audit Commission has increasingly worked with local government rather than outside it, addressing it as a partner instead of as a separate group of organisations, shows that that approach could work well in the overlap between Government, local government and the voluntary sector.
We will ensure that those principles, and the others set out in our document that I do not have time to detail tonight, will be put into effect across government under the oversight of ministerial task force, chaired by a senior Cabinet Minister. I welcome the arrival of Ministers on the road to Damascus, if the Government support our motion tonight, but I warn them that they are signing up to a tough approach. The voluntary sector needs to be helped to expand and develop, and it needs to be treated as a partner, or rather as a disparate group of partners with differing needs and contributions, but its independence also needs to be respected and, indeed, celebrated.
Some have suggested that the voice of charities should be stilled. Some Conservatives believe that charities should not bite the hand that feeds them, as though they were dependent puppies to be humoured. A similar conclusion was suggested by the Centris report, but we believe that such an approach is wrong in principle. In a democratic society, how can Government seek to silence a voluntary organisation working for the good of principles set out in charitable objects, if paid lobbying by those who have a commercial interest continues unabated?
If the Alzheimer's Disease Society cannot speak for sufferers and their carers, who can? Yet who best to provide targeted services on behalf of government? I do not seek to be specific about one society, but the example makes the point better than any amount of philosophical analysis. Our concern is given point and poignancy by the experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Washington (Mr. Boyes). I hope that the Minister will endorse the views that I have expressed on that point when he speaks.
I have not been able even to scratch the surface of the contribution made by the voluntary sector, or to list the issues that we need to address, far less to expand on the answers. For instance, I have not had time to discuss trusteeship, charity law or the definition of charity, which the Deakin commission suggested that the Government should try to tidy up. Incidentally, it will not pay to be too tidy, nor would the Government would be wise to embark alone on the task of writing a new definition, which might look simple but might unexpectedly cause a small earthquake in Peru. Each of those topics, and many more, deserve a full debate to themselves. However, I hope that I have at least indicated Labour's approach and the strength of our commitment.
I hope that the Minister will tell us something about the Government's approach that is of value to the voluntary sector. I hope that we shall hear an agenda for action, but I doubt it. The voluntary sector made a big commitment to the "Make a Difference" working party, for instance, and felt that the response from the Government failed to
match its commitment and lacked enthusiasm. When we asked for documents that set out the Government's commitment to "think voluntary", my researcher met blank incomprehension across Departments until at last one small leaflet was found, which an official from the Department of National Heritage said was the only publication about that initiative.
The Government must do better. Volunteering is an essential element of citizenship, and access and recognition must be offered to those in work and out of work alike who provide voluntary activity. That can be done, as the Prince's Trust Youth Volunteers have recognised. The Government need to encourage and show commitment to volunteering by their employees and to exchanges, so that officials and Ministers develop the better understanding that is necessary for partnership. The Government should also encourage the private sector in the initiatives that have been taken by Business in the Community and many individual companies.
Above all, the contribution of the voluntary sector is crucial to the renewal of civil society and to restoring the sense of community that is at the heart of Labour's project. That has been recognised personally by the leader of the Labour party and the partnership approach is not only in the party's constitution, but it is at the heart of the road to the manifesto process, as Labour plans for government.
In proposing the motion tonight, we are setting on the record, in the House of Commons, our recognition of the massive contribution by the voluntary sector to the lives of individuals and communities throughout Britain and of the fact that the potential is even greater. We are acknowledging that the Government need the voluntary sector and accepting our responsibilities as a partner that we can look forward to fulfilling in government. We are recognising the responsibility of government to nurture the sector while respecting the independent charities and voluntary organisations.
It is a privilege and an honour to introduce the motion on behalf of the Opposition.
"I can't understand the Government's approach to partnership. You can't go into a partnership with your mind made up, telling others what you want out of it. That wouldn't be accepted in business. You have to be prepared to work it out together."
That is the problem with applying a strict contract culture to the voluntary sector. If there is a top-down approach, as is too often the case, if voluntary
organisations are seen by the Government as little different to a group of private companies that are bidding for contracts, then it is not a partnership--it is the strong binding the weak; it does not have the creative strength of a genuine partnership.
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