Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420
- 439)
THURSDAY 17 JANUARY 2008
MR STUART
ETHERINGTON, DR
PETER KYLE
AND MS
DEBRA ALLCOCK-TYLER
Q420 Chairman: Could I stay
with you for a second because I would like you to say a little
bit more about what you say at the beginning of your memorandum
to us. You take us back to the heart of the question. You say,
"There is a real danger that the current debates about public
services are not addressing the real issue: namely why it is that
government wants the sector to take on public service delivery
and, equally important, why it is that many third sector organisations
do want to take on public service contracts. Simply transferring
existing services out of the public sector to another provider
will not achieve transformation in itself."[10]
I want to be clear that I know what you think the real issue is.
Mr Etherington: If you are just
saying, "This is a service we no longer think should be in
the public sector, it should be somewhere else, and we want to
create contestability" I do not think that, in and of itself,
transforms the nature of the service. I will give you an example
of why I think voluntary organisations are slightly different
in this. This is an example from a community programme at work
in Bristol. It is an old settlement really, which goes back a
long way but which still has modernised. Here you have a situation
where a person came to place their children in a nursery, which
was part of the service. That person ended up volunteering within
the nursery—so they became part of the production process,
if you like—they ended up running the nursery and they now
run the settlement. I think that is a different type of experience
for people in terms of services. They are engaged or should be
engaged in a way where they are, if you like, part of the service.
They are developing the service; they are more actively engaged
than they would be as a passive recipient. It is a view of citizenship,
if you like. That applies both to the role of voluntary organisations
in the delivery of services and to the role of citizen engagement
in commissioning. The issue is not just about who delivers and
on what terms do they deliver, but also a question of who influences
the commissioning process. Who is helping design the service?
There I think voluntary organisations have a role, as representatives
of citizens, in helping public authorities to design the service
in a particular way. By "transformation", Chairman,
I mean that it changes the nature of the citizen's experience
of the service. One of the ways in which we will maintain support
for public services in the United Kingdom—which I think
part of the reform agenda is about: maintaining public support
for public services—is to change the nature of the citizen's
engagement. One of the arguments is that that is about choice:
that it is a more market-oriented model, that you can choose between
this service and that service. I do not think there is a great
deal of choice in public services, so I think that is a bit of
a piece of mythology. The other argument is that you have voice:
that you can engage and change the nature of the services of which
you are part and, indeed, for which you are often paying. By "transformation"
we mean the latter. How do citizens become involved in changing
the nature of the service that is being provided and in engaging
with the service in a completely different way?
Q421 Chairman: The state cannot
do this by itself.
Mr Etherington: I think the state
finds it much more difficult to do that because it has not historically
sought to engage citizens in quite that way. I do not think, inherently,
there is any reason that they could not attempt to do that, and
many of the models that are now used in the public sector actually
started life in the voluntary sector. It is quite a common method—certainly
in the post-war settlement—that voluntary organisations
were often acting to create innovative services that were then
being translated. Often they provide services first. If you take
the hospice movement, the voluntary sector was the first in the
game. If you take the initial responses to AIDS and HIV, it was
the voluntary sector that responded very quickly to that—often,
now, taken up by the public sector. I think the public sector
can do it, therefore, but the voluntary sector is pretty good
at transforming the experience of individuals and taking a more
holistic view.
Chairman: Let me bring colleagues in
and we can explore this with others of you.
Q422 Kelvin Hopkins: I come
to this from a very sceptical position. Reading some of the literature,
I must say I was astonished by some of what had been said. The
voluntary sector provides for niche areas and new areas. You have
mentioned HIV, and there is a whole range of things: looking after
homeless alcoholics as a first point of call, often religiously
motivated, often self-interested groups, whatever. That is wonderful,
but the idea that the voluntary sector could take over major public
services—which seems to be the driving thought in the ACEVO
paper—I find astonishing. There is a question here. In the
ACEVO paper we were given a list of areas where it believed the
third sector could have an immediate impact on improving public
services. The list includes children services, health and social
care, education. Do you think citizens would be happier having
a voluntary or third sector organisation provide services than
having an accountable public authority, where they know they have
rights because they pay their taxes and get a direct public service?
Do you seriously think that people would be happier having these
serious services contracted out to voluntary organisations?
Dr Kyle: You said "these
serious services". Are you suggesting that some charitable
and voluntary third sector organisations are not serious? What
Stuart said is very relevant. One of our members, in particular,
has been delivering public services since 1273. We have been doing
this since before the state has been doing it. The question is
not which sector is best to deliver it but which sector is better
for the service. We are not saying that one small charity should
be responsible for delivering the entire services throughout the
entire NHS to the entire country. Commissioning is done on different
levels. You have a Pathways commission, which is an enormous commission—ACEVO
commissioned the report from Mavis McDonald which came up with
some big recommendations—but many services are commissioned
at the local level and they are to do with very small services
which deliver to the homeless, to different areas of social care,
different areas of education and so forth.[11]
Why can't a charity that has been doing that for years and years
and years, sometimes tens of decades, sometimes hundreds of years,
enter that process? They have nothing to fear from entering their
services, which they are convinced through to their fingertips
are the best—and the third sector is very good at saying
that what they do is the best—into open competition for
getting public money to continue what they are doing.
Q423 Kelvin Hopkins: Lord
Adebowale made the very strong point when he came to see us that
most public services started as voluntary organisations, often
motivated by churches, run by churches or whatever, but they became
so essential to a civilised society that they had to be taken
over by the state. What you are suggesting is moving backwards
in time.
Dr Kyle: No.
Q424 Kelvin Hopkins: Moving
away from essential state provision, where you will not have the
same kind of accountability—because one is in a market,
one could also see a private-sector organisation could go under.
He also made the point, that really what the Government is concerned
to promote is the private sector rather than the third sector;
that most of the effort is really driving to get public services
in to the private sector rather than the third sector. This is
something of a blind to cover that drive in government. In our
discussions we have talked about the voluntary sector making niche
provision for the kinds of areas we have talked about, where public
services do not have coverage, but there is still a need—there
is witness protection for example, a whole range of areas which
are very valuable. I am a strong supporter of all these organisations
myself—but, rather than filling in these niche gaps, taking
over from major public services in these kinds of areas—do
we really want our children cared for without some kind of genuine
democratic accountability through government?
Dr Kyle: I have had a lot of conversations
with Victor over the years on these issues and I recognise some
of what you have said in what you started off by saying. But,
where you have ended up, I would be very surprised if Victor would
go there. It comes down to commissioning. We are not talking about
the state. You might be, but we are certainly not saying that
the state is disenfranchising, that it is giving away its need
to deliver these services and take care of them. We are talking
about good commissioning here. Good commissioning does not just
let go of services; good commissioning accounts for all different
areas of outcomes, all different types of outcomes, and it is
repeated. Good commissioning is for a period of time. Commissioners
engage with the service. Commissions are owned by the state; they
are state organisations. Commissioners are state people; they
are there to make sure that public money is spent in the best
interests of the service users. The commissioners therefore have
to decide who is in the best position. Sometimes it will be a
statutory service—and often it will be. Sometimes it will
be a private organisation. Sometimes it will be a third sector
organisation. Why not judge each organisation on the outcomes
it can deliver for the service user? That is what the service
user wants. That is what they need. Why you escalate that argument
into handing entire swathes of public life over to a different
sector, I do not know, because in one area you could end up with
the same services being commissioned by different organisations
from different sectors.
Q425 Kelvin Hopkins: I used
a phrase the other day in the Commons about a Maoist revolution
and letting a thousand flowers bloom driving out services into
a more chaotic arrangement, rather than direct, rational, accountable,
transparent public services.
Dr Kyle: Good commissioning is
very accountable. In terms of commissioning, which I know is the
broad area of your investigation, we want not just a drive to
the bottom in terms of the economics of commissioning. We do not
want commissioning just to be done on economic grounds. We think
the third sector's value-add is in social aspects of commissioning
or social aspects of its relationship with service users and the
fact that they can offer much more holistic services across the
board. Mavis McDonald's inquiry did say that social clauses should
become much more a part of the way the commissioning process works,
so that it is not just an economic process but it is a social
process as well.[12]
There is a lot of work to be done on getting commissioning right
to make good value and good use of the third sector.
Q426 Kelvin Hopkins: The state
sector supports people's rights. It has duties to care for people
and these are decided by government and by law. Any move away
from that and there is an element of choice, if you like. An organisation
which is perhaps under financial pressure might choose not to
take on particularly difficult cases because it does not have
a duty to do that—it has a budget and it is worried about
that. The state has to deal with everybody, because that is the
way we have decided to run our society. It was said today that
even Emmaus and one or two of these wonderful organisations do
sometimes decide not to take people. They are voluntary organisations,
so they have choice about who they care for and look after. The
state does not have that choice. The state has to look after everybody
because that is what its role is. I may say I find this wholly
unconvincing and the paper here looks to me like an ideologically
driven paper coming from Downing Street in the ancien régime
of Tony Blair and not something that is going to be very useful
in future.
Dr Kyle: In response to that very
constructive comment—I take it you looked at my CV, then?—I
think your thinking is very mixed. I have listened to you and
your colleague this morning. You cannot, on the one hand, say
that this process is nationalisation by default and, on the other
hand, say that there is no accountability and that the state is
abrogating its responsibilities to service users. How do you tailor
that? I think you are guilty of some mixed thinking in this regard.
In regard to my thinking in this regard, I think you should look
much further back in my CV than my previous job, and you should
see my previous experience within the third sector as part of
delivery organisations.
Q427 Kelvin Hopkins: Are you
asking me a question?
Dr Kyle: I made the point.
Kelvin Hopkins: The final point I would
make is that I did make a very clear distinction between voluntary
organisations filling in niche areas which are not covered by
the state, and the duties of the state to provide for the vital
rights of the citizen. I think there is a serious distinction
there.
Chairman: And we are entitled to have
mixed thinking, anyway!
Q428 Mr Prentice: That was
very controversial. We heard earlier that there has been a shift
in the balance between the contracts and grants: contracts going
up and grants going down. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Should we feel concerned about that?
Ms Allcock-Tyler: It is a very
bad thing because the nature of contracting changes the nature
of your relationship as an organisation with your client. It distorts
who the client is and who it is you are existing to serve. There
is a lot of evidence that says that organisations which start
to engage in contracting relationships begin to satisfy the terms
of the contract rather than satisfy the needs of the user. In
fact, it has been really quite horribly evident, when we have
been looking at all the oral evidence and some of the submissions
that this Committee has had, how very rarely the need of the end
user is mentioned at all, of the individual. To give one example,
which is a true story, there is a small counselling service up
in the North-East—which I cannot name, and you will discover
why in a moment—which has been delivering counselling services,
under contract from the local authority, to young adults who for
one reason or another have suffered severe traumas. The local
authority decided, in the interests of fair and open tendering
and all the rest of it, that they would take this particular idea
of counselling of traumatised young adults and re-tender to deliver
it. One of the people served by this is a woman called Manju.
Manju, when she was 13, was raped by her uncle and younger brother,
and as a result of that got pregnant. Her family booted her out
and she ended up in various psychiatric wards and foster homes
and several times tried to commit suicide. She ended up at this
particular counselling charity, and had not attempted suicide
for about five years as a result of that. As a result of this
contract tendering process that was introduced by the local authority,
the particular charity serving Manju did not win it—because
the argument became about it not being fair for other charities
not to be able to compete for this service. The net effect of
that is that Eve had to go to Manju and say, "I am really
sorry, Manju, I can no longer help you" even though the nature
of hugely vulnerable people is that they engage in those very
special relationships with people. The problem with contracting
is that that is exactly what happens: it becomes about us competing
with each other. It becomes about: "Should Turning Point
get the contract or should it be the local organisation?"
rather than the whole blooming point being that there is a person
at the end of that whose needs are much, much more than the needs
of government to tick boxes or organisations to compete for funds.
Mr Etherington: It would be worth
reflecting on the numbers of the shift between grants and contracts,
so that we know the evidence base. I have the numbers here from
the data we produce every year. The latest data is 2005-06, although
we are producing new data next month, and we will send the Committee
a copy of the Almanac which is pretty much the definitive study
of economics of the sector. Grants have not fallen in cash terms
over the last 10 years. That is just not true. The proportion
has changed. Public sector funding has expanded quite rapidly
in the sector, from around £4 billion to around £10
billion in a 10-year period. It now constitutes about 38% of general
charities' income. Of that just over £10.5 billion, in 1995
contracts were just over £2 billion and grants were about
£2 billion; by 2005 grants had increased and in fact had
doubled to £4 billion—therefore, there is twice as
much money around in terms of grant—but contracts had grown
at a much faster rate, from just over £2 billion to £6.5
billion. The rate of growth of contracts is greater and their
proportion has changed, although the total amount of cash available
in grants has also increased. To come back to your question "Is
it a good thing that that shift has taken place?" I come
back to a more pragmatic view. People competed for grants as they
compete for contracts. Grants were not given by some sort of magical
wave of the wand: everybody can have a grant. Voluntary organisations
competed for grants—as a different sort of competition,
I will grant people that, and it was probably less specific. That
is the key point. It is horses for courses. I come back to the
original point that I made. In some cases, where you can specify
exactly the type of service that you are purchasing, exactly the
type of outcomes that you want to achieve and the technology is
well-known, it seems to me to be perfectly legitimate if you place
on the table that specification and you allow organisations to
bid against that. In a lot of cases, it is not easy to specify
the outcomes that you want. Voluntary organisations, historically,
work with the wicked issues—the very difficult areas of
public policy with which the public sector finds it difficult
to engage and which the private sector does not want to touch,
it seems to me. Because we deal with those issues: difficult areas
of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, homelessness—some very difficult,
thorny social and public policy problems—there it is more
difficult to specify. There it seems to me to be a good use of
public money to say, "We cannot be specific about what we
want to achieve. We think you probably know better than us about
the sorts of interventions that work and, therefore, we are going
to make a grant available to you. We might want to measure the
outcomes that you achieve later, but we are not going to specify
in detailed terms contractually what we want you to achieve because
we cannot." I suppose my argument about grants and contracts
is that it needs a higher level of sophistication: firstly, to
recognise that whilst the balance has changed the totality of
both have increased, and, secondly, to recognise that in some
cases grants are appropriate where you cannot specify the outcomes
that you want and in other circumstances contracts are more appropriate.
I think, again, it is a question of balance. What are you trying
to achieve and what is the best way of achieving it?
Q429 Mr Prentice: Before Peter
comes in, you said the private sector would not want to touch
them but, earlier, you said the trend is subcontracting through
voluntary organisations by private-sector intermediaries. I jotted
that down. How significant is the private sector when you just
told us they do not want to touch these?
Mr Etherington: They do not necessarily
engage with the most excluded groups. I will give you, again,
an example. Every so often they let me leave my office and go
to visit the members who do the work on the ground. I normally
do it in the summer. I went to an organisation this summer that
is providing employment rehabilitation for very vulnerable groups
in an area north of Newcastle—an old mining village, not
a lot of work. The DWP had let a regional contract to provide
employment rehabilitation services, Jobcentre Plus, et cetera,
et cetera, and they had let it to the private sector. I think
there were seven bidders for the regional contract and six of
them were private-sector bidders. The voluntary sector is not
very good at bidding at scale, but the private sector subcontracted
a voluntary organisation in that large village or small town to
provide a service for the most disadvantaged. Interestingly, when
I asked the voluntary organisation what was their experience of
sub-contracting from a private-sector contractor to the DWP, I
expected a sort of torrent of abuse but I was quite surprised:
they said, "Oh, no, it's much better than contracting with
the DWP." I asked them why and they said, "There are
two principal reasons: they do understand that if you are working
with the most disadvantaged groups the price should be slightly
higher; and they have grasped, unlike the public sector, the notion
of cash-flow.
Q430 Mr Prentice: The private-sector
intermediary is getting a better deal. That is what they are telling
you.
Mr Etherington: No, in this case
the voluntary sector organisation's experience of subcontracting
to a private-sector provider was better than its experience of
contracting directly with the DWP.
Q431 Mr Prentice: Yes, but
the private sector is getting a better deal from the DWP.
Mr Etherington: Yes. I do not
know what their contractual arrangements were but certainly the
voluntary organisation was getting a better price to deal with
vulnerable people and it was getting cash on time. You will often
find complaints with public sector purchasers, that, because the
cash comes in the public sector, they do not understand that organisations
can go out of business if they do not get the cash on time. That
is an often-heard complaint from voluntary organisations.
Q432 Mr Prentice: Sorry, Peter,
my question about grants and contracts.
Dr Kyle: I think Stuart made this
point very, very well. The figures that NCVO produce on this are
really, really useful and very much valued by the sector. As Stuart
said, grant money has not decreased in the last decade. The change
has been where the increase has been. I think Stuart covered it
very well really. All I would like to say is that, whereas Debra
makes the case very well for the empowering effects of having
a grant and what it can do with that money, there are equally
organisations who have been tremendously empowered by engaging
with the procurement process and being able to expand and stand
on their own two feet. The example I would use is not as emotive
but it is quite useful. Jeremy Swain is chief executive of Thames
Reach. He gives the story very eloquently about how, when he took
over control of Thames Reach, they were dealing with 100 homeless
people from a grant. They started engaging in the procurement
process, they won, and he talks about the incredible effect it
had on his staff. He said it really put a rocket through his staff.
The front-line workers suddenly started saying, "We're giving
you the best service," because they knew they had competed
with four or five other organisations and won.
Q433 Mr Prentice: Great stuff.
Dr Kyle: Then they went to other
places, won other grants, and they are now delivering services
to 4,000 people.
Q434 Mr Prentice: Great stuff.
Are they getting paid more for this fantastic increase in productivity?
Dr Kyle: I honestly could not
tell you.
Q435 Mr Prentice: It is an
issue, is it not, that bears? I hate to mention Sylvia again,
but it is a thread that has run through our inquiry that, perhaps,
the Government is making this leap, ideological or otherwise,
because it sees public services being delivered on the cheap and
that people are being employed in the third sector at a fraction
of what they could expect either employed directly by the state
or in private-sector organisations. Is that an issue, Debra?
Ms Allcock-Tyler: Yes. I am not
sure it is necessarily a bunch of evil politicians getting together
deciding to do it deliberately but I think it is a net effect
of what happens. There are examples. I think it is in the report
from Strathclyde University that was commissioned by Unison and
submitted to this inquiry, where a voluntary organisation lost
a contract, competing with a local public authority, because the
public authority had not put in, in its own bid for its own contract,
the true costs of overheads.[13]
Of course, from the voluntary organisation point of view, they
are not putting in the cost, effectively, of volunteers, who are
essentially free pairs of hands.
Q436 Mr Prentice: Is this
about getting public services on the cheap then?
Dr Kyle: Let me be quite clear
on this. There are two issues here and there is an issue for government
and there is an issue for the sector. This should absolutely not
be seen as getting public service on the cheap. Absolutely not.
There was an issue which ACEVO addressed to do with full-cost
recovery—which you might be aware of—where third sector
organisations were not as experienced in dealing with the procurement
process and were putting in bids for services which were less
than other sectors and once the bid was given they realised that
they had not included things like telephone costs, travel costs,
and some other areas which were involved in running a lot of the
organisation which is delivering services. ACEVO has a programme,
which has been running for two years now, training organisations
in full-cost recovery in order that, when they put a bid in, it
takes account of all the staffing costs, all the costs included
in that bid, so it is not just done on the cheap. ACEVO has been
very unashamedly saying that part of the professionalisation of
the sector is making sure that staff are well paid, that staff
have good pensions. As Debra has said time and time again, these
organisations are dealing often with society's most excluded people.
These are people with multiple problems, not just drug addiction
and homeless issues and mental health problems and other issues
to do with exclusion. They are dealing with a whole raft of these
issues. These people are the most vulnerable in society. They
deserve to be cared for by people who are well-paid, well-trained,
have good pensions and good prospects.
Q437 Mr Prentice: That may
well change the nature of the animal. There is professionalisation
that you were talking about. The very act of professionalising,
in the way you have just described, turns it from what we, as
lay people, would understand as a voluntary organisation to something
different.
Dr Kyle: Think of it in terms
of being a service user. You can still have volunteers. BTCV,[14]
big volunteer organisations, put a lot of effort now into training
their volunteers. People who have incredibly entrenched, difficult,
multiple challenges and problems and difficulties to overcome
deserve to be cared for and given support from people who are
well trained. In order to have the best people doing that, they
have to have good training, good management, good systems and
good pensions, everything that everyone else in every other sector
deserves. We should not be ashamed of the professionalisation
of the sector. This is a way of empowering the third sector and
it is a way of getting organisations of all sizes. This is not
just about big corporate, big charity. This is about all charities
which are delivering services delivering the best services for
people who need it the most.
Mr Etherington: The sector employs
650,000 full-time equivalent staff and deploys, depending on how
you define it, about 15 million volunteers in various ways. The
characteristic of the sector, the market structure of the sector,
is that there is a small number of very large organisations and
a large number of very small organisations. That is what the sector
looks like. In some ways, it is similar to the business sector—although
when people talk about the big charities, they are nowhere near
the biggest in the private sector, they are dwarves. Even they
cannot compete effectively for large-scale contracts. The characteristics
of the workforce are more similar to the small business sector
and less like the public sector. There are large numbers of very
small employers. Levels of training investment are lower. Levels
of unionisation are much lower. Levels of benefit are much lower.
There is no doubt, whatever the aspiration, that the reality is
that the workforce of the sector—the paid workforce, as
distinct from the volunteers—has characteristics more like
those of the small business sector. It is less organised and it
therefore is probably more vulnerable in terms of the benefits
to employees.
Q438 Mr Prentice: We know
there has been a big expansion in the training of commissioners.
I think it is 2,000, and the Government wanted it completed by
the end of the year. I am still not clear in my own mind, after
all these sessions that we have had, whether we are going to see
a step-change over the next few years in the number and variety
of public services delivered by the third sector or whether it
is going to be incremental and nothing that is really going to
frighten the horses too much. Because the rhetoric at the very
beginning was about step-change, and I am not entirely sure if
that is the case.
Dr Kyle: This is one area where
you cannot talk about the sector as a whole. I think there will
be areas of social care where there will be a step-change. I do
not know the full facts but I know Demos has been doing a lot
of work and research into the case of budget holders and service
users as budget holders. I think that is being released tomorrow,
unfortunately.[15]
I would love to see the full statistics, but I have heard some
snippets about it and I think the indications are that it has
been trialled in 13 different local authority areas. That is relatively
small numbers at the moment, but the effect that this has on the
users and the users' behaviour is quite profound, in that something
like 88% of people who were using residential care choose not
to and they choose to use other types of provision, and they will
spend it in more community-based local provision which is very
imaginative—sometimes which we have not even thought of
as providers. In areas like that, there are going to be very profound
changes in the way services are commissioned and used and delivered.
I think in other areas the rhetoric will not match up to what
it feels like for the service users in broad senses.
Ms Allcock-Tyler: I think it will
happen for a number of different reasons. First, we will find
what we are already seeing, that it will be a small number of
very large organisations at the top and the rest of the sector
will largely just carry on about its business. But I also think
it depends a bit on whether the taxpayer realises the con: that
they are effectively paying for services twice, through their
freely given donations and through their taxes. There is this
kind of strange situation, that we do not really ask the public—really,
properly the public—about what is their perception of a
public service, what is their perception of what charities do
or do not do, what do they think is right and not right and so
forth. It is all about "Is contracting with the third sector"—a
dreadful term—"with voluntary and community organisations,
good for government or the state and vice versa?" There has
not been a great deal of research into what is the public perception
of what charities should and should not do and what public services
are and are not.
Mr Etherington: On the question
of step-change: I think it will vary from area to area. The classic
example that is trotted out is social housing, where there has
been a step-change in the provision by non-profit organisations.
That had a particular set of characteristics. You had a combined
regulated funder in the housing corporation, you had local authorities
constrained in terms of their spending of capital receipts, and
you had considerable advantages being given to non-profit providers.
Interestingly enough, David Orr, who runs the National Federation
of Housing Associations, was writing in the Guardian yesterday
expressing some concern now that the new Housing Bill will place
almost draconian powers in the hands of the secretary of state
in order to instruct Housing Associations what to do and, therefore,
they will be drawn even more into the net.[16]
Social housing, I think, is an interesting case study of what
can happen if there is a significant shift. My view is that social
housing has been effectively colonised by the state and they do
not have a lot of capacity to operate independently, but what
will happen is that the private sector will win 80% of public-sector
contracts. That would be my prediction. They did in the eighties,
in social care, and I suspect that they will win the bulk of large-scale
contracting.
Q439 Mr Prentice: It is a
Trojan horse for the private sector.
Mr Etherington: There will be
subcontracting. There will be quite a lot of subcontracting of
niche markets between the private sector and the voluntary sector.
That is something that is beginning to happen and I think it is
something we will see more of. It depends, I think, on two sets
of things. One is political will. Do politicians want a significant
shift to occur between these areas? Secondly, it is a question
of whether or not the capacity really exists to do this well,
and I think the jury is out.
Dr Kyle: If you asked anyone in
the sector who is working for an organisation if they felt themselves,
as a private organisation, it was a Trojan Horse, they would be
horrified at the thought of it. People are very proud who work
in the voluntary sector and in the charitable sector of the status
and of the organisations they work for. They are motivated by
working in the sector often.
10 Ev 155 Back
11
ACEVO, Independent Inquiry into DWP Pathways to Work Contracting,
November 2007 Back
12
ACEVO, Independent Inquiry into DWP Pathways to Work Contracting,
November 2007 Back
13
Unison, False Economy? The costs of contracting and workforce
insecurity in the voluntary sector, May 2007 Back
14
British Trust for Conservation Volunteers Back
15
Demos, Making it Personal, January 2008 Back
16
Society section, The Guardian, 16 January 2008, p 4 Back
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