Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440
- 460)
THURSDAY 17 JANUARY 2008
MR STUART
ETHERINGTON, DR
PETER KYLE
AND MS
DEBRA ALLCOCK-TYLER
Q440 Mr Prentice: I did not
mean that but they may take it that way.
Dr Kyle: I know you did not, but
I know the broader point you are trying to make and I think it
would not be recognised by anyone in the sector. At the moment,
one-third of our members in ACEVO have previously worked in the
private sector and have chosen to come over to the voluntary sector.
When you ask them why, it is because of the social reasons. There
is a distinction there which is quite profound.
Q441 Mr Walker: Dr Kyle, what
is your view on charitable campaigning?
Dr Kyle: Do you mean political
campaigning?
Q442 Mr Walker: Yes, political
campaigning, big advertising campaigns, that sort of campaigning.
Dr Kyle: My view is quite clear
in this: charities, I believe, should be able to engage much more
in political campaigning. They should not be able to get involved
in party political campaigning, but if you are an organisation
which is, for example, working to see a change in some area of
public policy to do with social care of some kind, you have the
potential to work, sometimes, with 100 people but through political
campaigning locally you could have public policy changed which
could have a profound effect on many, many thousands of lives.
So I do not think we should just say this is just about party
politics. Political campaigning can change public policy for the
better, and if you are a chair or a trustee of a board on an old
charity you should be able to make the decision about which is
the best use of charitable money.
Q443 Mr Walker: But who pays
for the campaigning?
Dr Kyle: Through charitable income.
Q444 Mr Walker: One of the
concerns is that 80% plus of many charities' income comes from
the taxpayer, so actually it is my money that is funding this
campaigning.
Dr Kyle: No.
Q445 Mr Walker: It is, is
it not?
Dr Kyle: No. Are you talking about
the independence of the sector? Can you give me an example? I
mean, I cannot ask you a question but I would perhaps be interested
in an example of a large charity which is funded by the taxpayers
just using the majority of its money for political campaigning.
Q446 Mr Walker: It is a genuine
concern. If you are going to increase the amount of money that
the third sector, the charitable sector, gets from the taxpayer,
as Debra has pointed out, then there has to be accountability
in how they spend that money. I pay a lot of tax, I think we all
pay a lot of tax, and I would be concerned if a charity getting
80% or 90% or any amount of money from the taxpayer was spending
significant amounts on campaigning of any form without any accountability
back to me as the taxpayer. That is a legitimate concern. You
may not like the concerns that are being expressed around this
table, you may think we are demonstrating muddled thinking, but
actually we are demonstrating the concerns expressed to us by
our constituents. Because many of them have spent a lifetime in
the charitable sector, working with people like Debra who show
admirable passion for what they do, and they just do not know
where you are taking it. They have no idea where you are taking
it. And, I tell you what, it is probably incumbent on you to do
a little bit more explaining to these people as to where you see
this going.
Dr Kyle: First of all, any organisation
which is receiving government money, it does not just go into
a black hole. For the money that they receive there are very,
very strict accountability measures involved. There are report-back
measures, there is oversight. Commissioners get involved in the
process themselves. That is my first point. When you bid for government
money, if you put in a bid saying "I am going to spend 60%
of it campaigning against government policy or publication policy"
I doubt you would win the contract. That is the first point. That
aspect of your argument, I am afraid I do not recognise. Secondly,
I think you are underestimating the amount of campaigning organisations
do already. I suspect that you get spoken to a lot by charities
of all kinds, as an MP you get lobbied, as MPs you will get an
enormous amount of literature, briefing notes and all the rest
of it. That is campaigning. That is political activity. I doubt
the general public realises the extent to which it happens already.
Then there are other organisations, Greenpeace, Amnesty and the
like, who are not charities. I think most people in the country
would probably, if asked, assume that they were charities or believe
that what their ends are and what their means are fall within
the auspices of charitable purposes.
Q447 Mr Walker: I take your
point. One of the concerns I have as a Member of Parliament is
that we get wonderful people in to see us who are at the sharp
end, who have a passion and a belief and a drive for what they
are doing, who are delivering it at a local level, and then we
get major charities—now largely funded by the taxpayer:
80 or 90% of their total turnover funded by the taxpayer—and
they send public affairs managers to see us and marketing managers
and communication managers, and there is this vast paraphernalia
of people which I am funding, who are not delivering services,
who spend their entire time going around justifying their existence
and the existence of their charity. People are concerned about
that because I am not sure that is where taxpayers' money should
be spent, to be perfectly honest, on high-paid public affairs
professionals.
Dr Kyle: I would suggest that
your diary secretary is putting in a disproportionate amount of
the people who contact you asking to see you, allowing more people
from lobbying organisations to come to see you, than grassroots
people, because my experience of political processes—
Q448 Mr Walker: No, they are
all charities.
Dr Kyle: My experience of political
processes is that the most vociferous campaigners are the people
from small organisations who care passionately about certain causes
and they want to tell their MP about it and so forth. My experience
is that organisations of all sizes campaign. I would not be surprised
if the majority of correspondence to you is about small organisations
working in your constituency on very small issues and I think
your antennae are probably more focused on the more professionalised
end of the sector.
Mr Walker: Gosh, you seem to know a lot
about my office.
Q449 Chairman: We do not need
to explore it any further, I think.
Mr Etherington: On campaigning,
Chairman, I think it is worth pointing one thing out because there
is a pretty vociferous debate going on at the moment about charities
and campaigning. Clearly civil society organisations that are
not charities can do all the campaigning they want as part of
the freedom of association which we would associate, I guess,
with participative democracy. In terms of charities, the current
law is fairly clear: it is that a charity cannot campaign if that
is a dominant part of their activities.
Q450 Mr Walker: Now it is
changing.
Mr Etherington: No. There was
a group who proposed changes in the law. That has been rejected
by the Government and opposed by the Opposition, so the law will
not be changing in relation to that. The Charity Commission are
revising their guidelines and I suspect it is likely that they
will say: "Cannot be dominant over a period of time".
For example, if I am a charity that decides that a major piece
of legislation proposed either from the European Union or from
Parliament would seriously disadvantage in some way the beneficiaries
of my charity, I might chose for two years to devote more resources
to campaigning against that particular piece of work. The debate
is "What is dominant?" in fact. If one takes Amnesty:
everybody thought that when human rights was added as another
charitable head in the passage of the Charities Act, that that
would be okay, but Amnesty clearly is still not a charity because
it only campaigns, in effect, and therefore cannot achieve charitable
status. That will not change. I have just one other point on campaigning.
Historically, organisations which have run services, whether they
have been small and local or larger, have used the experience
of running services, when they have run their services, to try
to change public policy. It seems to me that a lot of organisations
would not distinguish between campaigning and services, in that
they will gain knowledge on the basis of the services that they
run, whether they be small or large, and will want to influence
you, as a public policy actor, in trying to change policy in beneficial
ways. That combination has been a characteristic of the charitable
sector for some years.
Q451 Paul Flynn: You are the
final witnesses in part of a great tsunami of information we have
had, and I find myself in a position where the more information
I receive the less I understand. I am genuinely seeking after
truth when I ask you these questions now. In 2006, from your organisation,
Debra, there was a quote which described the Government's policy.
We had the ministers here a few weeks ago, who talked about transformation:
"The policy is about transformation" and most of us
would regard it as being a little overambitious to use the word
"transformation" in any sense. Graham Leigh, Director
of Development at the Directory of Social Change, said "this
initiative feels like we are hurtling down a motorway and the
Government has doctored the brakes."[17]
Ms Allcock-Tyler: The Government
would argue that engagement with the voluntary sector will transform
public services. I have huge doubts about that. Our argument is
much more that the way in which the Government is engaging with
the sector in this delivery of public services is distorting the
entire notion of what voluntary and community action is about.
It is distorting the special and distinctive nature of the sector,
so you end up with an individual giving evidence to the Committee
saying that there is not any difference, when there is, there
absolutely is, but we are being forced into a way of engaging
differently, or some charities are. This is part of the problem.
This transformation is "Wouldn't it be fab if these wonderful,
gorgeous, voluntary-sector organisations, full of really terribly
nice people, came round delivering public services, because that
would be great for us, but only if they do it in this way and
to this timescale, for this money, under these conditions and
with these terms. Oh, and, by the way, they've got to compete
with the private sector. Oh, and we'll make it easier for the
private sector because we will have set social clauses into the
contract"—which do not serve us, because we don't need
social clauses, we are social clauses, but which benefit the private
sector. It is incredibly distorted. It is putting all sorts of
checks and balances. It closes down the ability of voluntary-sector
organisations to do what they are so incredibly good at, which
is work with the most vulnerable and the most disengaged and the
most unpopular causes.
Q452 Paul Flynn: One of the
most distinctive features of these lovely people who are doing
this work in the voluntary sector, as Martin Narey pointed out
to us, is that 70% of them do not know whether they are going
to be working on 1 April. The voluntary sector is bedevilled by
the fact that their main preoccupation, the best of their energies
and imagination, goes into working out whether they are going
to get a contract next year. Is this not a fundamental fault and
one of the main weaknesses of the voluntary sector, because you
are depending on contracts and you cannot see beyond the date
of the new contract?
Ms Allcock-Tyler: Yes, it is.
We need to stop doing it. The Government has a particular responsibility—
Q453 Paul Flynn: Is it not
a weakness that they are concentrating on their own survival rather
than on the outcomes on which they should be concentrating?
Ms Allcock-Tyler: Yes. However,
you have to ask yourself why that is happening. When you work
for a voluntary community organisation, what you care about is
Manju, and you will do whatever it takes to get the money in order
to be able to provide that service to Manju. If that means that
you have to engage in a contracting process, then that is what
you end up doing. When anybody asks a voluntary community organisation
who delivers public services under contract to the Government:
"Does it compromise your independence?" of course they
are not going to say, "Yes". If you ask a local authority,
"Did you not give money to that particular charity because
they argued with you?" the local authority is not going to
say, "Yes, we were very upset about what x, y, z person
said." They are not going to say that, they are going to
say, "It was not as good a tender, the costs were not right"
and all the rest of it. This whole contracting process is distorting
both sides. We are colluding in it. But government is enormous.
You are like elephants and we are like ants. We do not have a
huge amount of choice really. We either have to all come together
and form one giant pseudo elephant, so that we look more like
you, so that we get money out of you, or we end up scurrying out
of the way and the Government takes no notice of us whatsoever—which
is the point I think Alex was making—which is not always
a good thing, because sometimes we need support from government.
Q454 Paul Flynn: If we see
the outcome of what the Government seems to be proposing, we have
looked at the future and it is New York. What we saw in New York
was fascinating. Virtually all they have got is the third sector.
One of the weaknesses we found in one section—and, again,
it is about homelessness, which was mentioned—is that the
homeless problem in New York has diminished—4,000 in the
whole of the area of nine million people, when there used to be
one on every street—but the bureaucracy continues at the
level of bureaucracy when the charities were set up, when they
had an enormous problem of homelessness. That has happened here
to a lesser extent. There was a controversy at Christmas time
by a Conservative member of Westminster Council about this, who
made a very powerful case for an overprovision in this area. What
we saw in New York was a ludicrous overprovision. Part of the
nature of charities is that they empire build. They serve themselves.
If the cause of their work disappears, they have to invent new
work. They have to decide that there are hidden homeless. They
have to redefine homeless as anyone who does not have a patio
or a fitted kitchen. You magnify your problem in order to make
sure that your empire continues and grows.
Ms Allcock-Tyler: I think it comes
down to this distortion of a market-place under contract. For
organisations that are not largely funded by statutory sources
under contract, we have three measures that help us to survive.
We have to attract donors, whether that is funders, trusts and
foundations or individuals who will give us money; we have to
attract volunteers, because without volunteers most of us cannot
do our work; but we also have to attract service users, because
there is absolutely no point just having tons of money and lots
of volunteers if there is not anybody who comes to us and needs
our help. The point you are making is more likely to occur when
really the only thing you have to satisfy is the contract, where
the primary client is actually the commissioner, rather than having
to satisfy your service users and attract donations generally
and attract volunteers.
Q455 Paul Flynn: Could I ask
the other witnesses: with all the activity there has been over
the last 20 years and in the last 10 years in this area, of all
kinds of requirements and improvements on Compacts and so on,
is there any measurable improvement in the outcomes to the clients
of the services which has been independently measured? Is there
a correlation between the improvement in the work that is done,
the amount of money that has gone down and the outcomes?
Dr Kyle: There is certainly more
work that needs to be done in building an evidence base behind
specific areas of third-sector work. There is evidence that when
people have the choice—I referred earlier to the problem
of budget-holding service users—they tend to move towards
more localised, tailored, personalised services, which tend to
come from the third sector. There is evidence from the NCC,[18]
which said in a report that the third sector seems to be leading
the way in employment services and could help to spread good practice.
There are areas of research which have been pointing towards improved
service quality and delivery within the sector.
Q456 Paul Flynn: That is a
very tentative reply. We really are going ahead, do-gooding, feeling
that this is a sensible thing to do, but the policy is evidence
free at the moment.
Dr Kyle: No, it is not evidence
free, but there definitely needs to be more evidence. One of the
big challenges for the sector, when they engage in the contracting
methods and they win bids, they use some of the money that they
are getting to build an evidence base that they can use to win
further bids for. ACEVO is a good example. NCVO is a good example.
We are both organisations which have won bids. In the last couple
of months ACEVO has won several bids amounting to several million
pounds over the next three years. I, as a manager of these and
implementing these bids, need to make sure that I construct around
that an organisation which is sustainable and is geared to life
beyond those bids. That is one of my big challenges. That is the
challenge of a manager. Taking on some of the other comments,
can you imagine a representative of the statutory sector going
to a minister and saying, "Just give us the money. Let us
get on with it. We don't want to have to provide all these facts
and figures and meet all these demands that you are saying."
It is inconceivable that any other sector working with service
users would make the kinds of demands and expectations that I
have heard. Grant funding has stayed the same. There are other
ways of delivering the money. Nobody is forcing organisations
to go for bids. ACEVO went for these bids and won these bids.
That was a conscious management decision, taken not lightly but
after weighing up all the pros and cons and implications it would
mean for our organisation. Nobody is forcing any organisation
to go for any bids and to enter any procurement processes. If
they want to rely on donations, they still can. If they want to
rely on grants, they can still try to get those grants. But for
some organisations, this is an option, and they should not take
it lightly but they should not ignore the possibilities and the
potential benefits from it.
Mr Etherington: You asked about
evidence, which I think is probably an issue worth addressing.
I do not think this is an evidence-free zone but I do not think
there is a lot of evidence around which demonstrates why one form
of intervention is better than another. That is why we have argued
for an increased investment in higher education, to develop the
evidence base. But there is some evidence. You will find individual
charities able to demonstrate, I think fairly effectively, that
early intervention, say in relation to children, is more effective
in the longer term; NCH has a lot of project data in relation
to this. The NCC study is interesting, in that it has said that
in some areas of public policy the third sector was better and
in some it was no better.[19]
In social housing, NCC deemed the public sector and the third
sector to be equally bad in terms of user engagement. Things vary.
I heard evidence yesterday, for example, when there was a discussion
in the New Statesman magazine about Jobcentre Plus, that
there was quite considerable evidence that Jobcentre Plus being
provided in the public sector had better outcomes than it being
provided anywhere else, and yet this evidence had not appeared
to impact on decision-making. There is, I think, a bit of an evidence
gap. I have just one other point in relation to homelessness.
There are countervailing examples. I think homelessness is an
interesting one. If you take HIV/AIDS, there was a mass of voluntary
sector provision when it was felt that retrovirals were not known,
that a lot of people would die and a lot of people would require
hospice and very specialist care. When drug interventions prevented
the need for that and many people enjoyed a high quality of life
although they were HIV positive, the sector contracted and merged
and changed its structure. There may well be circumstances in
which in other areas of public policy the sector does react to
those sorts of market forces.
Q457 Paul Flynn: Charles is
afraid of nationalisation of charities and many of us favour privatisation.
We come from different angles on this. You have talked about social
housing. If we look at social housing as far as the recipients
of social housing over the last 100 years, there is one lesson
and that is rent is theft. Rent is a bad idea and a poor deal.
The view from politicians on high, who wish to bring these transformations
and wish to supply a need as they see it. It could be argued that
the greatest improvement as far as the clients of social housing
over the last 50 years was the sale of council houses, introduced
by Newport Council before Mrs Thatcher introduced it, the decade
before Mrs Thatcher, but the ideology behind this is one between
the parties, and in fact there is a bit of a retreat from it taking
place now in the Welsh Assembly. Are you not concerned that the
Government is talking about transformation, a big change, throwing
everything up in the air to see how it will come down again, when
the only sensible cause of action in this Place is not to look
for any radical reform, for any great change, with ministers having
their names on wonderful reform in the future, but to look at
the huge, immensely complex picture we have of voluntary sectors
and sectors, and allow them to evolve, rather than have government
laying down some pointer to some shining path where everyone should
go?
Mr Etherington: I think that is
a critical point. I do not think there will be this massive step-change
that is being talked about. I think it will be far more incremental
than that. If you look at the relative scale, about 40% of the
income of the sector comes from the public sector but it is less
than 2% of public spending. You are talking about very different
types of animal. There are two or three things that I think it
is worth noting as to why it is important that this develops in
an incremental way. Firstly, the sector does not do everything
that the public sector does or should. If I am a taxpayer, I would
expect a similar type of service, with a similar response, in
Newport as I would in Penzance. But we do not do everything. We
do discretion. Trustees operate with discretion. That is a point
that you made, Mr Hopkins, I think, and it is absolutely right.
The voluntary sector is not about equity; it is about trustees
and discretion. Given the fact that voluntary organisations are
quite clearly good at doing some things and do some things better—the
evidence is variable, it is to be developed but I think there
is enough to show that certain kinds of intervention by voluntary
organisations are more successful—that is where it seems
to me you should be coming from. What is it that I am trying to
achieve with public services and what agencies are best placed
to assist me to do that? In doing that, you have to be mindful
of the ecology of civil society in this country: large numbers
of very small organisations, and over the last 10 to 20 years
we have seen an increasing bifurcation between the very large
and the very small. My own view is that that is ultimately damaging
to civil society and that public policies which drive that further
apart ultimately work to the detriment of civil society. That
means that the procurement and commissioning processes have to
recognise the very nature of the civil society that you are trying
to engage both in service delivery and in shaping the nature of
public services. If you can get that right, I think there is real
added value for the third sector. If you blindly go for shining-path-type
experiments, ultimately I think you can cause considerable damage
to the fabric of civil society.
Q458 Chairman: Could I finish
on this, because you bring us back to the central question. In
the memorandum from ACEVO you say, "Third sector organisations
can and should play a major role in transforming public services."[20]
That is the proposition and you can find the same thing in government
documents. Government and the sector are saying the same thing
about transforming and it is usually with something about a particular
relationship with users that gives them a particular edge in provision.
Then you go on to say about these organisations: "They are
currently held back by a framework that promotes inefficiency,
restricts capacity, and stifles innovation. Radical reforms to
the way in which services are commissioned would allow third sector
organisations to develop and disseminate a new breed of coherent,
citizen-focused services, tailored to local situations and individual
circumstances." We ended with a kind of big difference between
that, the transformational agenda, which is only being prevented
from happening by these big blockages in the system and if only
we had cleared the blockages away then the transformation could
happen, and what Stuart is saying, which is, "Oh, no, it
is not like that; it is about incremental change in a very complex,
mixed economy." Which is it?
Dr Kyle: I do not see there is
an entire contradiction between the two quotes in the ACEVO statement
you read out. There are different ways of spreading innovation
and the great thing we have in this country is a welfare state
which can pick up innovation and run with it in different ways.
The one thing we have not really talked about today is partnership
between the sector and partnership between small organisations/large
organisations, because both sometimes share the same ambitions
and have different approaches. Also, many people who are working
with government in terms of taking government money or entering
into the procurement process, see their relationship and will
often talk about their relationship with government as one of
partnership, because, once they have won the bid, they know that
their aims are the same as those of government. There is a lot
more collaboration, there is a lot more partnership between aiming
and solving society's problems and up-scaling some of the innovation.
One example is a piece of innovation from the United States which
made it into the Social Exclusion Action Plan, which is the nurse/family
partnership which is now run out nationwide in the last budget.[21]
Q459 Chairman: This is partly
the evidence argument: that we tend always to decide the projects,
which is quite natural but is sort of not enough. You are saying
here that this transformational potential, if it is there, is
not being realised because of the framework. I want you to tell
me in a sentence what it is about the framework that is stopping
this transformation happening.
Dr Kyle: I will tell you in a
word, and that is "commissioning". The blockage in the
system at the moment is commissioning. That is why the Office
of the Third Sector is training 2,000 commissioners, which is
why ACEVO has contacted the Office of the Third Sector to offer
support and to try to understand what the training is going to
be for the commissioners. At the moment, the full potential of
the third sector is not recognised in the commissioning process.
Not all commissioners understand the third sector ... I dread
to use the word "ethos" but, under the spotlight, I
cannot think of another word, but what is unique about the third
sector which it brings to the table. They are not used to dealing
with third sector organisations. Once the commissioning process
recognises there are social outcomes as well as economic ones
which the Government want to achieve, then I think there will
be much greater potential to have a real step-change in the way
that the third sector engages in delivering public services of
all sizes.
Q460 Chairman: This has been
said to us often, that if only we crack the commissioning issue
then transformation follows.
Dr Kyle: I will give you a good
example. I had spoken to a chief executive about commissioning—we
had had a conversation similar to that we have had around the
table today—and she said that she was really motivated by
what she had heard in this session. She went straight home and
said, "Look, I've really got to crack this nut, I've got
to get back and deal with the commissioning process." She
rang up and tried to speak to her local commissioner for her services
but the call went straight through to voicemail. She rang me up
and said, "I've just rung for the fifth time this month and
I've not had my phone call. I cannot get through to them, I cannot
speak to the commissioners." There are people who really
want to engage with it but they are facing a blockage from the
bottom up. That blockage is in trying to get through to the commissioners,
getting there early enough to have what they can bring to the
table recognised, and have their services play a part in shaping
their commissioning process, rather than just responding to it
when it comes out the other end, when they realise that the commissioning
process excludes them, not explicitly but implicitly. Alex had
a great example of the commissioning process excluding people
implicitly. The Olympics, for example, had as one of the rules
for entering the commissioning process that you must have a turnover
of £5 million for community transport, even as a sub-contractor.
There is only one third sector organisation which has a turnover
of that size and is in the business of community transport, so
lots of other people could not enter the bidding process because
of that one rule. I think that was there for good intentions,
and was probably just standard practice, but there is no need
to have that qualification in there. The entire commissioning
process sometimes can benignly exclude third sector organisations
and can benignly exclude the very strong points which they could
bring to the table and the strengths. That is where the commissioning
process needs fundamentally to be changed: not at the end, where
the documents go out at the end of the process, in terms of designing
the service, but at the beginning, so that the commissioner sits
down and says, "This is the service we want. What is the
best way to do it?" talks to different types of providers,
and then sees how the commissioning process can judge each organisation
on the strengths from each sector.
Chairman: Thank you very much. That is
a good note on which to end. We have to make sense of all this.
We have certainly learned the questions. Whether we have developed
any answers, we will have to see. We have had some very rich evidence,
including from you this morning, and we are very grateful for
it.
17 "Is the voluntary sector heading for a
catastrophe?", Directory of Social Change press release,
28 June 2006 Back
18
National Consumer Council Back
19
National Consumer Council, Delivering public services,
April 2007 Back
20
Ev 150 Back
21
Cabinet Office, Reaching Out: An Action Plan on Social Exclusion,
September 2006 Back
|
