Attacks on the independence of the voluntary sector and civil society

" We are on a slippery slope, where it is becoming increasingly common to hear the view that voluntary organisations should deliver services but not challenge the status quo, especially if they receive government funding. We are already seeing a ‘chilling effect,’ with increasing evidence of self- censorship by voluntary organisations"

Roger Singleton, Chair of the Independence Panel for the UK Voluntary Sector

 The Panel for the Independence of the UK Voluntary sector has just released its 2014 report titled Independence Undervalued: The Voluntary Sector in 2014,  and the picture it paints is despairingly familiar to the situation in Australia:

 "The voluntary sector is losing its ability to protect the most vulnerable in society as a result of government attacks on its campaigning activities, lack of consultation over policy changes, and funding arrangements that put the future of an independent sector at risk"

In its media release the Panel:

• calls on the British Prime Minister David Cameron to take action to stop weakening the independence of the sector and to rebuild trust.  
•  calls on voluntary sector leaders to take a stand to preserve the sector’s independence, which it says is vital to a healthy and compassionate democracy and the reason why so many people lend their support to charities and trust their services.

•  documents numerous instances of a serious and growing threat from the government to Britain’s long tradition of independent voluntary action including:

• Growing criticism by some politicians, including the Secretary of State for Justice, of charities’ role as voices of communities.  There is an increasingly commonly expressed view that charities should simply deliver services and not speak out against injustices – leading to voluntary organisations self-censoring because they are afraid of losing government work, appearing too political or because of gagging clauses in state contracts.
• New and proposed restrictions to the ability of voluntary organisations to challenge government decisions in the courts on behalf of vulnerable individuals.
• Restrictions to campaigning put forward in the Lobbying Bill without consultation and, despite subsequent changes, with continuing concerns about their impact.
• Cuts in government consultation periods, leaving voluntary organisations too little time to respond to important questions, despite assurances this would change.
• Damage to support in communities due to loss of public funding for local specialist voluntary organisations as public service contracts concentrate on economies of scale rather than social return.
• Many state-sponsored charities subject to government interference, for example in appointment of board members.
• A weak Charity Commission ill-equipped to maintain public confidence that charities are pursuing an independent mission that is furthering the public good and not state sponsored or driven by private gain; and lack of government compliance with a document signed by David Cameron to protect the independence of the sector, the Compact.

 Panel chair Sir Roger Singleton CBE said:

“An independent voluntary sector lies at the heart of a compassionate, democratic society, a role that has become especially important as engagement with mainstream politics declines and the state reduces in size. Yet we are on a ‘slippery slope’, in which the independence of voluntary organisations is increasingly undervalued and under threat and there are insufficient safeguards to protect an independent future for the sector. It is increasingly seen either as a delivery arm of the state or only legitimate where it provides services but does not speak out for wider social change.

 The full 64 page report of the Panel is here

The paradox of the Paralympics

Excellent piece here by Amelia Gentleman on the paradox of the Paralympics- the disconnect between the positive attitudes to disability on display inside the Olympic stadiums and the experience of people with disabilities in the wider British society where intensive Government cuts are creating immense suffering for disabled people and increasing hostility towards people with disabilities is resulting in a soaring of hate crimes.

Many radical and activist groups such as Disabled People against Cuts have campaigned and protested against aspects of the Paralympics such as corporate sponsorship by large corporations such as Atos and cuts to services for people with disabilities. Atos who was a major sponsor of the Paralympics is contracted by the UK Government as administrators of assessments that rob disabled people of their benefits.

In this piece on the website of Disabled People against Cuts disability activist Dave King argues that the Paralympics are the precise opposite of the values of disability liberation. King writes

But with the Paralympics we have seen the addition into this cocktail of a supremely powerful and toxic ingredient, the opportunity for liberals to feel good about themselves for supporting the underdog and ‘progress in the fight against prejudice’. It is this thick coating of syrup which has confused even radical disability rights advocates, and is making it almost impossible for critics to speak out, except about the blatantly obvious outrage of Atos as sponsors. But the truth is that, despite all the hopeful talk about how the Paralympics are going to revolutionise people’s ideas about disability, the ideas and values at the core of the Paralympics are the precise opposite of the values of disability liberation. (I write this as a disabled person, one who has undergone one of Atos’ medical assessments and been found wanting, and who is suffering financially as a consequence.

In the Guardian Amelia Gentleman writes:

There has been a clear reluctance among officials this week to sour the happy atmosphere by talking about the Paralympics paradox – the difficulty of reconciling the amazing excitement around the Games, which has portrayed Britain globally as a place where positive attitudes to disability reign, and a bleaker reality that kicks in beyond Stratford.

The guide for journalists covering the event is explicit in its instructions that disability and any issues around it should not be the focus of reporting. It stipulates that reporters should concentrate on "performance, sporting ambition, training, competition and the emotions associated with winning and losing". Most athletes contacted to discuss the broader issues of disability for this piece declined to be interviewed. But many disabled visitors were quick to comment on the disconnection between their experiences within the park and their everyday lives at a time when in addition to cuts to services and benefits payments, charities such as Scope have been documenting worsening attitudes and official figures show that incidents of disability hate crime have soared to their highest ever levels.

Kalya Franklin, a disability campaigner whose Benefit Scrounging Scum blog has charted the rising problems faced by disabled people at a time of cuts to services and benefits, was amazed at the ease of her journey to Stratford from Birmingham, describing it as "the smoothest journey I've ever done on public transport". "People were there waiting to offer help – that's very unusual. There were much higher levels of staffing. That's not typical, nor is seeing lots of portable ramps around," she said.

She was delighted to be at the event, but like many, she was struggling with the Paralympics paradox.

"It's a utopian fantasy of where we need to move towards as a society," she said, pausing for a moment at Stratford station (interrupted on two occasions in the space of five minutes by transport staff asking if she needed assistance). "It's brilliant, because this has shown that with the right attitude, will and financing, it can be done."

The sporting event was for her, like any sporting occasion, a bit of escapism from daily problems, but she was anxious that attention to the pressing issues facing people with disabilities should not be deflected while the country basks in the international congratulations for having mounted a sellout Paralympic event. She pointed to a planned 20% cut in the disability living allowance (DLA), announced in the 2010 budget, in particular, arguing the that extra money, for employed and unemployed claimants to help with the extra cost of disability, had helped finance the extra cost of care and transport for many disabled visitors to the Games.

"What the public haven't realised about the Paralympians is how many of them are completely reliant on DLA. Although they are superfit athletes it doesn't mean they aren't also disabled and have mobility needs and care needs in their day-to-day lives," she said.

Abbott led opposition to adopt UK style Big Society policies

 Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald Lenore Taylor traces the influence of the UK Conservative Government's Big Society agenda on the Coalition Opposition's social policy agenda for the next election.

Coalition frontbenchers have been instructed to slice away federal bureaucratic oversight of aged care, childcare, employment and family services in a bid to devolve government power and deliver budget savings through public service cuts.

The Coalition, which needs to find more than $30 billion in spending cuts, will pledge cuts to the bureaucracy, but says it will not hit frontline services. The policy is in line with the controversial ''Big Society'' philosophy of British thinker Phillip Blond, who was in Canberra this week for meetings with Coalition leader Tony Abbott and most of his frontbench.

Coalition families spokesman Kevin Andrews told The Saturday Age he had developed the model for stripping unnecessary federal oversight of federally funded services delivered by community and private organisations.

But Big Society rhetoric provides cover for severe austerity measures and a fundamental transformation of the delivery of publicly funded human and community services. 
 
In the UK Big Society rhetoric was used to justify sweeping cuts to public services, to community services and even to the community and voluntary organisations it was supposed to nurture.
 
It has also produced the largest ever privatisation of human and community services in UK history with large swathes of the human and community services industry now under the control of private corporations.

Despite promises by the UK Government that local devolution would primarily benefit small community based not- for- profit, it has been large corporations who have been the real winners.

Taylor notes, correctly, that:

But in Britain, the outsourcing program that was supposed to benefit little community groups ended up giving enormous contracts to large corporations, such as Serco, which runs Australia's detention centres, and in some parts of Britain now runs all the government-funded schools.

The implications of the Big Society agenda for Australia are well documented in a recent report by the Centre for Policy Development titled Big Society: How the UK Government is Dismantling the State and what it means for Australia. 

The Report shows among other things that the reality of Big Society Agenda is vastly different to its rhetoric. The impacts of the Big Society programs in the UK have included:

• An £81 billion cut in public spending over four years including an average 19 per cent budget cut to government agencies, 60 per cent cut to the budget for new public housing and £7 billion cut to the welfare budget.
• The UK’s public service is expected to shrink by up to 710,000 public servants over six years.
• Corporations and the largest charities have dominated the commissioning process: 35 of 40 Work Programme (employment agency) contracts were awarded to corporations.
• Cameron’s budgets have dealt a £5 billion funding cut to the UK’s community sector and funding cuts of £110 million to 2,000 UK charities
• The number of people employed in the UK’s community sector fell by 70,000.
• Local government budgets were cut by more than a quarter in 2010-11 resulting in staff cuts of 10-20 per cent and widespread cuts to programs.
• During 2010-11, public sector employment fell by 4.3 per cent. Private sector employment increased by 1.5 per cent.

Under outcomes based contracting small agencies are the big loser

More evidence that outcomes based contracting approaches such as payments by results and prime/lead contractor models are bad for small not- for- profit human and community services organizations.

In the UK outcomes based contracting models lead to the issuing of larger contracts which primarily benefit large corporate prime contractors.

Outcomes based contracting has the effect of forcing smaller agencies out of public procurement processes.

This report is from the UK online publication Third Sector

Heather Wilkinson, chief executive of Striding Out, which provides career support and training, told Third Sector her organisation had been affected by changes to the way government departments commissioned contracts for the Work Programme, the Skills Funding Agency and the National Citizen Service. 

"The challenge is that these departments are now only looking to work with large corporate prime contractors with a view to only issuing bigger contract values, and they are paid-by-results models."

Striding Out had been in talks with a prime contractor about NCS services, she said, but "due to its profit margins, the money it offered us for delivering our element of work was unviable".

"The money is there and the contract opportunities are there, but the problem is that we cannot get to them," she said.

"I don’t feel there have been fewer opportunities, but our ability to bid competitively and fairly has been reduced."

James Allen, head of public services and partnerships at the National Council of Voluntary Organisations, said the introduction of payment-by-results contracts, such as those offered to charities under the Work Programme, had proved particularly problematic.

"Payment-by-results is a significant barrier to organisations bidding for contracts in the first place," he said.

"The problem is moving from a model of upfront payments and grants straight to payment-by-results without the transition being skilfully managed. Organisations are already under pressure and margins are tight. They won’t bid because they cannot take the risk."

The dangers of outcomes based contracting models

As the Barnett Government and the funded not- for- profit sector in Western Australia move to adopt outcomes based contracting models for the delivery of human and community services, the evidence from the UK demonstrates the danger to the sector of such models.

The use of outcomes based contracting models- such as prime or lead contractor models and payment by results models- within the UK Government Work Programme is having devastating impacts for small agencies and disadvantaged service users.

The UK experience is that outcomes based contracting and procurement- in its many forms- results in Governments, or the agents of government, moving public money into bigger contracts and bigger services, which increasingly are awarded to large private and multinational corporations  such as SERCO G4S, A4E, Virgin, Ingeus (There Rein's company) and Capita to name but a few.

The majority of contracts are won by large for profit corporations who claimed that they would sub-contract smaller local not- for- profit providers to deliver tailored specialist services, however this has not happened.

Many of the smaller not- for- profits were used as "bid candy" to enable the corporate providers to tender for and win the contracts and were promised work as sub-contractors. Such work (and income) has not eventuated and even when it has major delays in being paid have severely affected the income and cash flow of small agencies.

The result is that more and more smaller agencies are having to shut down due to cash flow problems and loss of income. And the closure of small agencies with specialist knowledge and expertise and strong local links directly impacts on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged clients.

The Third Sector, an online  publication for the sector reports that:

Eco-Actif Services, a community interest company based in Sutton, south London, and Red Kite Learning, an education and learning charity in Southwark, south London, both closed in July and blamed the government’s move to large-scale payment-by-results contracts.

Lin Gillians, chief executive of the LVSC, said: "Over the past two years, longer, larger contracts for employment programmes have been almost exclusively awarded to large private sector providers.

"The intention was that specialist voluntary and community sector providers would deliver tailored support as subcontractors – however, as time goes on we are seeing this specialist provision disappear.

"This raises enormous concerns about the quality of support available to the thousands of Londoners facing serious or multiple barriers to work."

The homelessness agencies the Single Homeless Project and St Mungo’s have also withdrawn from the Work Programme in recent months, citing problems with the way it is run.

Gillians said: "The government urgently needs to review the impact of this commissioning model on disadvantaged job seekers and special employment providers before more damage is done.

"This isn't about blaming the Work Programme or prime contractors – it's about providing appropriate support to give everyone a fair chance to work."

Brendan Tarring, who founded RKL 25 years ago, said: "The Department for Work and Pensions needs to reassess its one-size-fits-all mentality and acknowledge that individually tailored employment support for vulnerable jobseekers is best delivered by innovative mid-sized charitable organisations."

The gap between Government rhetoric about civil society and the reality

The UK Cameron Coalition Government has made all sorts of policy statements about the importance of civil society and the NFP sector in contributing to the "Big Society", but the sector is being devastated by funding cuts and the privatization and outsourcing of human services and public services to corporations.

A new report publicized in the UK Independent shows that not for profits and charities are set to lose 3 billion pounds in public funding over the next 5 years.

This comes on top of research by False Economy UK, which used freedom of information requests to show that 2,000 charities in England have suffered funding cuts this year and these cuts represent just a small amount of the agencies facing funding cuts.

The gap between the rhetoric of Governments about the importance of the not- for- profit sector and civil society and the reality has never been starker and should serve as a caution to NFP's here in Australia. 

The Independent reports:

"Britain's voluntary organisations face losing almost £3bn in funding over the next five years, according to the first comprehensive report to analyse the coming impact of spending cuts on the public sector.

In a blow to David Cameron's much-trumpeted "Big Society", charities across the UK face the prospect of their funds dropping by £911m a year by 2016, and losing £2.8bn in total over the next five years, according to research by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) published today.

The six-month study, which looked at how cuts to central and local government over the next half decade will hit the voluntary sector, predicts that charities will lose 7.7 per cent of their current public funds by 2016 if government departments pass on their cuts proportionately. Currently, central and local government together contribute at least £11.8bn to charities each year".

Why we should be skeptical about "social enterprise"

The concept of social enterprise has found its way into the centre of debates about the future of the not- for-profit sector in Australia and is viewed as a policy panacea for the sector.

Here in West Australia, the Barnett Government's Economic Audit Committee, which has been accepted and endorsed by large segments of the WA not-for-profit sector, has a vision to make all not-for-profits into social enterprises.

A UK study by the Third Sector Research Centre shows why we should be deeply skeptical of claims about social enterprise. The UK study found that social enterprise approaches are poorly defined, and they exclude black and ethnic minority groups as well as small not for profits that serve disadvantaged groups and communities.

Civil society rising in the UK and Europe

In London this week 50,000 students protested against education cuts by the Conservative- Liberal coalition Government.

Media reports in Australia have focused only on the occupation of the Conservative Party headquarters and, unsurprisingly for the corporate media, have largely ignored the larger story. All over Europe there is rising militancy by civil society groups against government  imposed austerity measures.

As Nina Powers points out in this piece in The Guardian the 52,000 students who protested in London display the real meaning of "The Big Society" that David Cameron claims he wants to promote. But Cameron's vision is an illusion. The Tories and Liberal Democrats want to destroy that part of civil society that resists and protests, and  holds governments and the corporate and business elite to account.

In her Guardian piece Nina Powers writes:

The protest as a whole was extremely important, not just because of the large numbers it attracted, and shouldn't be understood simply in economic terms as a complaint against fees. It also represented the serious anger many feel about cuts to universities as they currently stand, and the ideological devastation of the education system if the coalition gets its way. It was a protest against the narrowing of horizons; a protest against Lib Dem hypocrisy; a protest against the increasingly utilitarian approach to human life that sees degrees as nothing but "investments" by individuals, and denies any link between education and the broader social good.

The protesters - students and others - who occupied Tory HQ will no doubt continue to be condemned in the days to come. But their anger is justified: the coalition government is ruining Britain for reasons of ideological perversity. The protests in France and Greece and the student occupations here, such as the recent takeover of Deptford Town Hall by Goldsmiths students on the day cuts were announced, are indicators of a new militancy

UK Minister diverts fund allocated for Campaigning to service delivery

More evidence from the UK about the depoliticisation of the NGO sector and the unwillingness of government to support the campaigning activities of small NGO's.

The decision by the British Minister for the Third Sector Angela Smith to abandon a 750,000 pound Campaigning Grants Program after 32 successful applicants had been told they would receive funds has generated outrage among the British voluntary (NGO) sector. The decision has breached the Labour Government's own Compact with the Voluntary sector which outlines how the public and voluntary sector will behave towards each other.

The Minister's Office of the Third Sector announced last Friday that it was diverting the funds allocated to small agencies for campaigning activities into a Hardship Fund to support NGO's providing support for disadvantaged people.

With an election not far away it appears that the Brown Government got nervous about the potential political fallout of funding campaigning and activist groups in the lead up to an election. The agencies involved had already received letters informing them of the success of their grant so the legality of the Government's decision is likely to be tested.