It is good to have Danny Kruger’s report on the role of charities, faith groups, and community organisations, in serving communities, building strong social networks, and shaping the future of our society as we work through the effects of lockdown. A lot of careful reflection has gone into this report and it’s no surprise that it has been welcomed by many leaders in our sector.
It’s also no surprise that larger national organisations are staking claims to deliver some of the funded opportunities in the recommendations.
The critique of the Big Society framework is one that I am sure many of us recognise. As Kruger says, “The idea took hold that the government wanted communities to fill the gaps left by the retreating state.” Kruger is negotiating a path through a debate that has been ongoing for at least fifty years; what is proper for the state to deliver, and what should be the place of wider civil society in caring for people and communities? That shifting balance is one that Kruger recognises in the opening sentence of the section on a New Deal with Faith Communities.
As an aside I am reminded of the discussion recorded in the minutes of the Salisbury Diocesan Association for Moral Welfare in October 1965. Miss E.M. Magness, General Secretary of the Church of England Committee for Diocesan Moral and Social Welfare Councils, had been invited to address the meeting at a time when it looked likely that contracts to provide social work services for local authorities that had been held by the diocese for over thirty years would come to an end. Miss Magness noted that there was a tendency to ask “is the State going to take Moral Welfare work over?” But that “must be avoided – we are part of the State. …The people we are out to serve are more important than the “thing” which serves them.”
It is pleasing that Kruger report starts with the story of how the community in Devizes responded to lockdown and rightly credits Keith Brindle with creative thinking that speedily delivered a whole new partnership and way of working across the town that looks set to continue beyond the pandemic.
Kruger identifies a number of policy areas that lend themselves to being part of his proposed Community Right to Serve: healthcare, social care, early years provision, policing and crime prevention, employment support, refugee resettlement, adult education and community learning, social housing, and community energy and broadband initiatives. It is striking that most of these are areas of work in which churches across Dorset and Wiltshire, usually working ecumenically, have a long record of innovative and successful delivery. Dorset has a strong track-record in delivering innovative social enterprise projects, with thanks in particular to the creativity of Tim Crabtree in Bridport, and others who have established local development trusts, community land trusts, and other asset-based approaches to meeting local need. Charities including the Rural Community Councils and the Community Foundations, have also been enterprising in seizing opportunities, sowing the seeds of creative local projects, and generally enabling local communities to take control of their own destinies through an approach that the late Jane Raimes of Dorset Community Action used to characterise as ‘promote and float’.
So Kruger identifies quite a comprehensive range of activity that could be more firmly located in community provision, and as it happens, activity that has been well-served for many years by our local churches. What doesn’t feature in this report is extreme poverty and destitution.
Foodbanks don’t get a mention, and yet they have been at the heart of the response to lockdown in many of our communities. Universal Credit only features in the context of the services offered by Citizens Advice. Poverty is referred to in passing a few times, but I suspect that Kruger prefers the language of inequality, and wants to avoid the contentious issues around hunger and heating that have been the principal focus for social action by our churches for years now. Community support schemes are commended for delivering people’s shopping through lockdown but not for the delivery of food parcels to households that struggled with the loss of income.
The proposal of a ‘social covenant’ will have a resonance for many of us where the language of contract has become devalued through the expectation that of high levels of provision against ever-decreasing budgets. There is an honesty in recognising that the years of austerity and their impact on the resources of national and local government have, in turn, led to a diminution of the services traditionally run by voluntary and charitable organisations.
A new deal for the whole of civil society is clearly needed. The pandemic has heightened the sense of crisis. With well over a million people now relying on foodbanks to ward off the most desperate effects of poverty, and where tens of thousands of older people require additional support to deal with the costs of heating and get through the winter months, we have, over the past fifteen years, seen an alarming change in the needs that are being addressed through volunteering, charitable endeavour, and generous philanthropy.
Church House, the offices of the Diocese of Salisbury on Crane Street in Salisbury, occupies a building that once served as the city’s workhouse. We should all be concerned by the brutal fact that so much of civil society is once again deployed to alleviate the effects of poverty and destitution in our own neighbourhoods. That some of the foodbanks in our area are struggling to get by must surely add to our concern. Our sector is on the brink of collapse. Kruger’s report offers the possibility of a conversation with national government about how a way forward can be shaped so that we can ‘build back better’ as we work through the difficulties of the coming months. The ordinary cynicism that many of us might have will need to be set aside if there is to be any hope at all for those who struggle to get by, those who really are the most vulnerable in our communities.
As Miss Magness said in 1965, ‘The people we are out to serve are more important than the “thing” which serves them.’
Colin Brady 