Civil Society, the OCS web site tells us, is made up of ‘charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations’. So both ‘civil society’ and ‘third sector’ fit.
Or do they? I like the idea of a third sector, at an apex of an equilateral triangle, counterbalancing and complementing the public and the private, equal in esteem. And civil society, as any student of developing countries will tell you, includes more than just ‘charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations’.
A woman from west Africa asked a conference in London earlier this year: ‘Who is this ‘civil society’, anyway? Why can’t we be represented by the trade unions, like we always have?’ Trade unions are part of civil society, by any definition, as are political parties, pressure groups and academic institutions. So too are philanthropists and informal volunteers, which remain within OCS but don’t apparently warrant a mention in their rubric. OCS will not oversee these other interests so ‘Office of Civil Society’ is not a good name.
Rant over. It’s not what OCS is called but what it does that should concern us.
Like any other government body, OCS is charged with helping reduce the deficit, so plans to cut funding by 40 per cent are being drawn up. Carrots are being dangled before ‘charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations’, such as more opportunities to win service delivery contracts and unprecedented ten-year funding agreements.
But these chalices have been poisoned.
Nick Hurd has said that unit costs for contractual outcomes will have to be reduced and that full cost recovery is to be jettisoned. Full cost recovery – the principle that charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations should not need to subsidise the services they provide on contract – has been hard won. It is the key to the professional standing achieved by third sector service providers in recent years. It is also inextricably bound up with the Compact, the recently refreshed memorandum of understanding between government and the sector. When Francis Maude told his ministerial colleagues that decisions to cut funding to the sector should be ‘Compact compliant’ did he really mean ‘except for full cost recovery?’
It gets worse. OCS’s 42 ‘strategic partners’ are to be reduced to 15 in 2011. There will be less money for grants. Arbitrary new rules will ensure that no group gets more than half of its funding from OCS nor more than £500,000 a year from them.
Four organisations currently receive more than 70 per cent of their funding from OCS and no fewer than seven, including most third sector umbrella groups, are caught by the half a million rule. Six of these could lose up to a million pounds a year each, but one organisation will feel that it is being especially targeted.
Over four years V has generated imagination, enthusiasm and volunteering opportunities for almost a million young people. The greatest proportion of its £39 million direct funding last year came from government. Earlier this month the OCS and the Department for Education between them made an immediate cut of £10 million in V’s funding, leading to over 90 redundancies.
If this is a taste of things to come, who’s next for the chop?
Unless, the OCS have changed their mind the % limit is going to be 25% not 50%. Although there’s exceptional situation where this limit is too arbitrary, in most cases it’s right. Many OCS strategic partners are, in theory, membership organisations. It’s difficult to be a credible, independent voice for members if you get 50% of your funding in a block grant from the government.
In many cases, strategic partner funding is only one part of the funding organisations that get from the OCS/OTS, let alone the state as a whole.
There’s some fantastic organisations on the current list – SSE and Social Firms UK make particularly important, unique contributions to the social enterprise sector – but the overall size of it reflects a situation where there’s too many umbrella bodies too heavily dependent on state support.
In some cases, organisations are effectively funded by the government to carry out the core activity of lobbying the government – and in recent years have done so with lots of reference to the government and very little reference to the needs of their members.
It’s a shame there’s going to be less money available overall but, in general, a shake of OCS funding is very good thing.