Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 1

The government’s ‘Giving’ green paper is frou-frou

(but important frou-frou)
January 12th, 2011 by Malcolm Payne

The government’s green (consultation) paper on ‘Giving’ is frou-frou (see the end of
the post for a definition if you need to); even so I am going to spend quite a bit of
space on it. This is because it gives us an important clue and direction sign to how the
ConDems understand the idea of the ‘big society’ and how they are going to
implement it. It also has considerable implications for how end-of-life care is going to
be supported and funded by the present government, since most of it is charitable.

The paper is on the internet at:

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/Giving-Green-Paper.pdf

So you see that it comes from the Cabinet Office and is a document that applies across
government and implements the government’s philosophy, rather than just being
about a particular department’s interets. It is, therefore, an important general signal
about what the government is trying to do.

Starting point
The government’s Green Paper on Giving is mainly white, but has shifted to a new
yeuchy-yellowish-green theme colour. I presume their marketing people think this is
cool; I think it’s like vomit.

Green papers are theoretically consultations about policy. However, do not be misled.
You are not being consulted about the policy; you are being asked to come up with
more ideas than the government has come up with to do what it has decided to do.
What you cannot do (or you can but they obviously won’t take any notice) is say:
‘Well actually I wouldn’t mind paying a smidgeon more tax to help provide state
services, if everyone is going to pay according to their wealth and income, and
especially if bankers are going to stop leaching off the country and pay their own
way’. No, instead you can have ideas about how they can arrange to get money and
more volunteers to support the services they’re not going to provide, through your
donations or money and time to charities and similar organisations, provided they’re
run like businesses. Not, God forbid, to the state.

A good way, according to them, is to take a slice of your money every time you use
your bank’s hole in the wall to pay presumably to a few charities that the government
has selected to do the things that it won’t be doing. I wonder what the banks are going
to charge for that? Presumably proportionately more than the Inland Revenue (sorry
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) would cost for adding the same amount on to
my tax bill. Well, don’t worry, because on principle I, along with everyone else I
know, will not be cooperating with this in any way at all, so the banks are not going to
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 2

be overcharging me for that as well. This is a worrying politicisation of giving to

charity, which is going to turn a lot of people off, certainly a lot of people I know.

The real weakness of this document is that it is written by people who are in
marketing and believe in it. Frou_frou.com will lead you to a heaven in which cool,
computer-linked , computer-kinked all-sharing people who have lots of frou-frous that
don’t matter too much to them will contribute their frou-frous that you didn’t know
you needed and improve your community custard tart.

I repeat what I’ve often said on this blog: the voluntary sector is created by what
people, voluntarily, themselves want to do. It would not be created for what the
government wants to do; if the government wants it done, it should do it. In a small
way, the voluntary sector sometimes gets money from the government to provide
some of its services. Most voluntary organisations don’t do this. Those that do, like
hospices, get a fairly small proportion of their income from government. A few
(usually noisy) voluntary organisations get most of their money from government.
They have to be noisy because they have to influence policy to make sure they
continue to get that support. But as soon as the government sees the main purpose of
voluntary activity as providing what it wants to provide, then it ceases to be voluntary,
because it ceases to be free to decide on how and what it is going to help.

The government seems to think that by setting up lots of local community

organisations, social enterprises and supporting voluntary organisations, they will be
able to have a flock of providers keen to reduce the monolithic character of
government health, social care and other things. But the problem is that independent
organisations do not necessarily do what you want them to; the government cannot
implement their policies by telling independent organisations what to do. The history
of edgy NHS relationships with GPs (whose practices are small social enterprises that
have been in existence for more than 60 years) should tell them this. And then, of
course, all these little local organisations may sell out to big multinationals. Or big
multinationals may be preferred providers because they’re less trouble to contract
with. But they also, of course, have considerable power to do what they like. Then,
like banks, if they are providing most of your services, you can’t let them go bust. I
see 2035 as the date for the bailout of the health and social care multinationals.

You’ll have gathered that I don’t come to this Green Paper very enthusiastically, but I
have nerved myself up to it, because as major providers of excellent services to the
public, palliative care organisations and hospices, not to mention other voluntary
sector organisations have a very real interest in how the government is going to go
about this. And our patients and everyone else has an interest in how they think they
are going to make the ‘big society’ work.

The context: a culture change

The Introduction to ‘Giving’ (it’s not just money, it’s your energy and commitment)
puts this bit of their policy in context; this is helpful direction-setting, trying to
identify the network of footpaths that will lead to the big society. The aim is:
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 3

- Empowering communities – policies and actions to encourage or allow local

communities to do things for themselves.
- Opening up public services – allowing (in this order) charities, social
enterprises, private companies, employee cooperatives to take on running
public services
- Encouraging social action – encouraging people to give time, money, assets,
knowledge and skills ‘to support good causes and make life better for all’.

They will do this through:

- a localism bill, giving people the power to change their local community
- public service reform, allowing people more involvement in local services.

The main values expressed are to ‘acknowledge the limits of government’,

emphasising ‘the role of reciprocity’ and to use technology, particularly ‘social
media’ (things like Facebook and Twitter). There is a big emphasis on culture change,
the assumption being that we don’t do enough collectively for other people. They
hope to get local communities to play an important role and businesses to provide
‘support’ by enabling their employees to do more.

On ‘community’, the sociologist in me comments that this is all about local

communities rather than communities of interest (people who share similar interests)
or, indeed, online communities, which sociologists have recently begun to recognise.
Bearing in mind their interest in using new technology for many of the things in this
paper, it’s rather surprising the paper seems to miss out on this; to a ConDem
obviously only ‘local’ counts as community. This is fifty years behind the
sociological times.

There is also nothing in this about families and carers. Not, I think, that they are
against family and carer support, but the emphasis in this interpretation of ‘giving’ is
on organised support outside the family. I wonder why this is, since all the research
shows that people are more likely to offer support to relatives than neighbours and
more distant members of their community. I also don’t think that localism necessarily
generates mutuality and shared interest; we get more support from people with shared
interests, wherever they are. Social networking connects with this: some people make
their connections in ways that do not slot in to localism. It also fails to tell you how all
this new giving is going to interact with families and carers; it’s too busy pulling
together examples of cool things that it wants to do to think and plan about how it fits
in with the most important forms of support in our communities. Alongside families
and carers all this sort of thing is frou-frou.

On the other hand, social networking has to be taken a step further than computer or
mobile or Twitter communication; it requires real human interaction to cement it into
a group of people prepared to take action in some way. I think we have to be more
thoughtful about how we turn technological social networking into interpersonal
social networking. That transfer from networking to action cannot be taken for
granted. Some of that reciprocity has also to be there and it has to be planned for and
worked at.
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 4

And, on top of all that, I go back to the government getting what they want. The
whole principle of any kind of giving is that givers choose what they give, how they
give it and what they give it for. The whole history of social action is littered with
examples of governments encouraging community participation and then finding that
what the communities want from their participation is something the government
doesn’t like. As a result, participation gets taken away pretty smartly. That is going to
happen here too, if the frou-frou social marketing-speak ever gets taken towards
anything real on the ground.

The people I talk to are saying fairly clearly that the government is not going to get
what it’s looking for from these initiatives. First of all, people won’t give if they
believe the government is giving up. Second, it takes a lot of hard work to create
community initiatives and people are not going to do it for objectives that they don’t
agree with and that don’t really benefit them. A local community organiser said to me
a couple of weeks ago that she wasn’t doing newsletters and trekking round the streets
in her estate just to do something that she wasn’t interested in and that the government
should be doing anyway. Looking at the recent social care ‘vision’ document, I
commented on the idea that dealing with adult safeguarding (stopping granny-bashing
in normal-speak) through a neighbourhood watch model will not work. People are just
not going to sit in the front rooms and check up on neighbours who neglect their
elderly relatives. They expect to be able to report it to officialdom and for there to be
a lot of well-trained officials to do something about it.

The main actions

To achieve its desired culture change, this sections tells us what the government is
going to do. Perhaps you won’t see this in the typography, so I’ll point it out; it comes
as an acronym or possibly a nemonic: GIVES. This kind of cutesy stuff turns me off
government documents. It makes it more marketing frou-frou than an effort at
engaging me, and I do not like to be marketed at; I don’t know a lot of people who do.

Here it is:

- Great opportunities, so it’s exciting and convenient to do giving;

- Information, so we know how to go about it;
- Visibility, so we see other people giving and do more ourselves. This is a
sort of ‘keep up with the Jones-Smythes’ on the giving front, obviously
we’ll all want to do what our friends are doing.
- Exchange and reciprocity, so we all see the benefits of giving much more.
- Support communities and charities to take on more responsibility and scale
up what they’re doing.

Great opportunities

You’ve seen the press comment on easy giving using new technology. Examples are;
every time you click on the internet, every time you get money from the hole in the
wall, rounding up to a pound every time you make a card payment, easier donations
through the internet, on your mobile phone, volunteering slivers of time from home
through the internet. Yes, come on, offer your sliver of time via your computer to the
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 5

person dying in the next bed to me; I’m sure the highly qualified nurse will find it
very useful. Volunteering is real people in real places when required, not an exciting
marketing concept. And real professionals have to provide the services, and not spend
all their time organising slivers of time from people on their computers at home.

Other ideas are creating ‘trigger moments’ that catch people’s attention, getting civil
servants and local government officers to volunteer, for example providing training.
Dying as a trigger moment might get a lot of people’s interest, but I happen to think a
service providing for people’s needs during dying and bereavement is demeaned by
seeing it as a ‘trigger moment’ in a marketing campaign for increased giving to
charity.

From the point of view of an ordinary, possibly donating, member of the public and
from the point of view of the common or garden hospice in their local community, I’d
like to know how I choose who I’m donating to. Will it be some government-selected
charities that they like, perhaps those that are helping them fill in for their cuts in
services? Or will I be able to select any of the thousands of local charities for my
slivers of money and time so conveniently donated? I can see that every local bank
might be able to offer a choice of, say, a local community fund as well as three or four
national charities to choose from in the fourth pages of my hole in the wall process
(which already has too many buttons to press to get my cash), but how is that fund
going to choose the organisations that get the money locally?

We’d all better start buttering up the bank managers who design what charities are on
the front page of the bank machines, or fund organisers who decide on the local
grants. I’ve actually done that job for a local fund years ago, and what it led to is a
few thousand a year at most, more often just a hundred of two, for many local
charities. And anyone who’s worked for a grant-giving charity (or government
department) will tell you they spend much of their lives with people pitching clever
re-designs of their organisation to meet the latest cool criteria that teh fund-gier has
come up with so that they can market their exciting grant-giving to the outside world
and the trustees. And it always leads to grants given for projects, in the same way that
foundations provide now. This is not the way the provide funding for solid continuing
local care services. It’s likely to be no good at all to your local hospice spending a few
million a year on supporting dying and bereaved people with a consistent service.

Then on to volunteering. The offensive paragraph about volunteering is apparently

drawn from the Commission on the Future of Volunteering; did this really say that
volunteers provide ‘a personal, human touch that staff might be prevented from
providing, making services feel genuinely caring’? Obviously, nurses, doctors,
chaplains and social workers can’t provide genuine human caring according to the
Commission. Or at least the way some ignorant marketing professional working for
the government has re-written it. Neither can they provide ‘innovation and a fresh
perspective’ and ‘a source of local and other knowledge’. Not too knowledgeable all
these qualified staff, and of course our nurses and health care assistants doing shifts
all day and night must be living miles away from the hospice and have no local
knowledge at all. In case you didn’t realise, that sentence was ironic. Perhaps the staff
will be so driven because of all the cuts in services that only volunteers will be able to
do anything human. I’m sure that sentence was ironic too. And perhaps that one was.
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 6

One of the laughable examples is how another of the government’s green papers aims
to stimulate people into local social action in providing effective punishment,
rehabilitation and sentencing of offenders. I must make a note to read that document,
because my lifetime’s experience (I was working in offender services forty years ago
was on the board of one more recently and retain a concern) is that people do not want
to get engaged in voluntary working with the nasties in life. The number of people
wanting to help punish, rehabilitate or sentence offenders through local community
action is likely to be infinitesimal (except in the local teenager castration clinic, but
probably the government is not going to want to go that far). I can see that loads of
people might enjoy being a volunteer for the Olympics (another example). It’s time-
limited, it’s nice, it’s in the summer, so they’ve had a lot of applications. And, yes,
hospices might be OK because although people do tend to say that they can’t imagine
working in a place where a lot of people die, when they’ve experienced the services,
they find it interesting and worthwhile. But there are not going to be a mass of
volunteers to work with middle-aged alcoholics, or twenty-something druggies or
prostitutes.

And I’d forgotten we’re going to have ‘National Citizen Service’ for over 16s to give
their time. I’m sure lots of them will, particularly since so many are going to be
unemployed and not going to university or getting education maintenance grants: but
are we really going to run the country on this basis? Apparently so, because there’s
going to be some funny money to support ‘a volunteer infrastructure programme’ for
organisations that are recruiting, training and supporting volunteers. That’s
presumably to make up for all the local authority grants that are going to be
withdrawn from local volunteer centres that have been doing this job for decades (I
ran one in the 1980s and there are several very good ones in the St Christopher’s area,
that have been imaginative in supporting volunteers with special needs) Of course, the
government knows about these organisations, but presumably also knows that it needs
to come up with some realistic financial support for volunteering, because it’s not
cheap, it involves a lot of people to support and train volunteers effectively. The
problem is, I think, that training and support is best done close to the service that the
volunteers are working in; on the hospice ward, in the hospice home care services, in
the day centre or chaplaincy. Some generic support agency does not really have the
expertise in the job to be done. Of course, I’d forgotten that only volunteers have
knowledge and the human touch, so it’ll be all right; sorry.

Information

One of the ways slivers of time and money is going to work, apparently, is to have
websites set up for volunteers to apply through and for charities to show what they’re
doing and for donors to track the impact of their contributions. I’m sure there’ll be
funny money to support this initiative too, so what this means is that there’s going to
be lots of jobs for redundant local authority workers organising local charities to
provide information about how all this money and time is being used, and they’ll need
even more volunteers, because the staff are going to be run ragged providing all this
evidence of impact. My job’s safe: there’ll be many more audits to persecute doctors,
nurses and social workers with so we can feed information to these websites to
demonstrate to everyone what they’re doing.
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 7

Here’s an interesting point; ‘There’s much that we can do as government to make sure
the right information exists’ (p 12). What can this mean? Is there loads of information
existing that’s not right, and the government’s going to correct it? Or is it: ‘Ve haf
vays to ensure zat your information fits vat ve vant it to be’. Here’s the answer: ‘The
volunteering initiative ‘Work Together’ was launched earlier this year to encourage
all unemployed people to consider volunteering and to ensure that people have access
to the information they need to find local opportunities’ Ah, so it’s: ‘Ve haf vays for
you scroungers to find out how voluntary arbeit mach frei’.

And then there’s transparency. Apparently, people are not concentrating on the ‘right
metrics’ (p 12) in deciding who they are going to donate to and support. Ah, so it
really is: ‘Ve haf vays of making sure zat your information fits vat ve vant you to
sink’.

Visibility

Logically, if you’re going to make everything transparent (see above), you’re going to
have problems with visibility. This section is about making sure people are aware
through social and traditional media that it’s OK to give time and money to charity,
and that all their friends are doing it too. And celebrities that they’ve heard of. Delia
will be tweeting every time she buys her eggs: ‘I’ve rounded up the price and given
the money to the anti-obesity project for community cooks’. In case you hadn’t
counted that’s only 78 characters, so there’s plenty of space for the donation website
URL. But I suppose Delia, while trusted, may not be exactly cool with the younger
set: Cheryl Cole, then, but while she may be supporting anti-obesity, it probably
won’t be community cooks.

But don’t worry, the government is going to lead by example. That’s actually a sub-
section heading; I have to quote this in its entirety:

Government has the opportunity to encourage its employees to lead by

example, and in so doing help build new social norms. Plans are
already underway to develop a ‘civic service’, whereby civil servants
are encouraged to contribute to their communities. Our aim is to
provide civil servants with opportunities to use their skills to support
civil society organisations and to play their part in growing the Big
Society. We will do this by promoting social action as a means of
professional development for civil servants, and providing better
recognition for those giving their time.

Phew, that’s all right then, the government is not going to lead by example: George
(Gideon Oliver, Wikipedia tells me) Osborne is not going to be at my bedside to
provide that human touch as I shuffle off this mortal coil, they’re only going to
encourage their employees to do it. I thought there weren’t going to be any surplus
civil servants, so how are they going to be building new social norms from their
central London base in Whitehall? And if there were, they don’t have any worthwhile
skills, do they? According to the government, skills only come from business.

Are they including all the hospital nurses and doctors alongside the local jobcentre
clerks among their employees? The NHS as a really big government employer is
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 8

obviously going to be a big target for this sort of project; not really worth it to get
volunteers for the London area from the comparatively few pen-pushers (sorry, keep
up to date Malcolm: keyboard-tappers) they have in Whitehall. Might be good to have
nationwide civil servants from the NHS, though – judging by Casualty, I’m sure local
hospital doctors and nurses could all fit in an extra shift at the local hospice once
they’ve completed their undemanding day jobs. And all those unemployed PCT civil
servants too.

They’re also going to promote the charities they work with on government websites –
yes, Nick Clegg and his civil servants want to tell you that their favourite charity
‘Keep your word at any cost’ is a really top-notch place to volunteer and donate your
hard-earned slivers of money. No, on second thoughts, it will have to be like cigarette
packets. They discovered that the only way to give credibility was to say: ‘The Chief
Medical Officer says smoking kills’ (I’ve never seen a cigarette packet in recent years
so I don’t actually know what it says, but the point is it was definitely a no-no to send
a message from the government). Being approved of by a government in decline (in
three or four years time, of course) is going to be even less of a recommendation.

I also just have to quote the next one:

Finally, we want to consider whether we should be trying to establish

social norms directly. For instance, some have advocated that we aim
to make giving one per cent of income a social norm – but others
would say that the level should be far higher, as much as ten per cent,
which is in line with tithing levels. And there are similar questions
about levels of giving of time. The government can play a role in
creating the choice architecture and entrenching norms for giving… (p
15, emphasis original)

Well if giving 10% should be the social norm, it’s all right to put taxes up by 10% to
pay for government services, isn’t it? But I agree I don’t want to pay it to the
government. I’d happily pay it to my local council or the local NHS though, because
they provide really useful direct services.

And ‘choice architecture’? Did anyone tell them about meaningless business jargon
being a real turn-off. Either they all speak like this, or nobody with any connection
with the real world read this before they published it.

Exchange and reciprocity

We’re nearing the end now. Here we go again, a quotation:

While powerful motivators in many situations, the prospect of feeling good about
ourselves, making new friends or gaining experience, are not enough on their own to
encourage us to give in new ways, to new causes or for non-givers to start.

So making a contribution to good in the world is not a relevant motivator then; bit
inconsistent with the rest of the document perhaps? Therefore:
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 9

Peer-to-peer lending and financing platforms like Zopa, IndiGoGo and

Sponsume allow people to give money to individuals or projects who
post requests for funding online. They enable a clear sense of
connection between sponsors and those needing funds, and allow for
reciprocity – in the form of benefits in kind, or a real financial return
on money invested.

So sponsor St Soandso’s Hospice and we’ll reserve a bed for your wife when she’s
dying. That won’t work because nobody thinks that they or their wife is going to die
and she might not die for ages yet. And are only the donors going to get the beds? ‘I’d
better get a quick donation in now my wife’s got cancer’. Working for a hospice, I
have met some people who think this way, but it’s not the way I want end-of-life care
provided in this country. The government shulds realise that this form of reciprocity is
just not a realistic approach for many of the activities that charities provide for.

Then there is a list of organisations like freecycle that have come up with a good and
useful idea (for those who don’t know, it’s an e-bay-like website where you give
away things you don’t need to other people who do ). I know young people for whom
this has been a godsend to find free furniture and household items; it’s a mutual
Salvation Army clothing and furniture store on the internet without the SA as an
intermediary. The government would like to encourage more of this. But such ideas
are round the edges of life. I want to give away some palliative care books, but it
doesn’t seem to have worked: perhpas death and dying freecycle could pass them on
to someone who can use them. If you’re dying or bereaved, you want a coherent,
consistent service available from trusted people. Yes, it’s supportive to get reliable
information from the internet, but at the centre of the service there need to be well-
qualified competent people; you know, those human being types that we used to see
around so much.

Finally, support

People in communities will be encouraged to ‘step up’ to take on responsibilities. This

business motivational jargon implies that they wouldn’t be able to and they’re not
prepared to. In forty years of being involved with voluntary organisations, I’ve seen
people prepared to ‘step up’ to massive responsibilities if it connects with them and
they believe in it. Let’s be clear that nobody is going to ‘step up’ to do what they
think the government should be doing. People are not all failures in community
commitment, in fact most people are very committed to helping others around them,
but on a human-to-human basis with people they know and about issues that they feel
connected to and believe they can make a contribution with.

So, here comes the funny money; since this is all about marketing, I’m going to start
calling it funny munny.

Funny munny 1: a ‘community first’ programme will provide grants to help local
people implement projects and plans (and employ all those unemployed people on
short-term contracts until the project is up-and-running, when they can move on to the
next project).
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 10

Funny munny 2: £50m of ‘matched funding’ to support community endowments.

Matched with what? Local business is going down the tubes, self-interested banks
won’t lend, so they certainly won’t donate (how can they justify it to their
shareholders across our globalised world?) and more people are going to be cautious
because they’re more likely to be unemployed. And endowments don’t lead to
immediate projects, that people can’t use the internet to track their slivers of time and
other contributions so that they can see that they’re ‘making a difference’. They imply
a build-up of funds over decades, so the banks and financial services can invest it to
produce income for the future. So, is this really a goody for the banks? If it is, let’s
remember that investments are not earning real rates on interest at the moment, and
stocks and shares have not increased in value for quite a while. There will be no
community endowment, because endowments don’t grow in the present economic
climate.

Funny munny 3: A ‘community organisers’ programme to train 5,000 people to

‘galvanise’ (p 17) people around them to be more active. What this will be is more
money to employ unemployed community work lecturers or support courses in
universities and colleges which are struggling because nobody is funded to do adult
and further education. On short-term training projects, rather than building up solid,
long-term education courses.

Then there’s ‘Every Business Commits’. This was a Cameron announcement at the
Business in the Community AGM in December, so you may have missed it through
not being focused on community development in the run-up to Christmas, which is
the time most people make donations to charities, so I can see you’ll have been busy.
It appears on their website:
http://www.bitc.org.uk/business_and_the_big_society/business_commits/index.html
as a series of recommendations by Bitc that all businesses should pursue; the
government seems to have taken it up. The five main points are:

- Reduce carbon and protect the environment

- Support your community
- Improve skills and help create jobs
- Improve quality of life and well being
- Support small and medium-sized enterprises

Alongside gems like ‘pay suppliers on time’ which funnily enough over decades no
one has been able to get government organisations or big businesses to do, the
supporting your community stuff is what the Giving green paper covers; these
proposals are all circular. To improve quality of life and well-being, the following
clear and concrete proposals are:

- Make your workplace more family-friendly and offer flexible working

wherever possible
- Take further steps to improve the health and well-being of your workforce
- Support diversity in the workplace.

This is the equivalent of: ‘Now I do hope you chappies are going to do jolly nice
things in the future’.
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 11

But don’t worry, it’s not just business they’re supporting. There’s going to be more
funny munny to help charities and social enterprises encourage volunteering:

Funny munny 4: The volunteering match fund of £10m to match private donations
that support volunteering projects. I can already see voluntary organisations
redesigning their accounts and talking to donors to prove they’ve got donations
coming in to support volunteering. This is just another wheeze to take some money
from state services and claim they’re supporting voluntary effort.

Funny munny 5: A Volunteering Infrastructure Programme of £42.4m (that is £10m a

year again; you’ll remember I mentioned this above) to provide brokerage and ‘front-
line’ support to volunteers that organise and manage them. This is another job
creation programme for unemployed people to shift from public sector employment to
supporting volunteering.

Funny munny 6: They’ve already announced a Big Society Bank that will ‘capitalise
the market’ (p. 18) for social investment. If this is like Chris Huhne’s similar project
supporting eco-friendly projects, I presume the Treasury will stamp on it in case it
overspends and nobody ever repays its loans, so it will not become a genuine bank
that can borrow money and support social projects, but will be another grant-making
scheme to help ‘social enterprises’. So I count this as more funny munny. This is not
for charities because of course they are not real businesses, even if they provide useful
services, and so therefore cannot be capitalised. I suspect there might be a bit of
corporate redesign among the aspects of charities that can turn part of themselves into
social enterprises.

Funny munny 7: A Transition Fund of £100m to help charities hit by local authority
voluntary sector cuts over the next financial year, until the massive growth in business
and community support for voluntary organisations in the new Big Society replaces it
(you may think that was another ironic comment, but it’s actually not far from what
the document assumes to be the truth). Since they say that local authorities should not
be cutting stuff because they should be more efficient, it’s not quite clear to me how
they’re going to allocate this. Hence, I designate this too as funny munny. But I
presume at the end of the year, the big society won’t have arrived yet (just slightly
delayed of course) so I anticipate an outcry at the withdrawal of this support which
will embarrass the government, leading to the ‘transitional support’ becoming ‘pro-
transitional’ and in later years ‘post-transitional’. Another wait and see there.

Finally, there is the suggestion (they are consulting on this; you may have a view) that
they will make foundations pay out a minimum every year. So this is the new free
choice Britain: ‘Ve haf vays of making you pay, even if you don’t vant to’. There no
suggestion of a problem with this limitation on the freedom of decision-making of
foundations. Apparently some other countries do it; I’d like to know where and I’d be
interested to know how it works, because my long experience of people who make
donations to charities is that they really, really want to support things that mean
something to them, and they don’t like being told what to do by government.

But I wonder how the government thinks they’re going to do it, since they haven’t
managed to get the much richer banks to lend, or even reduce their bonuses. Of
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 12

course, foundations are much less powerful in the economy, when bankers won’t
make ‘yes’ as an answer, so perhaps it’s easier to bully them.

And another aspect of free choice is venture philanthropy: get a grant from our tame
foundation stacked full of businessmen and management consultants who are no
longer employable because the government is cutting back on business consultants,
and they will interfere with your objectives and management because being a real
business they will have much better management skills than your pygmies. Many of
their staff probably come from banks and financial services companies for example,
real examples of entrepreneurial skill. Sorry, that’s another ironic comment; I must
stop this. Perhaps some charities might go for this, because it might be better than
having local government and NHS bureaucrats interfering with their objectives and
management on grounds not of ability but democratic accountability for their grant-
aid.

Now you mention it, there’s not been much so far about democratic accountability in
this green paper. Of course, you don’t need that if everyone is building the big society
outside government; nobody has to be democratically accountable to anyone. Except
that I suspect the government is going to continue to take a very close interest in the
big society doing what it wants, not what people in the big society want. This is
because I don’t think they can quite imagine that some people don’t think like them,
so it will be quite a shock when quite of lot of people start creating a big society that
disagrees with the government. It’s happened with every other community
development initiative in the world.

The supporting evidence

This account covers about half the pagination of the green paper. So what about the
rest? The next big section offers the evidence in support of the proposals. This can be
summarised as evidence that there is wide variation in giving across the population,
and a lot of them simply aren’t asked, so if you can get at more people they will give
more money and time. Also, as NCVO has said in one of its reports, if you make the
‘ask’ clear and attractive, you will get better support. Then there is a comparison
between the UK and other countries: the UK already does better than most developed
countries in getting people to give to charity and 70% of people volunteer in some
way. The US does a lot better, but has a completely different culture; presumably the
government’s culture change is designed to emulate that culture.

However, there are a string of statistics here which show that many people don’t give
money (or time but most of this section is about money and shows where the
government’s main emphasis is) and there is mention of making it easier to make tax
reclaims, to give larger sums, to engage a wider range of corporate donors and so on.
All of this is predicated on the evidence that some people (or corporations) give, but
more people (or corporations) don’t. The paper therefore makes the assumption that
more people and corporations would give if giving was marketed to them better.
Marketing rules OK.

I think it might have something to do with how rich the potential corporate donors are
(I notice manufacturing and media companies are not big givers and I suspect this is
 Commentary on the green paper on ‘Giving’ - 13

because they are under the competition cosh, so can’t afford it) or what they can
achieve by donations (I notice financial services give a lot, possibly to try to improve
their seriously tarnished image, and they and other retail companies need to gain
public approval and charitable giving is a useful marketing device to this end).

Consultation
At the end, there are several pages of consultation questions. These are more about
how they can do what they intend to do, so mostly are not worth answering if you
don’t accept the basic premises of the way they talk. I don’t, so I’m not going to
bother with them.

The government believes that they can get community involvement through stronger
marketing of their opinion that everything would be better if everything was run like a
business but not by government. My view is that community work is a longstanding
and well-established profession, with a long history of achievement across the world.
It has demonstrated again and again that to engage people in community and mutual
support you have to make a personal and human connection with them and get them
involved in things they believe in and can make a personal commitment to through
social relationships with like-minded people. Marketing is not going to work. And
social networking has to develop an interpersonal interface to extend its reach into
real community support.

On frou-frou
You may be wondering what frou-frou is. My internet dictionary says: 1. Fussy or
showy dress or ornamentation. 2. A rustling sound, as of silk.

Yes; that’s what I think of the thinking behind this document.