Local authorities and other statutory agencies are damaging relationships with local voluntary and community sectors and undermining the independence of voluntary action, reveals a new report from the National Coalition for Independent Action (NCIA).
The report is based on interviews with 16 voluntary agencies in West Sussex conducted by NCIA working with Adur Voluntary Action, one of 8 Councils for Voluntary Service in the county.
The report demonstrates the impact of the growing central government focus on the role of voluntary organisations as providers of public services, rather than their wider role in local civil society. This focus is unlikely to change whatever the outcome of the General Election.
Revealed is the tension between exhortations on the voluntary action sector to co-operate and “work in partnership”, yet simultaneously to compete aggressively for contracts. And the report documents the particular damage that is being done by these commissioning policies and processes, which turn independent voluntary and community organisations into sub-contractors, working to tight specifications within performance management frameworks. Commissioning encourages the view that organisations have to be big to survive, and forces voluntary agencies through wasteful and ineffective processes in the fight for funding.
The findings are relevant to voluntary agencies across the UK as these organisations increasingly find themselves operating within a straitjacket created by adherence to central government targets and local strategic plans.
Adrian Barritt, Chief Officer of Adur Voluntary Action said: “This research sounds a warning bell for the future of local voluntary action and civil society. We urge people to listen to the evidence, to challenge policies that are destroying our sense of place and community, and to develop creative alternatives.”
Respondents said that there is an urgent need to improve the means by which intelligence is gathered about these damaging changes to the local voluntary and community sector. They also felt that second tier organisations needed more robust structures and arrangements to represent the sector effectively and defend its autonomy and independence.
The report finishes with respondents’ suggestions for making things better – as individual organisations, through acting collectively, through more effective and accountable infrastructure support, and through changes that local statutory agencies can put into place themselves.
Andy Benson, Joint Convenor of the NCIA said: “This report provides the hard evidence of what we are being told on a daily basis by voluntary agencies across the country. In their attempts to bring voluntary agencies firmly under their control, to deliver out-sourced public services and to operate in prescriptive and inappropriate ways, statutory sector agencies are destroying the very things they say they value about voluntary action – flexibility, accessibility, experimentation, independence of action and the capacity to improve policy and practice. They are killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”
For press enquiries please contact:
Andy Benson
info@penandy.co.uk
‘The local state and voluntary action in West Sussex: the results of exploratory qualitative research’ (39 pages) is available from NCIA Info@penandy.co.uk.
A summary of the report can be read here