Today we release three more reports from our Inquiry into the Future of Voluntary Services.
The first – The Rise and Influence of Social enterprise, Social Investment and Public Service Mutuals from Les Huckfield of Glasgow Caledonian University. This elegant review documents how New Labour and Coalition governments, within a framework of neo-liberal thinking, have … Continue reading
Today we launch the next two reports from our Inquiry into the Future of Voluntary Services.
The first “Outsourcing and the Voluntary Sector” by Laird Ryan explores the motivations, progress and impact of the Coalition government’s drive to privatise public services and how this has impacted on the voluntary sector in England. In surveying the … Continue reading
The privatisation of our public services and common wealth is taking place with stealth and subterfuge, and at a great pace. Our money is going to multi-nationals such as SERCO, currently under investigation for falsification of data and sub-standard services. But there are ways to expose what is going on and get it into the … Continue reading
In what is going to be a pretty massive release, we have today uploaded the first two of sixteen reports from our Inquiry into the Future of Voluntary Services. The general background to our Inquiry is provided by Dexter Whitfield’s ‘The Ideological Context’, which sketches out how neo-liberal ideas have damaged public services and … Continue reading
Despite legislation, campaigning and some additional resources over the last decades, inequalities remain, are getting worse, with xenophobia on the rise. This trend has not been halted by voluntary services. With current governments and ideologies there is no sign of a change of direction. In this landscape what is happening to elders from black and … Continue reading
Inequality and poverty is increasing in the UK. Policies that cut rights and entitlements, and dismantle and privatise public services, make this worse. Voluntary and community agencies cannot be silent on this. They must speak out and act alongside those campaigning to stop this damage. It is the job of charities to fight poverty and … Continue reading
‘What are charities for?’ was the theme of last Monday’s Radio 4 ‘Analysis’ programme. 25 minutes of powerful evidence, including from interviews with us, set out the stall of how state co-option and contracting has sapped the independence of charities and all but extinguished the fire in their belly to fight for social justice. But … Continue reading
In an important new paper, Ursula Murray, from Birkbeck University of London, addresses many of the key issues of our ‘Inquiry into the Future of Voluntary Services’. Entitled ‘To what extent is the voluntary sector colonised by neo-liberal thinking?’, the paper examines the involvement of the voluntary sector in the dismantling of the welfare state, … Continue reading
The second brief for our work on the Inquiry into the Future of Public Services is now available as a download. You can access it here. This sets out some of the questions that need to be answered about the role of the voluntary sector in the provision of public services. Our work on … Continue reading
‘Social enterprise’ is the new must-have brand for voluntary agencies wanting to prosper under the Coalition government and ’social investment’ is all the rage, held out as the antidote to austerity. But these are slippery ideas and promoted by a Government that is hell bent on cutting public services, contracting out what is left and … Continue reading