In the 1980’s the response to the Thatcherite regime of outsourcing was for some progressives to suggest that the way forward to protect public service ethos would be to establish worker cooperatives or not-for-profit trusts. Margaret Hodge and others are rehashing the same arguments now in the name of new labour.
We saw these approaches in the 1980s with former council run residential care homes packaged into Trust models which were subsequently plagued by financial difficulties and with former bus drivers becoming co-operators only to be later bought out by big bus operators for thirty pieces of silver.
So it is refreshing to see an honest analysis in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jan/05/self-indulgent-charities-must-change that strips away the fantasy land perceptions that the third sector and charities can deliver public services better or cheaper than can be delivered by either national or local government.
The growth in reliance upon state funding of charities tells us some big messages which are that there are probably too many charitable organisations to be sustainable, they are hugely depend on public funding that will be seriously reduced both immediately and in the next three years and they are inefficient. This makes the third and charity sector less likely to succeed in delivering public services whilst budgets are being slashed.
But crucially it also demonstrates that far from delivering efficiencies for the public sector the inefficiencies for the third and charity sector will simply be added to the financial burdens of the commissioning or procuring public sector bodies as services fragment into ineffective bite size chunks to feed this dangerous social experiment.
Of course the Tories know this and the ‘economic’ liberals aka yellow back Tories know this as well. The real game is of course to open up the markets, stand back whilst the Big Society vision fails spectacularly and then the profit making companies can have a clear run at the public sector.
Shamefully the ‘big society’ supporters on the left are being duped into trying to reclaim the localism agenda when what they should be fighting for is truly public services not Trojan Horse routes to privatisation of the state.
