Policy paper

Ministerial foreword

Published 9 August 2018

Applies to England

This Strategy is intended to help government strengthen the organisations, large and small, which hold our society together.

It is a response to the opportunity of the moment, when new technologies and ways of working suggest extraordinary new possibilities － as well as threats － for the way we live and work.

To meet the opportunities and threats of the future a new approach is needed that gives greater freedom and responsibility to our communities.

We believe that civil society is central to this new approach.

Despite all the pressures civil society is under, it does an extraordinary job, and is in fact growing in reach and impact.

Big societal challenges, including the future of social care, community integration, and housing, are being tackled through solutions that bring together public services, businesses, and communities. New providers are taking responsibility for youth services, domestic abuse services, addiction services, and offender rehabilitation services. New models are developing for funding and running libraries as well as children’s services.

All of this is happening because of the resourcefulness of the British people. We remain at or near the top of the global league tables for philanthropy and volunteering. The UK is the world leader in innovative social finance models and, with the US, the joint world leader in ‘tech for good’ innovations. Young people increasingly expect to work for employers delivering social value. Businesses are rediscovering the original purpose of the corporation: to deliver value to society, not just quarterly returns to shareholders. Across the country, in multiple ways, people are stepping forward to take responsibility for the society they live in.

The government has a vision of the UK with better connected communities, more neighbourliness, and businesses which strengthen society. Technology enables strong communities rather than creating disconnection and isolation.

The contribution of young people to a thriving society is recognised - the next generation has the ability to help the country tackle its most urgent challenges and deliver a better future for all of us.

People are empowered to take responsibility for their neighbourhoods. Power is decentralised so that local officials and professionals are properly accountable to local people, and trusted to do their job without bureaucratic interference. The provision of services is seen as the business of the community, not solely the responsibility of government, and providers are drawn from a broad range of suppliers from the public sector and beyond. Alongside public funding, private finance is used imaginatively to support services, stimulate innovation, and reduce risk for the taxpayer.

These developments have the ultimate effect of building a sense of shared identity, improving integration among the people of a place and also among the people of the UK as a whole.

The Civil Society Strategy is intended to set a direction for government policy. A group of civil society leaders wrote to us saying that “[the Strategy] should not be focused on what the government thinks the sector should do… instead [it] should set out how the government can support and enable civil society to achieve its potential.” They also suggested that the Strategy should be “living and breathing”, not a final communication, but the beginning of a process of policy development and collaboration.^{[footnote 1]}

This is exactly what we intend to do. This Strategy is designed to complement the work of the Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society led by Dame Julia Unwin, which is deliberately independent of government. Our purpose is to cast a vision of how government can help strengthen and support civil society in England. It will be complemented by the government’s strategy on tackling loneliness, which will set out how we will support strong connections between people.

We want to thank everyone who took part in our Civil Society Strategy engagement exercise. We hope the people who contributed will recognise their influence in this Strategy. We agree with the civil society leader who said that “the process you use to get to the future is the future you get.”^{[footnote 2]} The future we want is one of collaboration and ‘co-creation’. This Strategy is therefore a contribution from government to the task of co-creating the civil society we want in the years to come.

We look forward to working together.

The Rt Hon Jeremy Wright MP

Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Tracey Crouch MP

Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Sport and Civil Society

1. Letter to Tracey Crouch co-ordinated by Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales, 17 June 2018, signed by Paul Streets (Lloyds Bank Foundation), Vicky Browning (Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations), Carol Mack (Association of Charitable Foundations), Judith Brodie (Bond), Caron Bradshaw (Charity Finance Group), Kathy Evans (Children England), Anne Fox (Clinks), Debra Allcock Tyler (Directory of Social Change), Peter Lewis (Institute of Fundraising), Tony Armstrong (Locality), Jane Ide (NAVCA), Dan Corry (New Philanthropy Capital), Mandy Johnson (Small Charities Coalition), Rachel Rank (360 Giving) ↩

2. Myron Rogers, chair of the Lankelly Chase Foundation, quoted in ‘Lankelly Chase’s approach to working with complexity’ [blog], 2018 ↩