It’s official: commissioning is bad for voluntary action
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).
Chickens come home to roost
The Charity Commission has finally spotted what NCIA predicted at the beginning of the year, and long before -
“many charities will go bust because of their reliance on government contracts to deliver public services.”
Say No to Commissioning
One of the principal ways – perhaps the main way – in which the Government is mounting its assault on the voluntary sector is through the peddling of its latest ‘fad’ for PROCUREMENT AND COMMISSIONING. Statutory services of all sorts have been told – explicitly or implicitly – to develop strategies for this. There has been an unseamly rush to comply, despite the reality that in many places no two people seem to have the same idea of what ‘procurement and commissioning’ means exactly. One council officer asked why the authority was moving to commissioning told us, “because everyone else is doing it”.
Fighting back
Previous articles in Green Socialist have pointed out that privatisation does not just affect services formerly run by the statutory sector, and also (ironically) that privatisation can sometimes go hand-in-hand with increased state control. Voluntary organisations providing public services are being compelled to adopt the methods and priorities of private businesses through tendering and commissioning procedures. However, the pernicious undermining of the very concept of an independent voluntary sector goes even further. Below, Andy Benson, from the Coalition for Independent Action, looks at how the state and business are eroding this important element of our civil society.