The Baring Foundation has a long history of advocating for the rights and independence of civil society. Today we welcome the launch of a new initiative to uphold those rights, the Civil Society Covenant; ask how we can go further; and, lastly indulge in a little nostalgia for the Covenant’s predecessor, the Compact.
The Covenant is the result of hard work by many people over the last year inside Government and in civil society. The Baring Foundation has been supporting the work of Civil Exchange and BOND in this endeavour and I would like to thank and congratulate them for how far they have got. The Government is rightly concerned at the way the UK has slipped in the international rankings created by Civicus. The Covenant and other work is needed to restore civic space here, rather than languishing internationally in the ‘obstructed’ category behind Albania and Kosovo. Given the long history of civil society at the centre of national life, the UK should be among the freest countries in the world, whatever the political party in power.
The Covenant comes from the very top of Government, which is essential. It is based on principles which the Baring Foundation can certainly support, most importantly to ‘Respect the independence of civil society organisations and ensure they can advocate for those they serve and hold government to account without fear of reprisal’. Even more critical is the mechanism for breathing life into the Covenant. We need a hard-working Joint Council that is taken seriously. I would suggest that it should make annual statements on how the Covenant is operating. (Our independent Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector and its annual reports in part foreshadowed this, as well as Bond’s new annual reports.)
In a number of ways the Covenant does not go far enough. There is nothing on the entirely wrongheaded ‘gagging clauses’ brought in by a previous Government that should already have been scrapped. These and no advocacy provisions are entirely in contradiction to the Covenant. The Lobbying Act remains problematic. And beyond this, the Foundation had hoped for some signs of the Government’s intention to repeal excessive legislative clamp-downs on peaceful protest by previous Governments, which affect the ability of the voluntary sector to campaign. As yet, we see no willingness on the part of this Government to roll back these excesses.
Along with these highly important areas that still need to be addressed, civil society as a whole needs to commit to using the Covenant and holding the Government to account through an energetic use of these processes. It is true that a genuine partnership between the Government and civil society will have a huge positive impact on the causes and people that we both serve. Disability charities should have been involved at the very outset of welfare reform by the Government, not finally brought into the Timms Review when a Parliamentary majority fell apart.
And lastly I would like to pay my own tribute to three people who I have worked with that did so much to lead thinking on civic space and how voluntary sector freedoms and partnership with Government can be practically strengthened. As often happens, their contribution is beginning to be forgotten.
Firstly, Professor Nicholas Deakin (a former Baring Foundation trustee) led a commission in 1995 on the future of the voluntary sector. Much of what it recommended was then taken up by the incoming 1997 Labour Government, including the idea of the Compact.
This was further developed in a working group led by Sir Ken Stowe, a remarkable man whom I briefly worked for. Growing up during the Depression in the poorest part of the East End of London, Ken went on to work as Private Secretary to four PMs and lead the Department of Health. (I once asked him what civil society meant to him. He replied it included the enormous charity, the Institute for Cancer Research – which he chaired – and two Black Mums campaigning for safe school crossing in Brixton for their kids. I am not sure I have heard a better definition.)
Lastly in 2008, the Government set up and funded a Commission for the Compact. I was a founding Non-Executive Director and it was chaired by my hero, Sir Bertie Massie, the indefatigable and supremely effective campaigner for the rights of Disabled People, including his own. Here is an independent evaluation of what the Compact achieved. I was bitterly disappointed that the Coalition Government abolished the Commission for the Compact.
We lost the Compact. It wasn’t perfect. But what came afterwards was much worse. Let’s learn from that and use the Civil Society Covenant as a very good foundation that needs to be made to work and then built upon.