Francis Davis: How Archbishop Welby can make a truly radical response to Wonga

Francis Davis is an academic, social entrepreneur and a founder of www.cathedralinnovationcentre.com. Follow Francis on Twitter.

It is not surprising that Archbishop Justin Welby believes that the terms of the high margin, high risk pay day loan sector can be transformed by the action of the Church.  As an oil executive, he attended Holy Trinity Church in Brompton from where the Alpha programme - a ground-breaking  education initiative -  was rolled out globally, attracting close to 200 million participants. Subseqently he trained for the ministry at St John’s College in Durham University, one of whose claims to fame is to have been the launchpad of the ethical trade business, Traidcraft, which itself founded the global fair-trade movement.

Strange, then, the breadth and potential for his own striking announcement - that he wanted to ‘compete’ Wonga.com and its like out of existence - was suddenly overshadowed by a very traditional ecclesiastical call: namely, to give more local support to Britain’s small credit union sector. It was as though the experienced oil executive had for a moment been captured by a committee of earnest local community workers.  Just as a revolution for the poor and cash-strapped flickered into sight, it seemed that it might slip away again.

Francis Davis: A place that will drive economic and social recovery. In other words, a cathedral.

Francis Davis is a social entrepreneur and academic and a founder of the Cathedral Innovation Centre and movement.  Follow Francis on Twitter. To give or invest go to: www.cathedralinnovationcentre.com

This week, Baroness Berridge and Mark Hoban MP, the Minister for Employment, will launch an entrepreneurial initiative intended to back new firms and create fresh jobs from what, at first sight, may be an unlikely location – a Cathedral of the Church of England.   The Minister for Cities, Greg Clark MP, has pledged to be among those that first take part in a unique share offer being made from the same place.  The hope of its founders is that from a small start their model will spread like wildfire across the nation’s other cathedrals and its largest mosques, synagogues, churches and temples. We want especially to find new ways to unlock the under-sweated property, financial, and knowledge assets of businesses and public service bodies beyond London too.

Francis Davis: Gavin Barwell's mental health bill is a brilliant start. But the Conservative Party must now go further.

Francis Davis is an academic and social entrepreneur

The other day, something revolutionary happened from Croydon - something revolutionary that ought to inform every debate at the upcoming Conservative conference. Gavin Barwell, the MP for Croydon Central, brought his private members bill, which seeks to outlaw discrimination against people who have experienced mental ill health, back to the House.

The bill seeks to change current rules which outlaw those who have recovered from mental ill-health becoming MPs and jurors. It was only in February this year that this right was afforded to school governors. Ministers tweeted that they had found time to pop along to support amidst their busy schedules and the opposition’s Diane Abbott joined in with bi-partisan encouragement. But all those who spoke also noted things would have to go much further.

No wonder - for if they had listened to parents they would have heard of the devastating impact of mental ill-health on children, as well as stories of grandparents and siblings suddenly called on, too, to cope with new caring duties. I heard recently of a young girl in an isolated part of the Isle of Wight who, on being sectioned under the Mental Health Act, had to be moved at NHS expense to a far-away private psychiatric unit, since no support could be found not only on the island but in the whole south-east. Her parents could not afford to visit her. In many areas a teenager being discharged from such a specialist unit and not well enough to study or work could expect almost no support other than a twelve-week scheme run by the Prince’s Trust.

Francis Davis: The Big Society should be the means by which people reclaim duties and rights stolen from them by overwhelming bureaucracies

Francis Davis is an academic and social entrepreneur. He is currently preparing a special edition of the leading journal Public Money and Management themed ‘The Big Society and Decentralisation – A Critical Assessment ’.

With the greatest respect, if you think the Big Society is a political sideshow or gimmick you need to get out more. Inflexible bureaucracies are among the most dangerous of human inventions. The best way to resist them is with a rich weave of civil society institutions, including open markets. That and the development of a new generation of politicians who have had a civic life in business or charities before seeking a seat.

Britons get this instinctively when they are not presented with the unconvinced pitching the half-embraced on campaigning doorsteps: On Lambeth Council volunteers and Conservative councillors once broke a strike intended to maintain “totting” (the right for bin men to treat council refuse as a source of potential goods to sell for personal gain). Led by Sir George Young, they became rubbish collectors just as volunteers resist blockages today to extend their local library opening hours in Hampshire, save their lido in Devon or Sussex, join the Territorial Army in Kent, or scramble to sea as lifeboatmen in Cornwall; just as Helen Suzman bravely resisted illegal detentions in South Africa and Ang Sang Suu Kyi resists kleptocratic Generals in Asia.

And if you are Jewish, a Bosnian Muslim or know something of China’s termination of unborn daughters, you will need no convincing as to how much evil a dictatorial bureaucracy can impose. And, yes, on the doorstep voters like to meet convinced candidates from all these walks of life who have had a few civic successes and personal failures or anguish - and still kept going.

The Big Society should be the means by which people reclaim duties and rights stolen from them by overwhelming bureaucracies. The cross-Whitehall Minister for Decentralisation, Greg Clark MP, has rightly called it a radical direction.