Nick Hurd MP: Why National Citizenship Service is working

Nick Hurd is the Minister for Civil Society and the MP for Ruislip Northwood Pinner

The contrast could not have been starker. This summer, my TV screen had been full of riots and looting. Like many I was shocked, not least by how disconnected the mostly young people seemed to feel from the wider community.

Yet at the same time over eight thousand 16 year olds were quietly giving almost a quarter of a million hours of community service. I have been lucky enough to visit a number of these groups across the country. In Harrow, for example, a team of young people had been educated about homelessness in the Borough. They slept rough to taste the reality and had then thrown themselves with fantastic energy into raising money for a local charity. The natural leader of the group confided to me that if it had not been for this programme, he would have been in trouble this summer. The programme is National Citizen Service (NCS). It was one of our big commitments at the last election and we are delivering on it.

Nick Hurd MP: We don't want charities to become dependent upon the state

Nick Hurd MP is Minister for Civil Society.

Tim Montgomerie kicked off the New Year with a call for a “revolution in how taxpayers money reaches voluntary organisations”. His concern is that too many charities have become dependent on income from the State and in that process have become bland and out of touch with what communities need. His call is for a switch from direct grant funding to matched funding incentives, whereby taxpayers money follows the choice of citizens.

Tim raises an important point although he fails to recognise that hundreds of thousands of charities and civil society groups do what they do with no help from the State at all. Nor do I detect a lot of “monochrome” in the amazingly diverse ecosystem that is our voluntary and community sector.  However It is true that the charitable sector has become more dependent on the State, as public sector income has grown from £8bn in 2000/01 to £12.8bn in 2007/08.

As a result, the state now represents 36% of the sector’s income – on a par with income from individuals, however levels of giving have effectively flatlined in real terms over the period.  It is also true that resources within the sector have become more concentrated with over 70% of total income to the sector now going to organisations already earning more than £1m in income. This combination of creeping dependence and growing concentration should concern those of us who believe that the value of civil society lies in its robust independence and diversity.

We should be clear that most of this growth in income from the State has not come in the form of grants, which have declined as a proportion of the total, but from contracts. This is not in itself a problem. The Coalition Government is explicitly committed to opening up the public service markets to more independent provision. We want to make it easier for charities and social enterprises to participate because we believe that they can be more effective in tackling some of the really stubborn and expensive social problems, such as getting people into jobs or keeping them out of jail. The problem comes when you do not recognise the risk of overdependence and manage the relationship badly. Under Labour, public money was chucked about with very little transparency and too little rigour in establishing exactly what was being bought. Instead of focusing on outcomes, refuge was taken in micromanagement of process - as a result the whole business of applying for, and reporting for, public money has become a bureaucratic nightmare which soaks up time and money that could be better spent. At the same time, there was no sustained effort to encourage a step change in our cultural attitudes to the giving of time and money. Labour talked about a social investment bank for ten years without delivering it. The result is a very inefficient funding environment for charities and a terrible vulnerability to the cuts in public spending that are an inevitable consequence of our overborrowing.

Nick Hurd MP: How the Sustainable Communities Act can help Conservative candidates and councillors win local support

Nick Hurd is MP for Ruislip Northwood and shadow Cabinet Office minister covering the portfolio of charities, social enterprises and volunteering.

The Sustainable Communities Act 2007 exists because of Conservative support. David Cameron launched the draft Bill in November 2006 and I took it through Parliament as a Private Member's Bill in 2007. It is a response to widespread concern about the impact on communities of losing local services such as post offices and bank branches. It is rooted in a Conservative commitment to give local communities greater freedom to assert local priorities. The Act enjoys very wide popular support with over ninety national organisations signed up to the Local Works campaign coalition.

The Act does two things:

1. It asks Local Authorities to consult with their communities and come back with new ideas for policies and powers that they need to promote more sustainable communities.
2. It requires Government to publish local spending reports that break down public expenditure by local authority area. Local Authorities can then challenge that spending and argue for reallocation to fit local priorities.

Local Authorities do not have to respond. Those that do have to get their ideas in by end of July 2009.

But how it can work for you and your constituents?

Nick Hurd MP: Energy security and the rising price of fossil fuels also argue for urgent action against climate change

Nick Hurd is MP for Ruislip-Northwood and heads up the Climate Change Working Group of the Conservative Party's Quality of Life Policy Group.  He provides a second YourPlatform rebuttal of Nigel Lawson's recent case for adapting to climate change.  Peter Franklin wrote the first last week.

Nigel Lawson argues that climate change risk is uncertain and therefore we should focus on helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change rather than grip the challenge of reducing emissions. It is disappointing to see one of the great intellects of the Conservative past skip so superficially around one of the big issues of our time.

The modern policy maker, faced with an overwhelming scientific consensus about the scale of risk attached to carrying on as we are cannot afford to be quite so complacent. Lawson finds it convenient to ignore the fact that every molecule of carbon stays in the atmosphere for at least 100 years.

This inertia in the climate system means that if we wait for greater certainty on what the scientists are already telling us, then the bigger and more expensive the adaptation challenge is likely to get.  The next twenty years will be critical because it is in this period that the big investment decisions will be taken on our energy infrastructure. Get this wrong and the scientists tell us that we will be locking ourselves into a serious problem.

At the extreme end of the risk spectrum, the focus on adaptation alone becomes ridiculous. How is India supposed to adapt to the melting of the Himalayan water source?  How does China adapt to the potential loss of one third of her grain production?  At that stage people will adapt by moving, which is why Climate Change is a security issue as much as anything.  Lawson is understandably silent on both the short term and long term cost of his strategy but the message from the more rigorous Stern Review is that over time it is likely to be significantly higher than taking action now to try and stabilise our emissions and so mitigate the risk of dangerous climate instability.

Lawson argues that there is no point because it will add too much to our energy bill. That position ignores the high probability that the cost of fossil fuel based energy is likely to go up over time anyway because the world is well on our way to exhausting reserves. It ignores the fact that for many importers of energy (including the UK) the issue of security of supply is now a major issue, so why not try and become more self-sufficient? In short reducing our dependence on fossil fuels makes sense irrespective of climate change risk.

The technology is basically in place today to help us move to a low carbon economy .The problem is that it is relatively expensive now but Governments has the power to make that technology cheaper by facilitating roll out at scale. They have the power to create new market opportunities by requiring higher energy efficiency standards of the products we use and incentivising us to make the low carbon choices. 

Lawson says there is no point because the USA, China and India are not prepared to play ball.  He ignores the significant economic opportunity in being at the vanguard of this new investment frontier. He has nothing to say about the benefits of greater energy efficiency to the UK Economy. He ignores what is actually happening below federal level in the USA where progressive Governors and Business leaders push the Superpower into a more engaged position. He ignores the real concerns that India and China have about pollution and access to water which are forcing them to revaluate the issue.

It is not just in this country that the politics of Climate Change are changing fast as the risks and the opportunities become clearer. This is not the time to lapse into lazy scepticism. As Stern makes clear, adaptation is an essential part of the policy mix but it cannot be the exclusive focus.

It is time for much greater urgency in controlling the one variable we can - namely the emissions we generate. Concerns about energy security and the future price of fossil fuels should only reinforce political will to pursue policies that we will not regret even if the climate sceptics are proved right.