latest
general election
Farewell to all that?
Tony Blair’s New Labour swept to power in 1997 on a wave of optimism and ambitious promises. Thirteen eventful years later and the party is behind in the polls. Perhaps a good time, then, to assess what has Labour done for the sector during that time, for good or ill. Gareth Jones reports.
THE NEW LABOUR era has been an eventful one for the voluntary sector, bringing changes which have fundamentally transformed its nature and scope. In fact, the ground for many of these changes had already been prepared before New Labour came to power, with the NCVO-created Deakin Commission consulting within the sector
and producing The Future of Voluntary
Sector in 1996. Many of its recommendations found their way into Labour’s own Building the Future Together, which was produced by Alun Michael and published the following year. From these documents were the roots of the Compact, the Office of the Third Sector, ChangeUp, regulatory reform and the creation of a public benefit test. In this context, the sector was optimistic about the prospect of a new government. Or as Lindsay Boswell, who at the time was at Raleigh International before becoming chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising in 2000, puts it: “I think it’s fair to say that, following on from a party whose previous leader had said there was no such thing as society, I think fundraisers were very excited by the prospect of a new government.”
Politics of the sector
Looking back, one of Labour’s key achievements has been in taking the sector more seriously and attempting to engage with it in a more meaningful way. Indeed, the UK voluntary sector may be considered to have a closer relationship with government than anywhere else in the world. This is perhaps best characterised by the creation of, first, the Active Community Unit (ACU) in 2001 and then the Office of the Third Sector (OTS) in 2006. The former, set up within the Home Office, was not a success, to the extent that an NCVO report in 2001 called it “a disaster”, criticising a lack of adequate consultation when launching projects and the way it interacted with other government departments. However, few have a bad word to say about its
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Charity Finance April 2010
www.civilsociety.co.uk
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