Principle Three: You go faster alone, but you can go further together

It was on Monday 19 July 2010 that ‘The Big Society Network’ was launched, with a fanfare of a speech by David Cameron, as ‘a national campaign for social change … run by the people, for the people’.

But, four years later, The Big Society Network collapsed. On 24 April 2015, its founding CEO Paul Twivy, who had resigned after just one year in post, was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. He was asked by presenter James Naughtie: ‘Why didn’t it work?’ His answer. ‘It was a series of broken promises,’ he said. Explaining that in his view the UK had one of the most centralised governments in the developed world and that needed to change. He concluded that we need a government ‘that is going to appeal to us as human beings, not just as units of GDP. Those things aren’t happening so we need to reform.’

Successful ‘big societies’ are, of course, made up of lots of ‘small communities’.

What we call the National Health Service would be better labelled the ‘National Sickness Service’. The point at which any one of us engages with it is when we are ill. When do you make an appointment with the GP? When do you go to the hospital or see a specialist? When you are sick or have a health emergency!

What we most need, therefore, is a second service to help people stay healthy and to fulfil a complimentary role alongside the existing NHS. And that service must be holistic.

Our problem is that we have over medicalised healthcare, focusing our thinking, energy and funding far too narrowly. It’s time to think differently and invest in the other pillars on which real health and wellbeing are built. Health is three dimensional: it is about body, mind and spirit. That’s why the NHS alone cannot solve the health problems of the UK. It is time to think more radically.

I remember a conversation in Downing Street with Tony Blair, then the Prime Minister, almost twenty years ago about all of this. The conversation about the stress on the NHS is not a new one! Using the metaphor of being responsible for holding the baby, he explained to me the pressure that this sudden change of roles had created for government. I said to him that the impact of replacing the work of voluntary bodies with that of a vast team of government-paid workers, also had another unforeseen outcome – it had left the churches and other charities feeling side-lined and redundant; it robbed them of their raison d'être.

At the height of the Covid pandemic in June 2020, Boris Johnson commissioned Danny Kruger, a Conversative MP, to draw up a set of proposals around how to sustain the community spirit seen in the crisis. In response, Kruger outlined what he decided to term a ‘new social covenant’ as a way in which civil society could contribute to the prime minister’s ‘levelling up’ agenda and so strengthen families and local communities. ‘We need a new social and economic model to achieve this … a wholly new paradigm … in which community power replaces the dominance of remote public and private sector bureaucracies.’

It’s time to invest in doing the ‘Big Society’ the ‘small community’ way. You go faster alone, but you can go further together!