A generous reading of David Cameron's idea has been rendered less credible by plans to squeeze out-sourced workers
The Guardian's voice is not one of those that rises in reflexive rage against David Cameron's idea of the "big society". While bemoaning the vagueness, we have maintained that there could be something interesting here. Voluntaryism, localism, and indeed solidarity are important values, with potentially important application. Insofar as Mr Cameron has been restoring the place they enjoyed in the pre-Thatcherite Tory tradition, we have wished him well. So it is regrettable to observe that the past week will have encouraged those who wish to dismiss the big society as a big con.
Election rhetoric about back-office cuts, which all three parties indulged, is now making inevitable way for grim realities ? redundancy notices, cancelled operations and worsening services. If there is a moment for Mr Cameron to bring his big idea into play, then this is surely it. But in an article penned for Tuesday's Telegraph, he explained for the first time that the big society's core proposition is a new presumption that the work of all public servants, save for judges and spies, should be put out to tender. That idea will hold little appeal to anyone who has been on the wrong end of contracted-out hospital cleaning or housing benefit administration. But if one were being very generous, the prime minster might have been read less as advocating crude privatisation, and read more as advancing an infusion of outside managers, including from charities, to gee up state employees to provide services in more imaginative ways.
Sadly, however, that generous reading has been rendered less credible by a second development this week. The day after the Times ran an editorial calling for an axe to be swung at the protections afforded to out-sourced workers, the same newspaper revealed to the world that the Treasury agreed. If the report was right, Mr Cameron's proposed universal right for corporations to contract for every public service will come together with an invitation for tenders that undercut current costs by means no more imaginative than an assault on staff terms. To despair at this is not to deny that some conditions, particularly pensions, must be part of the painful discussion over cuts. No one is pretending that every perk can remain sacrosanct; the objection is merely to conditions being worsened by reason of a transfer alone.
That, after all, is the only protection provided by the so-called Tupe law and associated agreements. A contracting company remains free to renegotiate pensions, pay or anything else in response to evolving commercial demands. The current arrangements were built on top of the fairly minimal requirements of European law because of bitter experience with the first great wave of contracting out. Town halls were obliged to invite a race to the bottom on costs, and that is exactly what they got. It was not merely council staff who suffered, though suffer they undoubtedly did. Employers were landed with messy industrial relations, which they frequently found could only be resolved through a costly buy-out of current terms. Services from refuse collection to school dinners suffered on account of a demoralised workforce. In the end, the bidding process was refined to give some regard to overall value as opposed to mere price, while outsourced workers steadily secured the entitlement to a "broadly comparable" pension to that of state employees.
That right was always heavily qualified, with the law allowing out-sourcing firms to meet their formal obligations with a money purchase arrangement, as opposed to a final salary scheme. The government therefore has plenty of scope to squeeze out-sourced workers even without the help of the kite it is flying. As with the attack on the unions in Wisconsin, the argument from fiscal necessity is pretty spurious. The aim is to create strident mood music. As the volume rises, the big society risks looking small-minded, not to mention mean.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/26/editorial-david-cameron-big-society
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