Day Conference Abstracts, Report and Papers

Report from Pete Alcock, event organiser

A very successful November Day Conference was held at the University of Birmingham last month, attended by over 40 members and others. In the morning Peter Taylor-Gooby (Kent) and Mike Locke (UEL) led a lively debate on the role of trust in the development and delivery of welfare services by voluntary and community organisations. This was followed by the AGM, with the announcement of the election for the Steering Group for the coming year, with all the current incumbents re-elected. It was Gareth Morgan’s last AGM as Treasurer, however; and the meeting thanked him for all his excellent work in establishing a viable legal and financial foundation for the organisation.

In the afternoon Ken Ashford (former Charity Accountant, Charity Commission) posed the question - can the UK model for charity reports and accounts provide a basis for worldwide NGO accountability? And answered – no, but it could help. Rob Macmillan (Sheffield Hallam) reported on the unsettled state of third sector infrastructure, which if anything has been more unsettled by the impact of ChangeUp (and he managed to include a baseball in his presentation!). Finally Linda Milbourne (Birkbeck) made a plea for research on the unsung heroes in front line agencies struggling with the pressures of partnership and procurement, whose voices should be heard. Then we all had tea and biscuits…

AGM papers, minutes and more details are available separately.

Abstracts

• Peter Taylor-Gooby (University of Kent/ESRC Social Contexts and Responses to Risk): Do recent welfare state reforms improve services, but undermine public trust?
• Mike Locke (University of East London): Trust and Voluntary Sector Studies
• Ken Ashford (former Charity Commission): Can the UK model for charity reports and accounts provide a basis for worldwide NGO accountability?
• Rob Macmillan (Sheffield Hallam University): The unsettled state of third sector infrastructure: questioning effectiveness, sustainability and configuration
• Linda Milbourne (Birkbeck College, London): Unsung heroes: how do recent voluntary sector experiences at community level match the Government’s view of its future role?

Peter Taylor-Gooby (University of Kent/ESRC Social Contexts and Responses to Risk): Do recent welfare state reforms improve services, but undermine public trust?

As many commentators have pointed out, the pressures facing modern welfare states are formidable.  One response by government is to place greater emphasis on a policy-making paradigm which rests on an individual rational actor account of agency.  This finds its intellectual home in the leading tradition of neo-classical economics, its ideological home in a politics of active citizenry and equality of opportunity and its institutional home in the mechanisms by which the Treasury currently directs social policy.

The resulting policies have strengths in delivering productivity improvements and responsiveness to consumer demand, but weaknesses in accommodating the value positions of an increasingly diverse society, in sustaining the social cohesion necessary to the continuance of state welfare and in confronting the structural basis of some social interests.  These issues have traditionally been recognised in the sociology of values, the psychology of trust and the political science of power.

One strength of academic social policy is that it is a field of study in which a number of disciplines are deployed.  The ascendancy of one paradigm may obscure the contribution of others.  It is hard for social policy academics to gain recognition when they speak a different language from that of policy-making at the highest level.

Voluntary and community sector organisations have been increasingly engaged in the delivery of policy. This gives rise to dilemmas of responsibility to users and participants and the representation of their interests on the one hand, and the delivery of services in ways that meet the demands of an increasingly competitive environment on the other.   The presentation will raise questions for further discussion in this area.

Mike Locke (University of East London): Trust and Voluntary Sector Studies

Mike will review how and why trust is a major issue in voluntary sector studies – on the grounds of assumptions about working within voluntary organisations, about relations between users/clients and voluntary organisations, and about social capital.

Ken Ashford (former Charity Commission): Can the UK model for charity reports and accounts provide a basis for worldwide NGO accountability?

Over the past 20 years the UK has developed a model for accounting and reporting by charities which has proved to be robust and useful.   The model has been pioneered mainly by accountants who were dissatisfied with applying the business model of accounting to charities but they have been assisted by pressures for more and better accountability and transparency.  The UK regime has been based on adaptations of UK accounting standards (UK GAAP) which have been made possible because of the UK’s accounting standards board practice of introducing industry interpretations of standards.

The main driver for a UK charity reporting regime has been that business standards of accounting do not fit charities.  The same problem arises worldwide, but there are currently (apparently) no generally accepted global mechanisms to allow the preparation and acceptance of specialist NGO standards.  This is especially true of the new International Accountancy Standards which are entirely based on profit seeking entities.  There have been some suggested accountability frameworks, each of which seems consistent with, but not as comprehensive as the UK model.

It would be extremely presumptuous for the UK to suggest that our standards of reporting should be applied worldwide (a new form of colonialism?).  However is it possible that the approach to accountability that our model encompasses, could be moulded (by one or more international forums) into a global protocol which would for the basis for future NGO accounting principles and standards developed by national bodies? 

The paper puts together the key elements of this argument and provides a tentative first draft of a global protocol.

Rob Macmillan (Sheffield Hallam University): The unsettled state of third sector infrastructure: questioning effectiveness, sustainability and configuration

Evidence about the early experience of ChangeUp, the UK government’s ten year capacity building and infrastructure framework, is beginning to accumulate. Three years into the programme, research and evaluation studies have sought to address, inter alia, questions about the effectiveness, sustainability, coordination and potential ‘re-configuration’ of infrastructure. Third sector infrastructure is under the spotlight, and seemingly faces an unprecedented set of issues, concerns and debates, each of which has the potential to unsettle and call into question the way it is organised and funded, particularly at local level.

Drawing on evidence from a number of recent studies, this paper assesses the current state of infrastructure by suggesting that:-

·         evidence for the effectiveness of infrastructure interventions remains insubstantial, fragmented and difficult to draw together in any cumulative sense. Given this, judgements of infrastructure in practice tend to rely on confidence and regard, based on proxy assessments about the credibility of key staff

·         the sustainability of infrastructure varies considerably, and for many organisations is likely to remain in severe doubt

·         partly as a result of this, infrastructure providers are coming under increasing pressure to reconsider how they might coordinate and reconfigure what they do.

The evidence is used to develop a theoretical model for understanding how third sector infrastructure, and potentially the sector as a whole, operates in practice, including how the state has intervened to ‘shake up’ infrastructure. It concludes with some reflections about the 'capacity of the capacity builders' realistically to achieve the aims of ChangeUp. 

Rob Macmillan is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. His main research interests are around VCS infrastructure, funding, and competition and collaboration between voluntary and community organisations. He has recently completed a number of studies examining VCS infrastructure, including a ‘rapid evidence assessment’ of the benefits of VCS infrastructure, and a study examining the effectiveness and sustainability of local infrastructure organisations. He is part of a team scoping the evaluation of ChangeUp for Capacitybuilders, and is also currently undertaking a review of the configuration of local VCS infrastructure in a rural area in the north of England.

Linda Milbourne (Birkbeck College, London): Unsung heroes: how do recent voluntary sector experiences at community level match the Government’s view of its future role?

In its recent review of the Third Sector[1], the UK Cabinet Office has emphasised its future rôle in social and economic regeneration, highlighting government commitment to building capacity and greater community involvement in service provision and local decision making. The review also stresses the importance of campaigning activities, and of understanding how the principles of good practice in cross-sector relationships underpinning Compacts can be better supported.

The last decade has seen a growing policy agenda focused on inter-agency collaboration and partnerships, and more recently, voluntary sector capacity building and community participation programmes. However, there has been limited debate on the appropriateness of these endeavours in addressing social problems or their effects on voluntary sector organisations.