Tony Blair Moving to Shift Community Services in UK to Private Charities
Proposed UK reforms also envision increased charity giving to social service agencies.
Long after the US in this regard, the government of Tony Blair in the UK is taking steps to shift service delivery from government to voluntary and community groups by next year.
It appears to be a two-pronged approach. One: the Treasury in engaging in a comprehensive review of the voluntary sector to determine what spending, financial service, and tax policies stand in the way of groups delivering services. Ed Millibrand, voluntary sector minister (who prefers to be called Ed), is heading up the process and will make an interim report before the end of the year after consultation with organizations through the rest of this year.
The Other: in a letter to new Social Exclusion Minister Hilary Armstrong, Mr Blair said he wants a "step change" in the amount of involvement by voluntary organizations in place for next year's budget, including commitments by key departments by this summer and an implementation plan by early autumn.
The groundwork for this change was laid out by the 2002 report "The Role of the Voluntary and Community Sector in Service Delivery: A Cross Cutting Review" (57 pages, PDF, 519 Kb). That report suggests that in key respects the UK voluntary sector is similar to that of the US: "From the data a picture emerges of a diverse sector with a large number of small organisations but dominated, in funding terms, by a subset of large organisations."
The reports acknowledge that the public sector unions are likely to resist the changes.
Looking at the experience in the US, it appears that the expectation of increased charitable giving may not be realized. In the US, giving for social serivces has remained flat in dollar terms, which means a reduction in real terms. The chief organization responsible for social service giving in the US, the United Way, in under constant pressure to open up its contribution process to allow designations to non-social-service agencies. And the decline of large corporations and local banks has undermined the traditional base of United Way giving.
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