The new civil society strategy sets out how the Government will work with and support civil society to ‘build a country that works for everyone’. In the Strategy, civil society refers to individuals and organisations when they act with the primary purpose of creating social value, independent of state control.
The strategy reveals, among other things, that:
- Government will support citizens to act on the issues they care about by funding the training of 3,500 people in community organising by 2020.
- DCMS will work with the Department for Education to develop proposals to help young people to play their part in shaping the future of society
- Government will establish the National Citizen Service Trust as an independent public body that is accountable to parliament and ministers
- A new Innovation in Democracy programme will pilot participatory democracy approaches to support people to take part in the decision-making that affects their communities.
- DCMS in conjunction with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, will design a programme to look at more sustainable community spaces
- The Government will continue to encourage the take up of community rights and will improve guidance to help communities take ownership of local assets, such as community buildings.
- Local Enterprise Partnerships reform is an opportunity to strengthen the role of local stakeholders and civil society in local decision-making structures
- The Government will develop new models of community funding bringing together different forms of funding, such as social impact investment, charitable funding and corporate investment. To start Big Society Capital and Access (The Foundation for Social Investment) will devote around £35 million of dormant accounts funding
- Government work with civil society, the Electoral Commission, and the Charity Commission the Government will explore what non-legislative steps could strengthen civil society’s confidence in speaking out
- A cross Government group will work with civil society to establish the principles of effective involvement in the policymaking process
- Government is working with the Charity Commission and UK Community Foundations to release at least £20 million over the next two years from inactive charitable trusts to help community organisations
- The Government will explore how to encourage more collective giving, a form of charitable giving where groups of people pool their donations to create larger funds to tackle problems
- The Government has identified artificial intelligence and the data revolution as one of the four Grand Challenges facing the UK. We will work with partners to explore how best to use digital to build a stronger and even more effective social sector
- The Government will this year establish a responsible business Leadership Group to lead the debate about the role of business in society and develop actions to support businesses to fulfil this role
- The Government also wishes to broaden the range of funding options for community initiatives. This includes a revival of grant-making: grants can combine flexibility with the accountability and performance rigour of a contract, as well as bringing additional benefits, such as charitable investment
- Government will ensure that public spending is used to generate social value in addition to the goods and services it purchases. There needs to be an increase in social value commissioning across all levels of government. Central Government departments will be expected to apply the terms of the Social Value Act to goods and works as well as services and be expected to ‘account for’ the social value of new procurements, rather than just ‘consider’ it; and
- The Government will explore the suggestion that the Social Value Act should be applied to other areas of public decision-making such as planning and community asset transfer.