V4CE question Govenment Minister
V4CE staff were active at the 2008 NCVO annual conference in raising the profile of the organisation and putting BME Third Sector issues on the agenda. In a questions and answers with Ed Miliband, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, V4CE Director Vandna Gohil asked him whether his warm words of support and encouragement for service delivery organisations runs counter to threat the recently published Cohesion Guidance for Funders poses to reduce funding for BME organisations who are working with local communities on issues that impact on them. In his reply the Minister said that the Government’s aim is to build community cohesion, and that he would raise the issue with other Ministers if Voice4Change England wrote to him with details. A letter has been sent with a request for a meeting to further explain the damaging implications of the proposals.
In his keynote speech to the conference the Miinister referred to how the Civil Society reaches out to people and provides ‘innovative solutions’ in a way that the Government does not. He said that Government and civil society are partners and not rivals, and the relationship between the two should be one of mutual respect. He spoke of the three challenges in achieving social justice - globalisation, inequality and tackling poverty – and how civil society creates services that reach out to engage most disadvantaged and contribute to equalising life chances.
He said that campaigning was a central part of what the third sector does and that he was hoping to build a consensus amongst the political parties for organisations to do what they have to do in changing laws and attitudes. Groups should be able ‘to bite the hand that feeds you’. He accepted that politicians need to understand the issues that service delivery groups face, and that policy is often made separate from those people the policy is going to effect.
To co-incide with the conference the NCVO published The UK Civil Society Almanac 2008-02-21. This calculates that in 2005/6 there were 865,000 civil society organisations with a total income of £109 billion employing 611,000 people. The income was 10% higher than last year, largely due to an increase in earned income from goods, service, and contracts. More than half of charities received no funding from the state. Further details from www.ncvo.org.uk
Throughout the day, V4CE staff met with journalists from a variety of third sector publications. In addition, we received requests for meetings to discuss potentially joint working from the British Institute of Human Rights and LawWorks.
