Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller of think-tank PACES Empowerment have produced another analysis of the implications of the ‘Big Society’. ‘Big Society and Public Services’ says that taking over public services makes voluntary organisations more, not less dependent on the state, through contracts with public authorities. The most independent and economical form of community action is the work of community groups which carry out their own activities.

Supporting community groups is economical because they take pressure off public services by spreading their own forms of wellbeing, informal skills, learning, mutual aid and personal responsibility, and require only a fraction of their value through state support. The English survey of third sector organisations shows that these groups are the great majority of the sector, but receive only a small proportion of the support they need.

Independent of the state, and consisting mainly of members and volunteers, community groups can also express the views of communities and hold public services to account, no matter which sector the services are delivered by. Social enterprises under contract to the state consist of paid staff and cannot perform this role without conflict of interest.

The answer, says PACES, is to make empowering communities the leading big society policy with its own criteria and investment. The main methods would be reformed community development, better amenities for groups and more widely available grants. Commissioning voluntary organisations and social enterprises to carry out public services should be a supplementary policy, including giving the best chance to genuinely local grass-roots groups which can handle the dual roles separately.