Pickles threatens councils with statutory force to ensure community funding

Local authorities have been warned by communities secretary Eric Pickles that the government will use statutory force to ensure they do not make unreasonable cuts to community and voluntary organisations.

It is the first time the government has said it will use its powers to protect the civil society sector.

Pickles’ warning came at yesterday’s National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) conference, where he said the government would consider the ‘reasonable expectation’ of local authorities a ‘statutory force’.

This reasonable expectation was that local authorities would not pass on disproportionate cuts to local voluntary and community groups, that they would have expected the cuts and therefore would have been talking to voluntary and community groups about changes to public services, that they would have given at least three months’ notice to end a grant or support and that they would use this three month period to give local people the chance to put together a bid to run the service.

While he said he hoped it would never come to it, Pickles warned: ‘If councils are being high-handed, I'll consider giving our reasonable expectations statutory force. Because in order to make a success of localism, in order to enable our towns and neighbourhoods to thrive, I want to make sure that voluntary and charitable groups have got the confidence, the clout and the power to make their mark.’

He added that local authorities were expected to ‘squeeze out every bit of waste’, share back offices and clamp down on senior pay.

‘There’s no excuse and no hiding place,’ Pickles said. He concluded: ‘The day of the annual grant is gone. It should be about commissioning, involving the community and voluntary sector.’

Asked by Social Enterprise if he would consider, as part of the Localism Bill, increasing the three month window for local people to put together a business plan to run a public service or amenity – a call from Locality, the organisation delivering the government’s community organisers programme LINK – Pickles would not be pushed. He said the government was considering ‘at least’ three months.

Kevin Curley, CEO of the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (Navca), said communities needed more than six months to be given a reasonable chance to bid, and called for at least 12 months. But this was disregarded by Pickles, who said extending the window beyond six months could lead to judicial reviews from developers and land owners.

‘Going over six months in terms of property rights is unreasonable,’ Pickles said.

NCVO CEO Stuart Etherington said Pickles’ announcement was a ‘warning shot across the bow of local government’ not to make disproportionate cuts to the sector.

However, Unite, the UK’s largest union, said Pickles’ was living in a ‘fantasy world’.

Its national officer for the not for profit sector, Rachael Maskell, said: ‘A total of £5bn is being cut from the sector and only £400m is being injected in the form of the Big Society Bank and the transition fund, so we are left with a £4.6bn funding gap facing charities.

‘The chancellor, George Osborne needs to address the crisis facing the sector by the budget, otherwise many charities will go to the wall, which will be the death knell of the to the Big Society.’