Today sees the launch of Collaborate (www.collaboratei.com), a community interest company set up to promote effective and sustainable collaboration between the public, business and social sectors with the ambitious but determined goal of securing no le...

Public service outcomes needed and expected by the public do not fit neatly into the institutional systems, frameworks and silos that we have spent decades, even centuries creating, and with which service-users are patronisingly expected to comply and accept without question.

All but the most statist of thinkers now accept that the public sector, while always retaining a principal role,...

The scale and magnitude of the challenges, which are confronting the voluntary and community sector (VCS), are unprecedented. The sector, the communities it represents and supports, and its beneficiaries as well as its funders face the most serious har...

Any eternal optimist left in local government who thought that the government would ‘Santa Claus-like’ deliver a sack of additional money will have woken up with a start when Eric Pickles (no Santa Claus) announced the local government finance settlement.  This may have been a festive period announcement but it was not a festive message.  Not only will there...

The Government, local authorities and the wider public sector continually claim their commitment to increased social sector and charity provision of public services. However, the sector all too often responds by saying that the procurement process is tilted against them. This is a key finding of ‘The Shadow State’ report on public service outsourcing from Social Enterprise UK.

So what...

I have been invited by the New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) to contribute to a workshop on the role and responsibilities of a charity trustee when the charity is considering a significant issue such as a major contract or a merger or similar. This has made me think hard about the role, responsibilities and accountabilities that I and many thousands...

The overall fiscal context

The Local Government Association's forecast this week that local authorities face additional funding cuts of over £1billion next year is devastating news and without question, will adversely affect the voluntary and community sector and their beneficiaries.

This latest forecast of further cuts comes on top of the largest ever reductions in local authority grant and expenditure...

‘Community right to challenge supply’ and ‘community right to bid to own community resources’ are terms that government and many in the voluntary and community sector hope will be increasingly heard over the next few years. They are enshrined in legislation in the localism act, and represent some of the few remaining traces of the government’s ‘Big Society’ agenda.

In...